Beware of What You Write Online

You're being tracked. Use it to your advantage.

Whatever you write onlne generates products and service ads to fit your interests:

Went camping this weekend? Here are a couple coupons for trail mix.

Got a case of poison ivy? Here's some cream.

Want non-BPA lined canned food? How about an ad for Eden's food. 

Companies are reading the tea leaves of your writings and providing the items that best fit your needs. That's scary, cool, and something you can leverage as the consumer coin effectively flips both ways. 

SCARY

If you're feeling like a "marketing target" lately there is a good reason for that, everything you do on line is being tracked and captured to bring someone/thing to you to buy -- in you the market is trusting. Recently from Media Post:

ChoiceStream has just launched its Crunch targeting platform. Its design is not just to target segments but to anticipate how people will respond or engage with ads. The idea is to understand -- mainly through personalization, in combination with third-party data -- what audiences are most likely to deliver the desired marketer results. 

ALL your patterns and practices are being measured and piled in with other people just-like-you, then that information is being sold to a retail company.

It sounds pretty creepy with Big Brother is listening to everything until you think about, BUT what if you peppered your conversations with what you want. If Big Brother is taking notes, start telling him what to do.

COOL

As the top of the consumer foodchain, we women need to become smarter about what we're saying online. Companies want our money and our mindshares and therefore, so does the media. What we write is reverberated in articles and opinion pieces and the faster the market changes to meet OUR needs. 

Companies like Choice Stream are just helping business find their best customers, faster. In a strange way, this kind of targeted advertising could eliminate the need for the thousands of overkill ads we are exposed to on multiple platforms. Wouldn't that be great.

At the same time it makes women the smartest people in the consumer room - it bears repeating - whatever we want, we'll get. 

LEVERAGE -- The pen is mightier than the pocketbook. 

Stock markets rise and fall on the gut reaction to what everyone "thinks" is going to happen. If more and more women begin writing about what they want in their consumer lives, i.e. green and socially responsible products, it will happen. Business will read the trends and work behind the scenes to develop products to meet your needs first before someone else does.

So... write about the good you want to see in the world. Name drop the companies that are doing that good work like I did with Eden Foods at the top of this blog. (full disclosure, I buy their products.)  

Laws and regulations kick in after something has gone wrong, let's try a more positive approach and help companies make the right stuff the first time. The more we expect better products, greener products and more socially responsible companies - the faster we'll get them served up to us.

In women we trust.