Business Implications for Social Marketing

April 7th, 2008

There is a whole brave new world for social marketing which is unfolding and which, so far, has caught many businesses off-guard.

A good part of the reason for this is because many corporate marketing departments are managed by people who cut their teeth when TV, radio and print were the main ways to reach audiences.

Sam Flemming, who is the founder of Shanghai-based CIC, a market research and consulting firm which covers brand buzz in China, has posted an article on how online trends will affect how agencies will think and work.

Based on my experience working in traditional media and then online in China, I think that online users are about 2-3 years ahead of online users in the US. This is because the Internet developed without the help of advertising income in its early stages, unlike in the US where advertising was a very established model. For this reason, it is much easier for Chinese consumers and advertisers to adapt. In China, there is much stronger tie-in between offline events and online promotions, instead of just relying on online advertising as in the US.

US corporations and advertisers have to “unlearn” much of what they have thought would work in the new online space.

One of the big questions is that agency account people will have to learn to become advocates for their brands and products both offline and online. Where does the agency and customer advocate line end and begin? It’s easy to see that in the very near future the best agency account people will be those who are the most passionate and eloquent advocates for a product, and can exercise good judgment quickly. Those who succeed will be the ones who can go from strategy to tactics very quickly, while keeping the client clear about overall goals and weaving through the intricacies of the online conversation.

One book which is going on my “to read” list is Jump Point, which talks about how marketing to the interconnected online crowd is going to work.

Creating Value In the Digital World, and Bringing It to the Real World

April 1st, 2008

One of the great challenges in the digital world is: “How to create value?” People are spending more and more time online, and are moving to a mobile Internet, which has been attested to by the success of Apple’s iPhone platform. But spending online has lagged behind, especially in China, where advertising has been slow to take off.

Obviously there is something wrong with this picture. What can be done to bring value to people, and are companies looking in the wrong places?

Advertising has been established in the west for more than a century, but it has been much slower to take off in China. There are several reasons for this: for one thing, after having been a strictly socialist society for nearly thirty years, there really wasn’t much of an ad industry in China in the period from 1949 to 1977. A consumer society did not exist, and Chinese citizens did not have many choices. There was the hukou system which meant that Chinese citizens could get enough of what they needed, but only if they were in the right city, and only enough to take care of their basic necessities.

After 1977, when China started to open up, the ad industry had to basically build up from almost nothing. Now, in 2008, it is one of the few markets where ad revenue is growing by leaps and bounds. In the west, many companies are questioning the effectiveness of advertising in the face of the growing power and effectiveness of the Internet and its poster boy for online advertising, Google.

Still though, there is plenty of room for alternative business models. In 1999, while Yahoo! was earning a great deal of ad revenue from banner ads, Chinese companies had to look for alternative business models which were grounded in how Chinese were willing to accept value, and were willing to pay for it with real money.

Tencent, the creator of the fabulously successful QQ IM client, has probably the most successful virtual currency in the world, Q-Coins (in Chinese, Q-bi, it means “Q currency”). Since its introduction, it has become a fabulously successful currency which has its own currency exchange rate, and is bought and sold offline. In short, to many Chinese, it is a real currency with value. This is a case of something which was created in the virtual world, was deemed to have value, and then taken into the offline world.

This leads to a very interesting question for social networks: If Q Coins have been so successful as an online social currency for transactions among community members in China, then why haven’t the western SNS sites such as Facebook, Friendster, etc. created their own currencies which their own members could use worldwide? And why should there not be a secondary market for trading these virtual currencies among themselves, and then with real currencies?

Ogilvy China Digital Watch has done an excellent job of keeping an eye on the development of online advertising in China. But I have a question: “If the volume of online currency denominated transactions were added to digital adspend in China, how would that compare to how much is spent on online advertising in America?”

Could it be that in fact China is already a leader in bringing online-created goods and services to the offline world, and is ahead of the west?

Who knows, maybe the answer for a global ad agency like Ogilvy would be to issue its own virtual currency and to get as many people worldwide to use it as possible?

Now that would be a twist!

How Much Can Chinese Bloggers Make From Blogging?

March 26th, 2008

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For most people, blogs are no longer exciting as they were in 2002, when they first burst on the scene. Part of the reason for this is because although the technology for blogging is mature, an economic model for bloggers has not really taken hold. This is especially the case in China, where there are a huge number of bloggers and the Internet has become hugely popular, but the economic rationale has not yet appeared. Several years ago, there was a lot of talk and conjecture about a long tail, and idea which Chris Anderson made popular with his book, The Long Tail.

