Quote:
Originally Posted by popper
yet another companys selling its wares to corporations.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...social-network
"
Advertisers data mine social network sites
Watching the defectives
By Sylvie Barak: Wednesday, 26 March 2008, 5:08 PM
IN AN AGE where nothing is immune to analytics, market research firm, Network Insights, has jumped on the bandwagon by pimping its social network data tracking services to corporate clients.
...
CNET reports that on Wednesday, Networked Insights re-launched its previous Customer Intelligence Platform, which is an interface that big business use to spy on what social not-workers are saying about them.
They can happily use the interface to gather loads of customer feedback on their brands, directly from sites like MySpace and Twitter, without ever having to ask the actual customer what they thought of the products or those of their competitors.
The system can even purportedly measure the direct "influence" of a particular community member.
As if that form of data mining (or spying, rather) wasn’t enough, Network Insights is also building...
" |
It's a funny one that.
I haven't read the original article, but on the face of it I don't really have a massive problem with that one, as long as all of the data they're collecting is publicly available - it seems to be pretty much an automated equivalent of getting someone to surf myspace/facebook/forums/etc all day to find out what people are saying about your company.
The company creating the software might be on dodgy grounds with regards to copyright I suppose, but I don't have a big moral problem with companies wanting to find out what people are saying about them in public. It gets a bit sinister when they start talking about identifying the influence of individual people, mind.