Sold On The Internet
News:
We're still working on integrating our new newsletters with this
current one so stay tuned. The basic idea is that you will be able to
receive updates on new articles, free material, and discounts on a
more regular basis. For now, we'll continue with this format.
BIG News: Our New Online Store and Your Special Discount Code:
We've been busy making it easier for you to access our learning
material, books, and LearnBytes Helpcards, and our new store is now
online at http://bacalassociates.com
Over the next few weeks we'll be adding our product line -- material
to help you with conflict management, customer service, angry
customers, performance management and appraisal and much more.
To thank you for your loyalty and for subscribing to this newsletter,
we're offering you a special 40% discount on ALL our learning products
currently in our new store. The code to use to receive your discount
is bacal. There's a place to enter the discount code/coupon on the
right hand side of the shopping cart.
The code expires at the end of day on Friday, Aug. 26, so act now.
Any problems or comments about the new store? Email them to me,
directly at ceo@work911.com .
Feature Article:
Are You Being Bought & Sold On The Internet - Or, There's no such
thing as a free lunch
Millions of people use Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other
free services available on the Internet. These companies offer some
amazing functionality at a price everyone can afford -- nothing.
Unfortunately many consumers are not aware of the business models used
by these companies, and how customers are "paying" for these services
with their personal information and online behaviors. Privacy? It's
hard to find these days as these companies push the envelope. This
article helps you understand how YOU are being bought and sold by the
companies you use every day.
The Business Models - Selling You
If you have wondered how these companies can offer free services on a
massive scale, here's the simple answer. They sell advertising to
companies that want you to buy from them. In effect, YOU are the
product being sold to advertisers on Facebook, and similar platforms.
Ok. That's not new. You are no doubt familiar with the ads on Google
search results since they've been around for years. It's those ads
that allow Google to exist and make large amounts of money.
Facebook, Google, and similar companies BUY you and your personal
information by offering you free capabilities. You sign up. You
provide some level of information about yourself, your location, age,
gender, interests and so on. THAT information allows you to be sold to
advertisers and the ability to "Personalize" the ads you see. In terms
of the business model, the information you provide massively increases
the money advertisers are willing to pay because they can TARGET ads
to your demographics and information. YOUR information allows Internet
companies to reap huge profits -- in fact profits counted in billions
for Facebook and Google.
No problem, you figure, you'll just limit the personal information you
supply? You can do that. Of course the more restricted your
information, the less likely you can link up with people of similar
interests and location, so there's a cost. Still it's an option.
Except...
The Stealthy Part of Selling You
Have you noticed this? On Monday, you research and compare prices on a
new dining room suite. Using Google Search you check out a number of
stores, and then you decide you'll hold off on your purchase until
next year. On Wednesday, you need some citations for a paper you might
be writing on pumpkins, so back to Google you go. You search for
"pumpkins" and at the top, side and bottom of the results page, there
are ads. Some of those ads will pertain to your current search, but if
you pay attention, you'll also see ads related to dining room suites,
or furniture. Google "knows" (thinks it knows) what you want, and it
tries to get you to click on ads by showing you ads from your online
behavior and search actions from the past.
That may or may not suit you. After all, you don't want to see
furniture ads because they aren't relevant anymore. But the scary part
is that Google "knows" and uses your BEHAVIOR from the past to
increase the chances you will click on the ads.
Not only will this happen when you search Google, but your past
behavior will follow you around the web. These days, there are
millions of websites that finance their operations by displaying ads
coming from Google. If you search for furniture on the Monday, and on
Wednesday, want to buy a book on customer service, you might end up on
a site with Google ads displayed beside the book reviews. And guess
what you will see? Ads for furniture. So, if you visit any sites in
the Google "network" Google will customize what you see, whether you
want it to or not.
Google serves up "interest based ads" to you based on your behavior,
not just on the information you enter when you join its services. It's
stealthy. Can your opt out of that system? Actually you can, but I'll
bet you a) don't even know you are being tracked, b) didn't know you
could opt out, and c) can't figure out how to opt out anyway, since
Google doesn't really TELL you.
The Battle For Eyeballs and Info
The battle for information about you has escalated hugely over the
last eighteen months, and as a user, you probably are unaware of some
of the tactics used by companies to make use of your information, but
you'll be hearing more of it. Some of it has little effect on you,
personally, at least for now, but some of it does.
For example, there are some vicious lawsuits and tactics used by the
big players in the social media and Internet space. For example,
Google (real time search) indexes Twitter using Twitter data. Twitter
gets mad and cuts off Google, so Google has to remove real time search
from its service options so you can no longer use it. New patent
lawsuits are launched almost every day. Google is being investigated
by U.S. Congress for anti-trust violations and will be called upon to
explain itself to Congress in September. In Europe, cases against the
big players in the Internet space have resulted in multi-million
dollar judgments levied for various violations.
