Marketing plan development and strategy

¶ … Marketing Plan

Vara, Vauhini. "It's Hard to Hide From Your 'Friends'" the Wall Street Journal.

According to Vauhini Vara's article from the Wall Street Journal entitled "It's Hard to Hide From Your 'Friends'" users of the Facebook social networking site are coping with the challenges of finding that more and more of their private information, such as their buying habits, are being used by online marketers and can be accessed by a wide audience. Users of Facebook have begun to see automatic updates about what their 'friends' have bought online. Facebook, in an effort to compete with other sites that cater to young, hip teens and twentysomethings developed a marketing program called Beacon to so that Overstock.com Inc., Fandango Inc. And other affiliated companies would notify Facebook every time a Facebook user made a purchase on one of these sites, so the users' friends would become immediately aware of the purchases.

While 'friends' may think such voyeurism of their online friends' buying habits are amusing, many Facebook users such as a law student who did not want to share her purchase of a sexy dress with any of her online friends, were not so amused. Facebook does have privacy controls that can be used to limit the information users can share to friends, and the student said that now she is blocking the use of Beacon. The uniqueness of this idea is that it does not merely serve the interests of marketers, who are obviously grateful for the added publicity online, but also, in Facebook's view, it also serves users' interests, as it enables friends to be even more vigilant than ever before of what their friends are doing online. This way, even if someone has not updated their page, a curious online friend can still experience a thrill in hearing about what his or her friend has purchased. However, while consumption patterns may be something private that an individual does not want to share with even real world friends, or someone's spouse, a user must take added steps to conceal, rather than reveal their online buying habits on Facebook.

Facebook, of all the online networking sites, tends to cater to a younger crowd, and younger consumers are more likely to buy online, and to use social networking sites as distractions from homework, or for social purposes, rather than to craft a professional persona and network in a more conventional sense. But given that 'friend' status is given out fairly freely on Facebook and other sites it is easy to see how problems could arise. What if a 'friend' had heard that the user was broke, after the user 'bummed' a dinner off of his or her friend in real life, only to learn later on that the user had bought an expensive dress? What if a husband or wife noticed a purchase on a concealed credit card by his or her spouse? Even a potential employer, theoretically, could happen upon an employee's wild spending habits that were out-of-line with his or her salary, if the Facebook user was indiscriminate in giving out his or her information, and did not instate proper privacy controls.