First, for those of you that don’t know I’m getting married. That’s cool right? I just announced that to the entire internet. So my favorite part of getting married so far is the registering for things. I mean you go around and you pick random appliances and stuff that you want others to buy you. A materialist’s dream.
So now you’re wondering what this has to do with anything…well hold on I’m getting there. So the other day I was in the grocery store buying chicken and garlic. I personally like to do all my checking out at the self checkout out because there are usually fewer people there and I can move pretty quick. So I scan my chicken and enter in my garlic. Then I swipe my Shaw’s card to get the garlic for cheaper and finally I pay. So the little machine tells me to take my items and not to forget my coupons and receipt. So I grab my coupons and I pause…
The coupon says: “buy personalize M&Ms for your wedding at a discount”. And I wonder: How the heck does the grocery store know I’m getting married!
Well simple really. Crate and Barrel, Macy’s, and Bed Bath and Beyond sell my registry and other information to marketers. The marketers sell my information to Shaw’s. Shaw’s matches it up to their rewards card database thingy. The rewards card tells the coupon machine what targeted coupons to spit out at me. This is why I get coupons certain times of the month for certain items, its like the coupon/reward card knows I’m out cause it can see my shopping behavior, and presumably I’m somewhat predictable.
Scary right? So I actually think this is cool (once I got over the weirdness).
Well my targeted information advertising experience didn’t stop there. The other day I was at a faculty workshop on social networking and one of the professors here, Josh Stenger showed the workshop that you can go into Facebook and buy an advertisement. Of course the cool thing isn’t the buying of the ad (and you don’t even need to make a purchase to get to the cool stuff), its the information Facebook supplies you when you get to step three of buying the ad. Below is a picture of the coolness:
Step 3 when buying a Facebook Advertisement
Essentially Facebook allows marketers to find the exact number of people on Facebook that fit my criteria. And of course, if I were buying an ad, I could sell it to my targeted audience. That’s how I (personally) got the ad for Lost (the TV show) on my Facebook page, and how I then became a fan of the show and why that’s the only add that comes up (which is annoying). At anyrate, its kind of cool to play around with.
Another really cool tool Josh showed us was the Facebook Lexicon. This allows you to see what words people are interested in. So below you can see the buzz around Obama which of course spiked on election day.
the buzz around obama as seen from the facebook universe
So my question is this. Why aren’t libraries using this stuff? Why aren’t we looking at the buzzwords our users are typing in to search interfaces and then trending them on graphs? Why aren’t we using profiles to keep track of their research interests and then pushing them targeted articles. Or even easier than all that, why aren’t we putting ads on Facebook for research assistant appointments or the like?
How cool would all that be?