Strategically Communicating

How to think like a modern-day journalist, included a link to Eli Pariser’s TED Talk on Filter Bubbles…a very interesting element of the Internet.  I have recently been learning more and more about the capabilities of the Internet through a project to revitalize our website and have been amazed at what information we can collect about people just because they clicked on our link or visited our site.  We can gather an incredible amount of demographic data, which allows us to modify our online “image” to become more appealing to our target customer. After viewing Pariser’s talk, I realize this is a minuscule piece of this puzzle we call the Internet. Pariser opened my eyes even further when discussing how our Google search results are controlled by algorithms designed to predict what we want to see based on up to 57 different information points…most of which we were probably not even aware existed. So these algorithms created about us, in which we had no input, are deciding what we see and don’t see on the Internet.  (And I thought I had just gotten really good at my search criteria.) A few weeks ago in my post “Who owns the Internet?” I mentioned that I thought the Internet might be our only hope to true democracy and a well-informed public. Well, there is a lot more to that story…and you can hear more from Eli Pariser and his concept the Filter Bubble at www.thefilterbubble.com.

1) The information is out there, so how do we outsmart the algorithm and get the information we need and want from the Internet?

2) What is good and what is bad about the plethora of information we can garner from the Internet about our target customers to more effectively market to them?