Social Media: Pro or Con

Though it interesting to explore the positive business implications of social media, it is also fascinating to explore the role of social media on individuals. In particular, it is interesting that news reports tend to focus on the negative impacts of oversharing. The article featured today on the Forbes website (http://bit.ly/fMy632) lists rules one should follow when posting information to the internet; it's simple but proven rules seems intuitive to people who grew up online, and who first learned about oversharing in the days of Myspace and Livejournal.

Nonetheless, internet privacy promises to be a hot topic in the years to come, though perhaps in a different format. The LivingSocial Amazon deal mentioned earlier in this blog proved to be a bonanza for both firms, as LivingSocial expanded its brand awareness and Amazon was potentially enabled to track individual users' future LivingSocial purchases, as noted on a tech blog, http://bit.ly/gTYjpN. One cannot help but wonder, however, how comfortable future generations will be sharing the data from all of their online purchases, currently spread across nominally unique vendors, with every firm they purchase from. Though this deal may have been a win-win-win, it will be interesting to see if there is a point at which customers will not feel comfortable sharing their sales data across firms, and if so, what the impact on targeted online marketing will be.