Privacy for Sale

Petti Fong

| October 8, 2010

Image by: Linday Siu

Ear to the Wire: Did you tweet about Vancouver during the Olympics? Fjord West's Angèle Beausoleil and Sandy Fleischer likely know about it.

Social media have created a raft of opportunities for  local businesses to learn more about what consumers want and to tailor products and services to their needs.  But the free flow of information comes at a cost.

In the days leading up to the Winter Games, analysts at Fjord West, the Vancouver-based digital interactive arm of global marketing firm Cossette, sat down at their computers and began eavesdropping on the private and not-so-private conversations of tens of thousands of people around the world. Among the 140-character tweets and the updates on thousands of Facebook walls, Fjord retrieved valuable information for its client, Tourism BC. 

While others lined up during the Olympics for the hockey house or the mint pavilion, Fjord was hunting and gathering information for a project it referred to as the Listening Pavilion. Half a dozen Fjord staffers began tracking when specific words were mentioned – whether on Twitter, Facebook or personal blogs – and analyzed tens of thousands of posts to figure out what people were saying about B.C. and Vancouver. The Games provided Tourism BC a window through which to monitor what the world of social media was saying about Vancouver, and so, during the month of February, every mention of certain key words associated with Olympics and B.C. was zeroed in on and dissected.  

“After decades without much in the way of innovation, there’s a whole lot of new tools and technology to allow us to market in completely different ways,” says Sandy Fleischer, the 40-year-old vice-president and GM of Fjord West, as he reviews pages of raw data and pie charts in his Yaletown office with Angèle Beausoleil, Fjord’s vice-president of strategy and client services. “Now we’re drinking from the fire hose to stay on top of things.” 

That fire hose is spewing out data, personal information, current status and present location of social-media users who post, tweet and reveal all through Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Snippets of your opinion – your likes or dislikes at a precise moment, in an exact location – are increasingly being picked up by companies, advertisers and marketers. 

That visceral, immediate response to a product or an offer, and the urge to post about it to your friends, is invaluable to companies, and it’s all available to anyone, according to Beausoleil. But few people bother to read the privacy policies on Facebook, Twitter and even their personal blog pages, she adds, looking over Fleischer’s shoulder at his computer screen.  

“You do sign off on it. As soon as you publicly comment, the contract is that it’s for public consumption. All of a sudden, our public is virtual. This is listening that brands and companies can leverage and begin the conversation. Depending on how it goes, it may be perceived as eavesdropping.” 