Legal, Ethical and Privacy Issues

Extra Credit Webcast: B to C Online Customer Acquisition Ten Steps to Success

2006-10-27T13:46:00.000-04:00

The presentation sponsored by The American Marketing Assocaition entitled B to C Online Customer Acquisition: Ten Steps to Success featured two guest speakers, Mike Chapman and Jere Doyle. They gave great insight on how to succeed when marketing to consumers.

Mike Chapman, the Editorial Director of E-marketer focused his discussion on the recent challenges that marketers are facing now that consumers are gaining more power in the messages that they receive. He highlights ten steps to success that allows for messages reach the consumer. The first of the steps is recognizing the challenge and to know the types of advertising blockers, such as the Do Not Call list and spam blockers. When you realize your problem you can go about addressing it properly. According to Mike 15% of messages never reach their intended target. Step two is getting permission; a good way to go about this is a check box, which allows customers to verify if they want to participate in further research. This option allows for customers to express interest that they are willing to participate, and willing customers provide the best information. “Cast many lines” is the next step which states that you shouldn’t limit yourself to one source to locate customers. Step four states “Relevance, Relevance, Relevance”, meaning that messages should be personalized to the consumer. Personal messages are compelling messages and 67% of consumers say that relevant information increases the chance that they will respond to an email. The fifth step declares to capture the right amount of information. He affirms that it’s best to gather information incrementally as the relationship increases. The next step is to pay attention to privacy concerns, because if you don’t consumers won’t share personal information or buy from you. The seventh step that Mike highlighted is to covert “prospects” into “customers”, thus reaping the benefits of permission and trust based campaigns. “Keep it clean”, is the eighth step which expressed the need to try to use in house lists that are up to date for maximum impact. The ninth step says “measure to measure”, stating that measurements are vital in assessing and improving marketing efforts and continuous testing and fine tuning are needed. The final step “Don’t stop now”, suggests that once you’ve got a customer you should develop a deeper relationship, when communication is increased you get more personalized data. Mike concludes his section of the presentation by ensuring that with the right approach consumers will willingly share information that is need to make messages relevant.

Jere Doyle, the President and CEO of Prospectiv focused more on customer acquisition. He discussed the importance of a house file and that it is needed to extend reach beyond websites. The suggests using a multi-channel approach such as paid search, microsites designed to have people sign up for house files, email, co registration, and advertising networks. He listed five critical success factors for effective online customer acquisitions. These factors are: to select a reliable proven online marketer service provider, to target precisely using optimized technology with robust decision criteria, collect the right amount of consumer data, make sure the data is properly cleansed and verified, and lastly to immediately begin a direct dialog through multi-channel marketing. He finally discusses the amount of information that companies: must have, probably need, good to have, and nice to have are dependent upon the goals they are trying to achieve. His focus was more on the ways to obtain customers and the amount of information to collect, rather than Mike’s techniques for email marketing.

Mike Chapman and Jere Doyle provided valuable marketing techniques and guidelines useful for future careers in marketing research. Both men provided insightful information that allowed me to gain knowledge on what these men have thus learned in their successful careers, enabling me to apply this information to my future profession.

Trail of IM conversations can linger for years

2006-10-13T22:08:00.000-04:00

Article Link
The Internet never guarantees privacy. Do you think that once an instant messenger conversation is exited it vanishes forever? In truth text messaging sent in real time via the Internet can be saved and retrieved. Instant messenger conversations are a popular way for nearly 79 million users in the United States to communication with several friends, family members or coworkers at one time. The most popular instant messaging programs have built in archiving features that can be set by the user and many are unaware of these capabilities. Many companies and government agencies are using software that scans these messages and copies text for storage on corporate or government computers. AIM Pro, AOL’s business version of instant messaging archives messages on the users’ hard drive by default. Many users are unaware of the programs capabilities and that they are being monitored by their employers and spouses. As the textbook points out, “despite the patchworks of privacy laws, most internet users expect their personal information to be secured. What most don’t understand is that whenever they send or receive information or messages online, the data passes through multiple computers and systems. Any system administrator can lead read a message and or store it. Any workplace system administrator can monitor workers’ emails. Any website administrator can invade the user’s privacy, and with the USA Patriot Act, a government agency can do the same.”