Unfortunately in China, the long tail looks like a Manx cat. (The Manx is a variety of cat which is born tailless.)

Recently there has been much discussion in the US about the value of ad networks. The economic rationale for ad networks is simple: they buy unsold inventory and place ads in them so that no ads go unsold. Better to place ads anywhere than to have them wasted, right?

Not so fast, says Jason Calacanis. Quoting from ESPN’s recent tough statement banishing ad networks, he says that “the use of ad nets diminishes the value of their (clients’) brand and content by spreading it so widely, ultimately threatening existing relationships with advertisers”.

In his article, Calacanis argues that for that medium-sized publishers, they should take on the costs and responsibility of their own ad sales networks to sell their own inventory, instead of outsourcing to an outside ad network. He argues that a real publisher is in control of three things:

  • Your writers
  • Your readers
  • Your advertisers

Moreover, he puts numbers behind his definition of a mid-sized publisher. If you have more than $250,000 in ad sales, you should hire your own dedicated sales person.

His advice is that if you are a mid-sized publisher:

  1. Hire three ad sales people
  2. Spend 50% of your time going to ad meetings and conferences
  3. Kick out your ad networks and use something simple like Google Adsense to take up your backfill

Another article about how Gawker Media pays their writers left me even more interested in how these numbers would translate for China. Gawker writers are not paid a salary, but simply get an “advance” against pageviews. Basically they have to hit their pageview numbers if they are going to do well. Moreover, these numbers are public.

This raises a really interesting question: How would these US numbers for pageviews and traffic volume translate to make sense in China? And could it be that blog ad networks in China have held down bloggers’ salaries by providing low quality untargeted traffic, and the only way to turn the situation around is to have publishers build their own ad sales teams in-house instead of relying on outsiders to sell their ad inventory so that they can pay their writers a working wage?

I suspect that the answer is “yes”, because only a publisher has the best sense and feel for their own content and audience. Ironically, it could well be that ad sales for medium-sized networks are something which cannot be sold best over the Internet.

Now, that would be a change, wouldn’t it?

Apple’s iPhone Computer SDK Just Changed the World Today

March 7th, 2008

iphonesdk.jpeg

In Sept. 2007 I wrote an article about how Apple’s global marketing for the iPhone was attracting and creating a new user base in China. Now, we know that there are more than 400,000 unlocked iPhones in regular use in China.

Since Apple gets recurring revenue for the iPhone through its contracts with the operators, many analysts have said that these unlocked iPhones represent lost revenue for the company. In China, China Mobile gets all the revenue spent by users for moving data up and down from the cracked iPhones, and does not have to share any of the income with Apple. And the statistics show that iPhone users consume much larger amounts of data than competing mobile phone platforms.

Obviously this is a serious loss for Apple.

I say “Not so fast!”

Today, Apple just announced its new iPhone SDK. Now, the Apple iPhone will talk with Exchange servers, morphing the Apple iPhone from something corporate IT departments viewed as a consumer toy, to a full-fledged platform on a par with Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Linux.

As in most Apple presentations, the most important stuff always get buried close to the end of the presentation. That was the announcement of the Apple App Store, which will allow developers from all over the world to build and sell their iPhone applications. Developers will be able to charge any price they want, and Apple will keep 30% to cover hosting, distribution and credit card fees. The App Store will be available as a new button on the iPhone beginning in June. Presumably, this download will work on all iPhones, including cracked and jailbreaked iPhones.

Make no mistake about it, this is truly revolutionary news. The iPhone platform has taken over the role which the carriers once took for themselves. Today is as important a day as when Apple announced the Macintosh platform in 1984, singlehandedly launching the desktop computing industry.

Today Apple launched the mobile applications industry. When the Macintosh platform was launched in 1984, it led to the growth of Microsoft with the Office applications suite, which was developed for the Macintosh before the PC platform.

Now, do you think that Microsoft will have enough sense to develop apps for the Apple App Store, or will they continue to stick to developing for the Windows Mobile platform only? My feeling is that if Microsoft developed for the Apple App Store, they would get traction very quickly, if only they would let their developers develop.

Make no mistake about it, today, Apple launched the mobile computing industry with the iPhone computer SDK which user statistics show, is the favorite platform among consumers, and is gaining headway in the corporate space.

Even in China, where it is not officially sold and supported yet.

With the iPhone computer SDK and App Store, along with Apple’s excellent development tools, any developer with any sense will start building apps for the iPhone computer.

