Cranking up the rusty blog engine again.

With a new look for tenrec.com (just launched today, 4/2/2014. Go team!), we’re dusting off our blogging hats and are determined, this time, to make this blog a fixture in our lives. As luck would have it, Seth Godin posted this today on sethgodin.com: Cracking the Pottery.

As much as I like just about everything Seth writes, this really stood out as sage advice. If you don’t have time to follow the link and read the full post (really? It’s only 200 words, maybe less), here’s the best part:

“I find that it’s almost essential to fall in love with an idea to invest the time it takes to make it good and worth sharing. And then, the hard part: deleting that idea when it’s just not what it could be.”

For my part (and this is Per writing this post) the hard part about blogging is the feeling that it’s not experimental, that there is no space to make errors, that once the blog post is published it’s immortal. Naturally, that stymies creativity and saps the energy that is needed to follow through on an idea or a whim long enough to write about it.

Taking Seth’s advice, we (Tenrec bloggers) will create more sketch posts, jot down more ideas, draft more drafts then break / delete some of those before they ever make it into these pages. We may even pull some published posts down or edit them after posting, maybe even move them from here to there in the calendar or mash them together. We’ll see what the outcome will be but, for now, I’m staying focused on getting this one post done to break the ice.

-PWC

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If you can handle the colorful language, you should watch this… John Oliver crashing the FCC website http://t.co/ZgPcgQwlzW via @TheAVClub

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Are you using 2-factor authentication? You should be. Read how to activate it for 100+ sites http://t.co/8UgSGi0Wi0

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Good pointers for firms considering SEO– 10 Mistakes to Avoid when Hiring an SEO Company http://t.co/3PJEKR8rtB via @LawPracticeAdvisor.com

The Age of the Customer? Or the Age of Corporate Spying

What age are we in?

In Julia Angwin’s new book Dragnet Nation she tells the story of the Nielsen Company trying to steal the posts from a private message board used by mental health patients. The presumption is that the Nielsen Company wanted to sell to this content to its pharmaceutical clients. She also describes how Whole Foods has installed facial recognition software in its stores and how some malls are tracking us by the emissions from our cell phones.

This was supposed to be the Age of the Customer. We are all empowered buyers of products and services through the information we can access at the tap of a finger, right? We have witnessed the dominance of information (i.e. the Information Age) give way to the rise in access to information (i.e. the Age of the Customer). There are over 90 million smartphone users in the US and over a billion worldwide (http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/smartphone/). We use our phones to post and read reviews, follow products or companies on social media and research our buying decisions. In short, the Internet and smartphones have literally placed great power in our hands. But is this just a smokescreen?

What are sophisticated marketers up to?

The challenge the Age of the Customer creates for marketers, especially B2B marketers, is that they now need to get their messages into the information stream that leads to buying decisions. In this short Q&A session by Forrester with a marketing VP from Xerox (Jeannine Rossignol) the basic tenets of B2B marketing are well-described. Organizations need to create content marketing initiatives that work together with traditional sales and marketing efforts to influence potential customers where they are (e.g. social media and the Internet) providing real value and insights to them as they make their buying decisions.

But I can’t help but feel like the public face of corporate marketing is all about the customer while the inward-facing message is that they (the corporate marketing pros) have a death grip on us from our computers to our phones and even into our home.

The first reason for my concern is the rise of automated marketing tools and customer profiles in the Big Data realm. A quick look through this week’s Forrester Forum for Marketing Leaders and it’s easy to see that the speakers and sponsors are focused on creating better and more sophisticated marketing techniques using better and more sophisticated data + software to improve marketing systems and outcomes. No surprise there.

The second reason is the data itself. We’re all aware of the NSA’s spying program and we’re all alarmed by domestic spying. But I suspect that most of us feel that we’re law-abiding citizens and that the NSA is unlikely to ever care enough about our phone records or emails to read them and learn what time our sons and daughters have soccer games on Saturday.

But what about all the corporate entities that do want to know about that soccer game, where it is, what shoes our kids are wearing and who’s bringing the team snacks?

Angwin tells some eye-opening if not eye-popping tales of corporations and local municipalities using data gathered on customers and citizens to (try to) predict their behavior, sell to them or even punish them. Their goals weren’t nefarious. They just want to improve their system, to gain efficiency, to market to the right customers better. But the outcomes tell a different story. And in those outcomes the customer or citizen is inconvenienced, leveraged or misled.

Where will this lead us?

In my mind’s eye I try to compare as best I can the rapid growth in corporate spying against the more modest growth in our access to information. Will our evolving abilities to use Google, Facebook, Yelp and Angie’s List outpace the capabilities that corporations are developing to gather and parse through our browsing history, social media posts and online profiles? And, based on the normal evolution of technology, what happens when the data gathered on us and the tools to use it cost less and less? Will this type of information mining become ubiquitous? Will our local auto mechanic, dry cleaner or insurance broker be able to buy some report on our buying habits? If so, what will that Age be called?

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Thanks Marci! @manatrapartner “A Dan Pink primer for #LMAIntl conference attendees.” http://t.co/RRbjOCqqCB

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There’s a new default theme coming to WordPress https://t.co/MZXd7zbavE

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This is a good sign. #HTTPS-tipping-point? Firefox users chalk up HTTPS encryption milestone https://t.co/KvmMFXJYHQ via @techcrunch

Wilk Auslander

The NYC-based firm of Wilk Auslander turned to Right Hat to design a new brand and website for the firm. Right Hat recommended Tenrec to provide information architecture, programming and testing services for the website portion of the project.

The new website at www.wilkauslander.com is built on the Darwin Site Management system and features rich mega menus, customized attorney profiles and a targeted tools for publishing the firm’s news and insights.

Visit the website »

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Apple’s new iOS 10 has some security settings you should be aware of https://t.co/D2rQDIyGZX