The ability to archive these conversations has recently proved to be beneficial in the sentencing of Mark Foley, the former Florida republican congressman who was caught having sexually explicit instant messenger conversations with teenage congressional pages. The screen shots of Foley’s online messages were captured using AOL's AIM software and forced the congressman to resign. The ability to obtain instant messenger conversations with built in login features allowed Foley’s time stamped conversations with a 17 year old boy to be saved on his computer and later obtained and used to prove the congressman’s blunder. The Foley investigation has prompted the Attorney General to request a federal law requiring internet providers to preserve customer records intended to assist in the fight against child pornography. Kristin Nimsger, vice president of legal technologies with Kroll Inc.'s Kroll Ontrack stated, “Delete does not always mean delete and a hard drive by its very function is going to retain all sorts of information about a person's computer that they may not be aware of.” Internet users need to be aware that information held on computers can never be fully secure and someone might be viewing your personal conversations so be careful what you type via internet messaging and realize that it might be viewed by others.

Employers rushing to stem data theft tide

2006-10-06T13:11:00.000-04:00

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Recently companies are disclosing secure information not as a result of security breaches or hackers breaking into company systems but through stolen and misplaced employee laptops. The Department of Veteran Affairs recently lost data on 26.5 million veterans and military personnel stored on laptops and an external drive from the home of an employee. Since June of 2005, there have been 29 known cases of misplaced or stolen laptops with data such as Social Security numbers, health records and addresses of millions of people. According to the class textbook security means protection against an attack or theft and currently organizations such as The Deptartment of Veteran Affairs are failing to practice "security" procedures. Simple measures such as encrypting data could be taken to secure this information if stolen, but few choose to follow procedure. Encrypting data makes it nearly impossible to access without passwords and other credentials; it scrambles information which is useless to a thief without a digital key that decrypts the data. Employees are often reluctant to use it because if they lose the key it can be difficult to access information and slows down programs. Measures need to be taken to secure our information from those who find it “too difficult” to encrypt their computers or laptops with built in encryption. Microsoft Windows Vista, which will be released to businesses in November and consumers in January, will help users encrypt their data more easily. Windows Vista helps keep data confidential by supporting data encryption at the disk, directory, or file level, allowing for an assignment of the level of protection that’s needed for the user. Security measures taken by companies can only work if they are being used, and currently they aren’t. Companies need to require employee laptops not be taken home unless they are encrypted and employees need to be better educated to understand the repercussions of their careless errors.

Image compliments of Fotosearch

Regulating Love: Lawmakers Cracking Down on Web Dating Industry

2006-09-27T21:48:00.000-04:00

Article link

It is a wild, wild, world on the internet today especially with the increasing number of social and dating networking sites now available. With social networking site MySpace and various dating sites such as Match.com, eHarmony, and Yahoo! Personals, members wonder what the true backgrounds of the people they are speaking to and often meeting really are. Several states are currently regulating online dating sites, proposing new laws that require criminal background checks. Currently New York is the only state regulating these sites but California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, and Texas have recently introduced similar legislation. The regulations vary by state. Some states want mandatory criminal background checks and others want online companies to alert users when background checks have not been completed. Lawmakers are increasing regulations due to the vulnerability of these dating situations and to ensure the safety of its subscribers. Last year, a case was filed in which an online dating company was sued by a user who was allegedly raped by someone she met on the company’s Web site. The case was later dismissed due to the Communications Decency Act, which grants protection to Internet companies for content provided by third parties.
A current case involves a 14 year-old girl who claims she was sexually assaulted by someone she met on MySpace and is seeking to hold the Web site responsible. Will performing background checks increase the security of users against precarious dating? It is difficult to predict. An online dating company can perform a background check in which the dater can have a pristine record but then turn out to be a psychopath. Users may then begin to hold the company accountable because they entrusted in the company’s “approved” dating pool. Online dating is a dangerous game and its players need to be aware of the variety of people that are out in the world and that they just might meet them. Subscribers to these Web page’s are putting themselves at risk in these dating situations and they have to assume responsibility when signing up. Online dating services should be required to perform background checks to extract dangerous daters but by doing this they should not be held legally responsible for the tribulations that may arise.

