They Know Everything Now

In today's world, exponentially expanding technologies have widened the reach of everyday electronics and has greatly affected the marketing and information systems landscape. Through data mining, companies can now gather previously unheard of vaults of data on every customer they are trying to reach in an effective and subtle manner. Based on your public preferences on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as your search terms in search engines like Google and Bing, companies can access almost anything they want about you, and easily store it in huge databases.

Many people have expressed qualms with what they feel is an invasion of privacy by these large corporations. In fact, John Kerry is chair of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, and is working to force companies to improve the security of these databases and allow consumers to selectively include what information is found in the database. However, as Joel Stein points out in his article on Time.com, "taking your information without asking and the profiting from it isn't new: it's the idea behind the phone book, junk mail and telemarketing." Stein also points out that worrying about this isn't a new fad either; as early as 1890, records state people expressing concern about their photographs being used without their permission. However, there is still sufficient reason for concern in today's world for the reduced barriers of accessibility for this information.

I, personally, do not think that this increase in data mining is necessarily a bad thing. While some pieces of information (my address, social security number, etc.) I would be partial to have included in every company's database, I think the market research that companies gain from this data mining is very useful to the continued sales of their products. Data mining allows for companies to gather accurate demographic and psychographic data for their target markets which helps them with market segmentation. In this way, I think that data mining is here to stay.

Social Media: Business Ally or Enemy?

With so many websites available for people to visit at any time using the Internet, companies have long put barriers on what sites their employees can access while using the company’s Internet service. However, in our rapidly advancing world, it is becoming necessary, from an IT perspective, to unblock social media in the workplace.

Since social media has such a high volume of users, companies need to be able to embrace it in their everyday actions. For example, it is difficult for online marketing managers to truly gauge the effectiveness of social media advertising campaigns without having access to the sites that they are being advertised on. Also, as Ann Bednarz addresses in her article on CIO.com, “HR teams want to be able to recruit, hire and retain social media-savvy employees, yet they feel hampered by overly restrictive usage policies.”

The challenge in loosening restrictions to social media sites, however, is being able to ensure that the social media access is not detrimental to the productivity within the firm. One solution is to adopt acceptable use policies, which would spell out what purposes social media should and should not be used for in the workplace. However, many times guidelines like these fail to address every single issue that could arise, resulting in many instances of gray area in terms of the intended purpose of the sites.

I think what the issue with social media in businesses boils down to is a lack of trust in employees to stay on task if they are given access to their personal social media sites. In this conflict, I would have to side with the management, even though I am from an ‘employee’ standpoint as a student. If my professor were my boss, and I their employee, and I was assigned work to do for that class, I can guarantee that I would visit my social media sites regularly while doing the work. This access severely slows my progress and can also affect my ultimate performance on the assignments. With this in mind, I think in a workplace, where performance is critical to a much larger group of people, social media could have a negative impact on businesses. It is up to senior management now to decide what is right for their firm and if social media itself can be trusted to be an ally, and not the enemy.