Including in China.

So where does this leave China Mobile? Much press has been devoted to Apple’s unsuccessful negotiations with China Mobile to distribute the iPhone in China.

In reality, the interests of the companies are aligned.

  • Both China Mobile and Apple want the mobile computing industry to succeed.
  • Both stand to make MUCH more revenue when the platform takes off.

Right now, they are just jockeying for position in this new business ecosystem. Where they rub against each other is on the applications platform level, which China Mobile wants to control as much as possible, and on the revenue share level, which China Mobile wants to control, and does not want to share with anyone.

Today, Apple just won on the application platform level round on the rapidly growing iPhone computing platform.

But I predict that China Mobile is quietly pleased with all the extra revenue data consumers on the iPhone computer platform have been generating, and which it does have full control over. Have you noticed that China Mobile has not broken out those revenue numbers yet? When the Apple App Store launches in June, those numbers will shoot up even higher.

You see, there is nothing wrong with being a commodity data mover when you run into the ideal data platform for users.

Round two will be about who will define ad standards and specifications for the iPhone platform (Apple), and how advertising revenue will be shared in different markets on this platform.

Advertising On The Three Screens and New Business Models for China

February 16th, 2008

In technology marketing parlance, the three screens refer to the television screen, the PC screen and the mobile phone screen. Most marketers and advertisers now recognize that more eyeballs and viewing time are going to the PC screen, and even more will soon go to the mobile phone screen, and the question they are asking is “When will advertising on the PC and mobile phone catch up with advertising on the television?”

This is a question which Kaiser Kuo, publisher of Ogilvy China Digital Watch, asked in his article “Closing the Marketing Gap”. To quote from his article:

The “Marketing Confidence Gap.” That’s Ogilvy parlance for that vexing and persistent chasm between, on the one hand, the high percentage of media time spent by the average consumer online and, on the other, the relatively low percentage of overall ad budgets being directed online.

Kaiser then goes on to point out that when TV was the disruptive new technology, advertisers most likely ran into the same kinds of complaints from what were then mainstream media buyers (print and radio). And that it took some time for the new advertising models for TV to take off and then reach a new equilibrium of general acceptance. The new medium created its own new business ecosystem with the most well-known being the television market research firm AC Nielsen.

The three screens model throws the old model of TV advertising into question. For many video watchers on the PC, the main appeal of watching videos on Youtube or Tudou is because they can watch them anytime, without advertising. Contrast this with the old broadcast model of the 1960s in the US, dominated by ABC, NBC, and CBS and a few affiliate networks. In the 1970s, cable TV began to take off; it did not have any advertising and relied exclusively on subscriptions. Then in the 80s, satellite news (CNN) took off. So the good old days were not really as quiet and stable as some would have us believe.

This is why the relationship between time spent online and advertising does not hold water for me. There is no rule which says that the correlations which applied to the first screen of television should also apply to the second and third screens of the PC and the mobile phone. I would go so far as to argue that disk and broadband prices have dropped so low that the traditional ad agency role of playing matchmaker to ad inventory (advertisers) and media (publishers) have disappeared. My opinion is that the only place where there is any meaningful and measurable matchup of ad inventory and media are done online is with search ad results, with Google the leader in most of the world and Baidu in China.

This is why I think Sam Flemming’s talk about Internet Word of Mouth (IWOM) has hit an important vein which the ad agency’s have failed to grasp. It is an uncontested fact that while e-commerce in China has been slow to take off in China, many Chinese look for information about purchases beforehand by visiting BBSes and seeing what others say about a product. So why is there no way to track the main influencers of buying decisions and rewarding them with money if their recommendation results in a completed sale? To me, this has always seemed like a difficult, but not insurmountable, technical challenge. In the west, there would be complaints about people making recommendations because they want to make money instead of actually having tried and used the product, but in China, I don’t believe that those disputes would be likely to arise.

China has a unique retail phenomenon called tuangou 团购. This is groups of individuals and families who meet each other in the BBSes and who are planning on purchasing the same big-ticket items. Then, they go and negotiate volume discounts with individual retailers, eventually selecting the retailer who gives the biggest discounts. I have never heard of this phenomenon anywhere outside China.

There are plenty of opportunities in China; it’s just a question of how you see the challenge.

Why Google Loves Microsoft-Yahoo On So Many Levels

February 5th, 2008

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The quality and amount of discourse on the proposed takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft has had my bullshit meter jumping off the charts, and I felt I just had to chime in.

