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Oh, Brave New World! The Novel World of Big Data.
Last week @claire posed the question “What does Facebook know about us?” It is a worthy question, and one not easily answered. Facebook certainly can automatically glean a number of facts about us, but as her post demonstrates, that does not translate necessarily well into knowing us. Why else would she constantly receive ads for products in which she clearly has no interest? Ours is a brave new world of massive data gathering and data mining, where our personal profiles, in any form, are traded much as one would once have traded baseball cards. Yet for all its ubiquitous reach, this is still new, it is still novel, and it is still buggy, as I will relate below.
I have some direct experience as a customer of Google’s Ad Words program, though this experience is now somewhat dated. Six years ago I enrolled my company as a buyer of Google advertising. The program is fairly simple:
- Assign a monthly budget cap.
- Pick or spell out the search terms where you want your listings to come up first.
- Pick or spell out the search terms where you want your banner ads to appear in the search sidebar.
- Bid on how much you want to pay per click.
- Create your ads, and link them to the appropriate landing pages.
After some automated vetting by Google, your ads are (hopefully) approved, and, depending on your bidding levels, will appear accordingly. Others who have bid higher than you will have their ads appear more often, and in more prominence than yours. You are not billed per ad displayed, but by click-through. I ran with the program for 18 months, and it never paid for itself.
Perhaps I had not bid high enough to get my ads displayed often or prominently enough to get through to the sorts of customers who would have made the program at least break even. Perhaps my ads were poorly constructed. Perhaps the products themselves were not the sort of things that lent themselves well to this sort of advertising anyway, as I sell business-to-business, not to consumers. Perhaps it was a combination of all of these factors. All I can say for certain is that whatever the monthly budget I set, Google would consume it in 2-3 weeks, without fail. I spent in excess of $20k over 18 months and garnered only a scant $500 in sales that I could definitively trace to those ads.
Throughout that time, Google routinely fed me reports of how my ad-buys were faring, and included many suggestions for improvement — better words (which had higher minimum bids), higher bids on my existing word set, catchier jargon, paying extra to include photographs, paying extra to be featured in more sub-networks, and so forth. In short, all of their “advice,” if heeded, ultimately meant spending even more money. Maybe if I was selling consumer goods, perhaps I would have fared better (and let’s be honest, back-end automotive electronics are not “sexy beasts” that can sell on looks alone). Yet I looked where my ads were featured, and, generally speaking, they were featured in the appropriate target markets. I know from direct sales into those markets that our products have homes (and fans) there, and I know (because my budget was always expended in full) that someone was certainly clicking, yet the ad program itself was a failure for us. So much for the power of Big Data.
My second experience is far more recent. Over the course of our Thanksgiving family dinner, I took pictures of my gathered family. During the after-dinner lull, I uploaded a number of those photos to my Facebook page. I did not tag anyone else present, I did not caption any of the photos, I named no names. Yet when I checked in an hour later, to respond to some comments from distant relatives, I found that my post had been tagged with other names – the post read “Skipsul, with Mrs. Skipsul and Dave Carter”. Yes, according to Facebook, our own @DaveCarter was somehow at my parents’ house to share in our feast. How did he manage this? Facebook had tagged a photo of my father as Dave Carter. Why? Because I follow Dave on Facebook, and Facebook, in its clear desire to record the faces of anyone in any photo, just assumed that my Dad was Dave. Facebook had added my wife simply because she had opened up Facebook at the same location as me, at roughly the same time.
This should give us all pause.
There are zero controls available to Facebook users to prevent this automatic tagging of others in your own posts. The best you can do is to request that no one else can tag you from one of their posts (useful defense against some persons here who have sent me funny but inappropriate videos at times), but apparently, they’re busy linking events behind your back anyway. Oh, Brave New World indeed.