The profits from buying and selling you are so large that even multi-
million dollar penalties are not enough to discourage companies from
pushing the envelope by using your information and online behavior.
There's more. Ever try to delete your Facebook account? Got tired of
feeling your privacy was invaded, or perhaps just got tired of the
thing? It's like the roach motel ad; you can check in but you can't
check out (is there a song about that?). For a while it was near to
impossible to delete your account, and now, while you CAN do it,
you'll probably need to hunt around to find out how. (for more about
Facebook, at least from a rather negative point of view check out this
article on BusinessInsider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-reasons-to-delete-your-facebook-account-2010-5
Conclusion
You may or may not have concerns about your privacy and some of the
stealth techniques companies are using to compete with each other, and
get more and more information about your personal habits, interests.
It's a personal decision, and there is clearly value in using
Facebook, Google, and free services they provide. Perhaps the critical
takeaway is that most consumers just don't know how stealthy the
techniques are--the backroom tracking is largely invisible to end
users unless they pay attention. And they should. Whatever decisions
you make about how you use these free service, and how much you allow
yourself to be bought and sold, you SHOULD know it's happening. And,
it might be worthwhile to do some additional research on how your
favorite companies and services are using your data and tracking you.
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Reminders:
Big Change In Reprint Policies For http://Work911.com
We have liberalized our reprint policies. In the past we've not
allowed people to make copies of our articles, and we've had a pay-for-
use policy in effect. It's all changed.
While the new policy is displayed on our main site at http://work911.com,
it also applies to all our customer service related articles on
http://customerservicezone.com. So, if you want to print out copies
and distribute to your colleagues and friends, you can now do so.
First what you can't do. We still cannot allow any of our articles to
appear on websites, or any place public on the Internet. There's a
good reason for that. Search engines have trouble figuring out which
"copy" of an article online is the original one, and that means that
if you were to use our material online, you might make it impossible
for us to attract visitors to our sites. And that means, we'd have to
close them all down. We have to eat too.
But the good news is you can print them, use them in seminars, forward
copies to colleagues and friends IN EMAIL. The only exception is for
commercial publications that charge for subscriptions or accept
advertising. So if you run BusinessWeek, sorry, but you have to pay
us.
One of the reasons writers write is they feel compelled to do so, and
that applies to me. However, most writers WANT people to read what
they produce, and that's one of the major reasons we've made it easier
to share our material.
As always, you CAN link to our articles, and you can use short
summaries along with the link.
All we ask is that if you do share (remember, NOT on the web in public
places, give us credit.
News - Our Leadership Center
We've decided to spin off our Leadership Center to its own domain. You
can now find it at the more convenient address: http://leadertoday.org
. Easy to remember. We have to update the article database and get rid
of bad links, so be patient. There's tons of great stuff on ALL
aspects of leadership, including a frequently asked questions area,
and a Leadership Library.
Back to us.
We need your help. We've shut down some of our sites already, though
they were sites we either didn't promote or didn't update, so you
really won't miss them. Whether we shut down our other sites later
this year will depend on whether we can increase our traffic.
You CAN help. I'm not asking you to donate money, or in fact, spend
any money although buying our products would help <grin>
All I ask of you is that if and when you make use of our sites, you
share the pages you like with your friends, twitter followers,
Facebook and LinkedIn contacts. We've tried to make that easy by
putting buttons on many pages so you can share with a click or two.
We need traffic to our sites, or we'll have to shut down more sites
this year.
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Get Up To Speed On Social Media Via These Special (Free) Offers -
There's a lot more than social media resources here!
We've created some special pages on which you can find some great
reports, book chapters and other documents free of charge on social
media. In fact there are a lot of other topics available too, so go to
http://work911.com/wpap/socialmedia.htm . Other topics like small
business, and HR are available in our drop down menu under
"Whitepapers" which you will see when you arrive there.
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Our Sites:
Just a quick summary of our sites that have information on the
following topics:
World's Best Search Engines: http://researchprofessional.org
Training and Development Resource Center:http://thetrainingworld.com
Free Learning Stuff: http://free2thee.com
Leadership Resource Center: http://leadertoday.org
Communication Resource Center: http://www.work911.com/communication/index.htm
Conflict (both workplace and family) http://conflict911.com
Business, Strategic and Personal Planning: http://www.work911.com/planningmaster/index.html
Performance Management & Appraisal: http://performance-appraisals.org
Customer Service: http://customerservicezone.com
Our Main Site: http://www.work911.com
Multi-Purpose Articles Database: http://www.articles911.com
To new subscribers: The work911 newsletter is published no more than
once a week and contains articles on all things work related, and
contains other work related resources, and updates about our sites,
and their contents. Past history indicates we publish about every ten
days. Subscribe at http://work911.com/newsletter.htm
Don't forget that you can access free, useable previews of over twenty
of our books and helpcards at:
and that we continue to offer special freebie offers and discounts to
our newsletter subscribers!
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