Paul Kedrosky summed it up best when he said that it would benefit Google the most. Anyone with half a brain and who has worked in corporate management more than one week knows that the most painful thing to do in business is to grow by acquisition. Acquisitions are especially hard to do in a market which has matured relatively quickly in the US, such as search advertising. But analysts and senior management sometimes like to do acquisitions because it creates a lot of buzz. And in the lousy US market nowadays, any buzz which does not include the keyword “subprime” is welcome buzz.

Organic growth is the much better way, and in the long run, yields better results. A lot of early Google talent has been cashing in their chips and leaving the company; shouldn’t Microsoft focus on hiring some of those very smart people to beef up their search offerings? Wouldn’t that be a better way to catch up to Google’s search technology? Yes, and I’m sure that Microsoft is doing that right now, but it doesn’t capture the imagination of the old media folks the way Microsoft! would.

“Let’s toss a big fat red herring to the dumb masses!”

In spite of its management problems, Microsoft still has a formidable technology pool of talent. The fact that it cannot create an operating system as reliable as Apple’s Leopard even though it has more than three times the number of employees is more a testament to bad management of talent and resources than to anything else. It could even be argued that Ubuntu Linux has a friendlier and more stable operating system, and it has almost no revenue, and almost everyone working on it is a volunteer!

So why does Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer want to do this deal? I see it as hail-Mary desperation pass to show that he is “doing something”. If you are saying that it is useless and dumb, then you have a problem. You see, you have committed the unforgiveable sin of looking too closely and thinking too much.

Shame on you!

To add to the entertainment value of this show, Google has jumped in with claims that it is seeking to protect the “openness of the Internet from a closed company like Microsoft”. Now, I have had many images of the Internet, but I have never quite had the image of the Internet as this beautiful bride about to be horribly ravished by some mean thug in the northwest. As a matter of fact, I think that the Internet has been ravished many times before, continues to be ravished, and somehow manages to live with it and get along with life.

Now, if Google has suddenly discovered that Microsoft is closed, why should it limit itself to complaining about Microsoft? Why not go after nation-states which are not famous for openness, and frequently tinker with the “openness” of the Internet. If they have any trouble thinking of any, they are welcome to call me.

I could easily come up with more than 190 names.

So Google can now also score points with your senile old grandfather, the one who criticized Microsoft for being a monopoly way back in the 90s, but still makes sure to keep his copies of Microsoft Office current.

YEAH, GOOGLE STANDS FOR OPENNESS!

Now, to add to Uncle Steve’s general cluelessness, he comes out with this gem stating that Google has no products, it only has search. He may not have heard it, but there is a whole bunch of businesses which don’t have products; they’re called services.

Yes, Google doesn’t have any products; it only has services. But the services produce something called search advertising revenue by matching advertisers with content providers using keywords and taking a chunk of revenue in the process.

Do you think that Steve knows why he’s buying Yahoo?

Frightening thought, isn’t it?

Ogilvy Mindshare Report on Chinese Consumer Behavior

January 28th, 2008

chinamobilephoneuser.jpeg

I just came across this Ogilvy Mindshare report on Chinese consumer behavior which goes beyond the normal reports which cover exclusively the Tier 1 cities.

This one also covers the tier two and three cities, which are becoming increasingly important for marketers. According to the report, consumers are still frugal, and are reluctant to go into debt.

How old-fashioned can they get? And I’ll be that they think savings are a good thing…

Sheeesh…

Facebook’s Beacon and Valuing Social Networks

December 5th, 2007

Social Networks

There has been a lot of talk lately about valuing social networks and Facebook's management knows that, which is why they try to track everyones' activities across the Internet with Facebook Beacon.

There has been a lot of discussion
if/how/when/who Facebook will acquire a social network company in China. As usual, I will jump out to offer my often contrarian views on social networking.

Let me put it this way, I don’t think that there is a way to value social networks, even though this is what advertisers would very much like to see happen. And the reason that social networks cannot be valued in a top-down/corporate/advertising way is because they are entirely subjective and dynamic according to each individual at any given moment in time.

That’s why it makes much more sense for each individual to assign a value for _access_ to his network, and anyone who wants to access it has to pay an access fee. If you don’t like the access fee, then don’t pay. If you like the fee, pay, and you will get access.

It’s that simple. Nobody owns the network except me. Not Facebook, LinkedIn, Google or anyone else. I own my relationships, just as you own your relationships. They only exist on Facebook insomuch as I’m active on Facebook now, but that is no guarantee that I will be there tomorrow.

