Connecting the dots

In response to NMA article, 21 January 2010 Peter McCormack, co-founder of McCormack and Morrison, makes some interesting points in his opinion piece in published in NMA 21st January.

If brands are truly throwing away their traditional marketing campaigns in favour of third party channels such as Facebook then I would agree it is unwise – but only ‘today‘. Because today you cannot connect the dots and establish the identity of twitter’ers and other anonymous users of social networks, but that will not always be the case. There will come a time when total transparency exists online and your anonymity will be lost. Every transaction, every interaction via the web leaves a trace and slowly but surely analytics tools are bringing these traces together. Data analytics tools are powerful now and it won’t be long before we will be able to identify the patterns that connect LinkedIn profiles to tweets, Spotify, Amazon, dodgy blog, dating and dare I say porn accounts. Beside the implications for individuals that total transparency highlights, there are enormous implications for marketers. The issue raised by McCormack that marketers, by turning there backs on traditional marketing methods and putting all their eggs in one anonymous social media basket are making a huge mistake needs revising. The distinction he makes between a well managed CRM campaign and the use of a Facebook page is surely wrong? Doesn’t a well run CRM campaign include social networking? Where does advertising fit in as surely offline advertising presents the same profiling issues that anonymous social networking does? I read a paper recently about the future of the postal service and it predicted the end of letter postage within 10 to 15 years. Email will have almost completely replaced letters in that period and yet has only been in existence for 15 to 20 years. What will social replace? McCormack is right to raise the data ownership question at the centre of his point. If brands handover ownership of customer data to third party sites in the same way that consumer goods have to the supermarkets in the grocery space they are in making a big mistake. In today’s world I am not sure that they have to providing they have a clear measurement strategy as part of their strategic marketing plan.