About 10 years ago, when I got my first iPod, I dove headfirst into listening to a wide variety of podcasts, and one such I found was the TWIT (This Week In Technology) network, started by Leo Laporte, formerly of Tech TV. Leo was an early advocate for facing this new reality head-on, and he championed the notion that, unless you take definitive steps to “stay off the radar” (and these steps would include making certain to never have any credit or debit cards, frequent shopper cards, and so forth), you will, in one form or another, be defined anyway by “big data,” by social media, or by some other collection of online metadata. If that is the reality we all must face, according to Leo, then you might as well take the steps necessary to define your own profile: create and maintain a social media presence that you can control (as much as possible), and even buy your own domain names if you think you have even a moderate shot at needing name recognition (either for personal advocacy or defense) later in life. Looking back now, was this wise advice?
I would call it mixed. Yes, there is value in controlling your own social media presence, but Facebook does not want to give you that control. Unless you rigorously police your Facebook account (and I do), the ever-shifting sands of their rules and practices will eventually reveal all, truth and untruth alike (like Dave being at my parents’ house). Why are they doing this? I can only speculate, but they must be doing it either for money or for control. My own experience with ad-buys suggests that the money cannot flow forever for them, unless their ad placement accuracy has improved (and Claire’s experience suggests that it has not), I suspect ad buyers are increasingly finding what I found, that it doesn’t pay to buy ads except for a few select types of businesses. Twitter’s reputation has turned horrid, what with their mercurial awarding and revocation of “verified” accounts, and their ghosting of posts by people they don’t seem to like. We cannot truly control how we appear online, and the ad buyers who pay for all the “free” services we use seem not to be getting their money’s worth.
What, then, should we do? I have no answer. Perhaps the market will sort things out? Perhaps it is time to call in the heavy hand of government regulators? Either way, this is all still new, this is all quite novel, and no one can really claim they’ve figured any of it out.
Published in Technology
$200 later and I’ve got them firmly off my trail. On the plus side, Amazon now thinks I’m a brony. On the minus side, Amazon now thinks I’m a brony.
Personally I would have gone with Rainbow Dash… but that’s just me.
You seem to know them quite well. Do tell?
Thank you. I hear it was at least noteworthy.
And now the trouble starts…
Just need a Thomas & Thomas bamboo fly rod and I promise I’ll be no trouble at all.
Well, he’s cheap to feed, since he likes convenience store hot dogs.
I have very refined tastes, sir.
You don’t have nieces? Or a pipe line to nerd culture? Hard to travel the world of little girls or man nerds and not run into My Little Ponies. The episodes I have seen, were actually quite good for a Cartoon show aimed at 6-10 year old girls. Distinctive and attractive art style, basic but well constructed plot, with distinct and appealing characters. Considering how horrendous a children’s cartoon could be to an adult psyche My Little Pony probably ranks a 2 on the blow my brains out 1-10 scale of children’s cartoons with 1 being a classic Disney cartoon (fun for all ages) and 10 being some 3D Computer Generated Sing Along made for TV Schlock (That only a particularly dim 6 year old would like).
I have 4 daughters, believe me, I know the show quite well, and even wrote a review of the recent theatrical release.
http://ricochet.com/460687/my-little-pony-the-movie-a-review/
Sadly, it only garnered 6 likes.
Agreed, it’s not a bad show at all.
Obviously your dial should go to 11 for:
Sorry man, I couldn’t read it, couldn’t take the risk of ending up a brony. I’m weird enough already.
Ditto.
You are both missing out.
Sometimes, one just has to miss out to preserve what little dignity one has left.
The review will make you laugh, I promise! It only needs 6 more likes!
You might try to remember… Also, I liked it a long time ago, back when it came out.
Just saw the price. You sure we weren’t married at some point?
Well, I did marry a Cajun but I’m pretty sure she isn’t you. Not that I wouldn’t marry you if given the chanc…. wait, that doesn’t sound right.
Well there was an 11 but then we made that into 10.
The Panda clicks in for number twelve, Skip…I do have great-nieces, and, you’re welcome!