David Hubert Interactive Marketing

If privacy is not dead, it is certainly dying.  That is if you want some sort of a normal life, if not the other choice is to stay off of the Internet and not be tracked.   That choice seems to be a little crazy if we take a look at our lives.  I cannot remember a day when I did not have some use on the Internet.  I am connected by laptop, phone, gaming systems, and school computers, it would be tough to completely disconnect from it all.  The Wall Street Journal article entitled The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets written by Julia Angwin, discusses in depth how far these pieces of tracking software go.  

I do not think that most of us understand how much tracking software follows us on a daily basis.  According to the article the top 50 website’s that Americans visit install around 64 trackers on average.  This is what is most startling, the amount of trackers and how in depth they go.  These trackers have now become so advanced they can look at where our mouse is going as we view a web page.  No one signed up to be tracked, it was no one’s intention by viewing a web page to be tracked and logged into a database by a number.  This information is invaluable for a marketer, but as a consumer this may be going overboard.

If we do not want to disconnect from the internet, the other choice would be to delete the cookies and other tracking software installed on our computers, the problem is that files that have been cleared can re-install themselves.  This makes the process useless.  As this goes with tracking software, it should be illegal.  There are no two ways about it, this practice should be outlawed in government.  At some point I think consumers will push lawmakers to go after these tracking companies and create a “Do Not Track” list, or have some laws in effect which can regulate the companies to give Americans their privacy back.  The only problem with this is that most people do not know about the trackers.

I took a look at Yahoo’s Ad Interest Manager, and saw myself in their system.  It is correct, I am Male, 26-34, and living in Illinois.  As I looked onto which pages I click on and visit, they are correct also.  They have also lumped my searches into categories, some I can remember and some I cannot, this is the advantage they have, by using a computer to record it all.  I see this not as bad as some of the tracker that I probably have on my computer, since these topics were all taken from Yahoo itself and I use this site regularly.  This information does not seem to be too invasive.  More invasive types of trackers is what I and I think most others have the problem with.  Privacy is definitely dying and it is due to the tracking software that we have allowed be installed on our computers unwittingly.  We will see in the future if this brings about any long term problems for us.

Search Engine Optimization is defined – “All the techniques used to cause a Web page to be highly ranked on one or more search engines”  (Roberts 2008).  This is important because when you want your pages to be seen, being highly ranked is very important to being seen.  Increasing traffic to your site can increase sales if you are selling a product, which is what business is all about.  There are billions of web pages, without having SEO, it would be extremely hard to differentiate site from each other.

After running my blog through the keyword density tool, I found that my main keywords are form, market, plugin, marketing, business, and company.  These results are not totally surprising, I recall using many of these in my posts.  Form however is not a keyword that I remember using as much as it has been used.

Guest speaker Ryan Eugene, of itSupplies, gave insight into the history of itSupplies, as well as some key trends in the internet marketing realm, and a view of his specific job at the company.  As a recent graduate from Northern Illinois University himself, it was very informational into the different types of jobs open to us.

itSupplies, began in 1998 with founder Greg Lahart, with the first focus as to hold as little inventory as possible.  Greg selling equipment out of his garage, had used catalog’s as a main sales channel, with customers being able to order by phone.  This model that Greg used was a merchant business model, since he was selling the products directly to consumers.  As demand began to increase itSupplies changed to more of a web-based platform selling tool, continuing on with the merchant model, as they do today.  Using the website at first was mostly a fullfilment tool, but soon they expanded adding thousands of products.  itSupplies also saw the need to have a large web presence due to the growing e-commerce market.

Ryan being the webmaster of itSupplies, understands the need for SEO.  With his discussion into itSupplies, he dived right into the SEO world explaining the need for unique content.  This was shown in the company website with the content pages, with the explanation that if you just take information from a manufacturer’s site, your site will be “buried” in searches.  Utilizing key words is another important aspect Ryan explained in the SEO topic.  One way itSupplies increased their SEO rank was to start a blog, increasing the unique content associated with the company had a positive impact.

Where the web wins, was another topic in the discussion with Ryan.  Ryan spoke of having new customers on the global scale.  Having this ability can grow your company a tremendous amount.  Also using the web is less costly than using lists (direct marketing).  Another area where the web wins is that analytics allow for easy assessments of conversion rates.  Having these statistics can show your company the trends and what is working, so targeting and tailoring is easy.  The final points in Ryan’s discussion were two specific things – keeping up with technology, and understanding data flow.  Not being left in the dust with technology is important, as there are tools coming out everyday to help businesses.