Social media watchdog
As champions of best practice, the big marketing agencies spend a great deal of time agonising about the harm that businesses can do to a marketing channel by thoughtless use of data.
The classic example is telemarketing, where the abuses were so shocking – calling people up at all hours with irrelevant offers, ‘silent’ automated calls, and so on – that half of UK households have opted out, and can no longer be legally cold called. As it’s the more affluent half, that sort of telemarketing is effectively dead.
Could the same happen to social media? In the US Alterian has sponsored the creation of the Social Media Marketing Council (SMMC) to ensure the responsible use of social media and the data that businesses collect from that channel. The aim is to:
- Help regulate how businesses harvest and use data from social networks and other online channels
- Provide guidance on what constitutes responsible use of social media data
- Encourage organizations to use best practice when they interact with consumers.
With most businesses still playing catch-up where social media opportunities are concerned, wide-scale abuse is unlikely to be a problem. Companies will first have to learn how to take advantage of social media for marketing purposes before they can start to misuse it.
I’m certainly not aware of howls of outrage from consumers about businesses taking unfair advantage of their presence on Facebook and Twitter. A cynic could say that in promoting this worthy cause Alterian has just spotted a marketing opportunity for itself.
But problems could come, and marketing specialists have been so traumatised by the backlash against misuse of data over the past decade they have good reason to worry. Better to start educating companies now about best practice than to let problems fester, as happened with telemarketing and commercial mail.
More details here.