That is why it doesn’t matter if Facebook owns all my data; if I no longer go there, it’s dead, out-of-date data. My data is only valuable as long as I’m active there.

I talked about the idea before, let me fill it out some more.

Here is my problem with Facebook’s Beacon:

  1. If Facebook wants to track my activities across the Internet, they should explicity ask me first, and give me an opt-out option.
  2. If I say “Yes”, they should ask me how much I want to be paid for access to my network activities on a 24-hour basis
  3. I go in and set my fee for 24 hour access beginning immediately and click submit.
  4. Facebook’s servers churn and return “yes” or “no”. If “yes”, they will be directed to my payment gateway. After confirmation, Facebook will say something like “Thank you for giving Facebook access to your network activities for 24 hours. After 24 hours, the cookie installed in your browser will automatically expire. (More blahblahblah from corporate and legal departments.)

In this model, each user has control over his/her activities, and is paid for access to their data by each social network.

Now wouldn’t this be a much better world than the current free-for-all where everybody is playing “Let’s screw the users and see how much we can get for free?” The current valuations on social networks are based on not paying users for access to their data.

How would you value social networks if they had to pay users for access to their data?

And since the Internet is all about pushing power to the edge, then why shouldn’t users have the power to earn money from having their activities and relationships tracked?

It would be great to hear what Seth Godin, Dare Obasanjo, Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have to say about the idea.

UPDATE: It’s been three hours since I posted this article, and I wanted to see if Facebook had imported this article into Facebook Notes so that I could tell my Facebook friends about it. (I have set Facebook to automatically import my posts here.)

Guess what? Facebook has not imported this article. Now what have I done to get that kind of treatment? I seem to have some recollection about “empowering users” and all that stuff.

Charming. Did their PR and marketing people go to the “Khmer Rouge Charm School of How to Win Friends and Influence People”. I guess I should be so grateful to Facebook and their management where they can watch all our moves and try to monetize it without passing anything down to us dumb users who haven’t figured out the shill yet.

I’m a great believer that if you fail, you should fail fast. In this respect, Mark Zuckerberg and his flaks have done a great job in record time. Mark, what are your chances now that you will hit that 15B valuation?

Scott Karp has written a great piece “Facebook’s Crisis Demonstrates That People Matter More Than Technology”. Be sure to read it.

Dell and WPP: Will DaVinci Work?

December 4th, 2007

HP 2710p

When an ailing computer company which has lost a lot of its shine teams up with one of the leading ad agency groups, WPP, to form a new marketing agency called DaVinci to spend $4.5B in marketing money, I am, naturally, more than a little skeptical.

Consolidating adspend under one roof makes sense sometimes; it made sense for IBM in the nineties when it chose my former employer, Ogilvy, also a part of WPP, to handle all its accounts. IBM was able to consolidate its image, and Lou Gerstner, then IBM’s CEO was able to make a dramatic turnaround and a nice exit for himself.

More than 10 years later though, the challenge for Dell is more complex. Dell is a company which has surpassed at squeezing costs out of the system, making cheap computers for the office masses. The problem now for Dell is that it is getting challenged on this front by Lenovo, the Chinese computer manufacturing giant and Acer, the Taiwan company which has made a dramatic comeback after a near-death experience. And then there is the US giant, HP, which is doing some very interesting stuff.

When it comes to buzz, Apple sets the bar. After switching to Intel architecture, then using the iPod as a platform to generate buzz for the iPhone globally, Apple is on a roll. Dell has been left in the dust. Add to that recent customer complaints about quality, and Dell is not in a good situation.

So can DaVinci turn things around for Dell?

My initial reaction is that it doesn’t go far enough; it is made up of Dell and WPP people, and can serve as a buffer to any agency conflicts. But the problems which afflict Dell run much deeper than just quality problems.

They are management and perception problems.

One of the big problems marketing people run into is how to turn a product which is a stinker into something which people want to buy. The Internet has made the challenge even greater, because anyone who has the time, motivation and interest can find anything about a product.

It doesn’t matter how you spin a turd, when it stops spinning, it’s still a turd.

The problem is that once a company starts thinking that it’s all about an agency, or it’s all about the creative, the ground is set to place the marketing people and agency as the fall guys, when actually the problem is with bad management decisions. Then as the management panics because of falling share price, bad buzz, and everything else, their decisions get increasingly short-sighted and the options get worse and worse. When the management starts thinking in these terms, the company is basically in a death spiral; it’s all ends when it hits the ground and bursts into flames.