Image Links: Article Image and Goggle Images

Eye on Privacy at Work

2006-09-22T15:48:00.000-04:00

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Do realize that while at work your employer is reading your emails, viewing your instant messenger conversations among friends, and is tracking what websites you’re visiting? “Technology has made it possible to monitor everything you do and say while you are at work, and sometimes at home, and there are virtually no laws that prevent employers from doing this” states Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute. The only preventative for employee privacy is the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986, which is the only thing stopping an employer from tapping in on employees personal phone conversations at work. Companies say they are performing these searches for company protocol to ensure employees aren’t releasing company secrets, hogging internet bandwidth, or spending too much time surfing the web. But most of the time it is outsiders that tap into company information not employees leaking sensitive information. Are these worries worth the lack of privacy companies are giving their employees and are these employees even aware that they are being monitored? Most employees have no indication that their employer is tracking their computer keystrokes. They have no idea that their personal conversations and emails are being read by their bosses and I’m sure if employees were aware they would monitor their office procedures. Software sales for programs that track employee online activities and email are growing at a tremendous rate causing monitoring of employees to become more intense than its current state. Mattby states “It’s not as if Congress is refusing to do something about this, or that the business community is opposed to more reasonable rules, but there’s not a lot of public pressure to do anything about it.” Something needs to be done to protect our privacy as employees in a world that currently lacks seclusion. We need to stand up and fight for privacy rights at the workplace.
Image above from Goggle Images

Nikon Discloses Breach of Credit Card Numbers

2006-09-15T20:39:00.000-04:00

Article found at The Wall Street Journal Online

On Tuesday, Nikon learned that the personal information of 3,235 Nikon World subscribers was accessed by nine new customers who received e-mails with links leading to secured company information. Once Nikon became aware of the problem they emailed all of the magazines’ subscribers to inform them of the problem and told them to cancel their credit cards. Nikon blamed the security breach on an outside vendor’s system failure. The company released a statement stating, “At present, we are in the process of notifying all those customers who may have been affected to make certain they are aware of the situation, take action to protect themselves and their confidential information, as well as to be a resource for any questions they may have.” The public release of the company’s information was discovered by an employee of a film works company who had recently subscribed to the magazine and received an e-mail with a link which led to a listing of subscribers’ names, addresses, telephone numbers, credit card numbers, and expiration dates. The data was quickly removed from the site after notification, but was this too late, was damage already done?

The rise of identity theft in today’s society should force companies to be more cautious with secured company data. As consumers, we release personal information undoubtedly, expecting that it will be secure and restricted to the public, but when we discharge our personal information do we really know that it won’t become public? Nikon needs to take an additional step and inform subscribers of the outside vendor’s crisis that caused the release of the customer information. The subscribers have a right to know what the problem was, if it is currently fixed, and made certain that it will not happen again. Security is becoming a main concern for internet users; therefore developments need to be made before confidence can be restored.

View the subcription advisory posted on the Nikon World website
Image above taken from Nikon World

2006-09-07T17:33:00.001-04:00

Inside the Backlash Against Facebook
Article found at CNN.com

The famous social networking site Facebook which currently has 8 million student users has created a membership of enemies who are angered about the sites new “News Feed Feature” that was added Tuesday morning. This feature now allows users to track their friends every Facebook move. It shows every action taken and displays a timestamp down to the exact minute that new friends were added (Joe Smith and Jane Smith are now friends 8:08pm), relationship status’, recently tagged photos, updated information in profiles (highlighting the exact information that was changed), wall postings, groups joined and even whether event invitations were accepted or declined.
Students are angered at the new intrusive Facebook. Since Tuesday thousands of Facebook members have united together and formed groups to protest the “New Facebook”. The largest group “Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook) has 284,000 members. Students are irritated because there is no way to turn off the News Feed feature and they want the option. Mark Zuckerberg founder and CEO of the site posted a blog “Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You.” He didn’t state that the feature would be removed but he did say that he added as “a cool way to know what’s going on in your friends’ lives.” Is this new Facebook an invasion of privacy?

This new feature is an invasion of privacy. Is it really necessary to get news feeds of how your friends’ profiles are changing by the minute? Who wants all of their friends to know when their relationship status changes from “In a relationship to single?” I know I wouldn’t! When members sign up for Facebook and make profiles they are releasing personal information to their friends and fellow students at their colleges. The invasion of privacy doesn’t lie in the information displayed in the profiles but in ease of access to the information and the exact times that the changes took place. The feature wouldn’t be invasive if it could be hidden but currently this has not been made available. What will be next, postings of the times we logged in and out and listing who viewed our profiles? I think we need the old Facebook back!

Image taken from Goggle images

2006-09-07T17:06:00.000-04:00

WELCOME
Hello my name is Jeanine Michelsen. I am a senior Marketing major at the University of Delaware. I have created this blog for my IT Applications in Marketing course. I hope to share with you some insightful articles to expand your knowledge of Legal, Ethical and Privacy issues online while providing you with my personal opinions on the issue. Hope you enjoy!