Advertisers data mine social network sites

26 Mar 2008 | 17:08 GMT

By Sylvie Barak

IN AN AGE where nothing is immune to analytics, market research firm, Network Insights, has jumped on the bandwagon by pimping its social network data tracking services to corporate clients. It then analyses the data and puts it into a format it flatteringly calls “customer intelligence” which it then sells to the corporates. So, no, its not paranoia, they really are watching you.

CNET reports that on Wednesday, Networked Insights re-launched its previous Customer Intelligence Platform, which is an interface that big business use to spy on what social not-workers are saying about them. They can happily use the interface to gather loads of customer feedback on their brands, directly from sites like MySpace and Twitter, without ever having to ask the actual customer what they thought of the products or those of their competitors. The system can even purportedly measure the direct "influence" of a particular community member.

As if that form of data mining (or spying, rather) wasn’t enough, Network Insights is also building social-media applications so that their clients can access the various Web sites themselves and track what users are saying about them. Of course, so far, this only applies to social not-working sites that are in the public domain, it doesn’t yet work for password protected sites like Facebook. To mine information from Facebook users, the Network Insights would have to make a deal with the popular not-working company, and, for the time being at least, this doesn’t seem to be on the cards.

But some feel that it might well be a possibility in the future. As advertising becomes more and more targeted, advertisers are willing to pay enormous sums of money to anyone who can provide them with highly accurate information about customers’ demographics. It’s just a question of when Facebook and others like it will decide to cash in on the demand. µ

L’Inq
CNET

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