The problem with Dell is that they are very good at cutting costs, but they have not shown customers how they can ADD value. So naturally, Dell attracts the customers which are at the bottom of the value chain. Dell’s management has effectively commoditized their own product line. This is never a wise thing to do. If your own products have effectively become commodities, how do you position them against anything else?

The answer is you can’t.

Cutting internal manufacturing and component costs is something every computer maker should do internally, but you never want to make it the message you tell your customers and IT departments.

For the past several months, I have been debating what I should get for my next computer. It has been a match between the Santa Rosa Macbook Pro and the HP 2710p. The 2710p is a Tablet PC and has received some excellent reviews. It was the only PC I have been seriously considering.

Why? Because I have never owned a Tablet PC, and it looked like it had reached the right balance of functionality and design. Other HP lines, Dell and the other PC makers never entered the equation.

HP obviously likes the 2710p a lot, they have made it the centerpiece of a TV ad campaign in Asia.

That is why I say that the integration of Dell and WPP do not go deep enough. Instead of trying to flog a lot of commodity products which the market has tired of, instead they should think of how to come up with new products and a product line which actually make a person excited. We’re not talking about marketing anymore; we’re talking design marketing, the kind of stuff Apple excels at.

They should start with one product, then take it to a product line, then expand it, then kill all the boring stuff. Just like Apple did with the iPod, which expanded into the iPhone line.

Of course, in order to do all that, you need to be a dictator like Steve Jobs. The question is whether Michael Dell can be that kind of dictator, even if his own name is on the line.

How Facebook Screwed Up, and How The User Can Control Advertising

December 2nd, 2007

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook

Scott Karp had an excellent article about how Facebook’s Beacon messed up and created such a reaction from Facebook users.

My explanation for Facebook’s policy re Beacon is that all the press, plus a 15B valuation on a company which does not have significant cash flow will get management to adopt all kinds of dumb user-privacy violating tactics to justify the valuation in the hope that the company can garner significant ad revenue.

In short, Facebook’s Beacon policy of spying on users’ activity across the Internet was a panic move…

Some hokey marketers get so wrapped up in the data that they can garner that they forget a lof the information is, frankly, useless.

“Look! We can target albino 16-year old Chinese boys who play more than 20 hours on the PS3 in Nome, Alaska during the winter and who had the Nintendo Wii recommended to them on Overstock by a friend in Wichita, Kansas!”

Now, many have put forward basically a Bill of Rights for users, and user control of their own data. Dave Winer has said that the user should be able to control how his/her data is used, right down to being able to to keep a copy for him/herself.

Giving the user control over his data? What a revolutionary idea! (There I go again…)

I think that there is a simple and elegant solution which will take some hard work and years to perfect.

Here it is: Why do consumers have to give their data for free to advertisers and be only consumers? Why can’t consumers be advertisers too? And why can’t they be credited or paid for advertising products/services they like? In return for being paid/tracked, they would give up their anonymity. Should they want to become anonymous again, they can do so, and they would not be tracked. But they would not be paid. If they wanted to become tracked/paid again, they could do so. Anytime. Anywhere.

In this scenario, the user would control what ads he wanted to receive in his user profile in real-time; this could be done with a system of checks or tags or something else. To opt out of “auto ads”, just to use an example, all he would have to do is uncheck it.

Basically, the user is selling his attention information to the advertisers. I look at it another way; the user is selling his time to advertisers to get data; relevant advertising data will be deemed useful and passed on, while irrelevant data will not be used and will not be passed on, and will be treated by the user as spam. In return for passing meaningful data to another prospect or customer, the first consumer should be reimbursed with money for exposing his data, and making a meaningful referral which eventually results in a sale.

And so on and so forth. Here is the trade: Give us your name, identity and user info, and let us follow your activities, and we will pay you. You can opt out anytime, and you will not be paid.

Simple.

I have always wondered why consumers are always treated by advertisers as consumers, when in real life, people have multiple roles such as father, husband, son and manager, or mother, wife, daughter and VP, just to use a few examples. So why should people only be consumers? Ask people for their data, then pay them for it.

That’s what I call a fair trade.

Now, if Facebook did that, that would be really something. And if Facebook doesn’t, then I hope that someone else does.

If they do, they’ll have my business.

Whatever Facebook does, let’s cut the spyware bullshit. That’s a real business killer. Those guys just dug themselves a big one with Beacon, and I’m wondering how they’ll get out.