General discussion
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Topic
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Is the profile page designed to create spam lists?
LockedAt some point, our privacy conversations were going to go down this road, so let’s get the subject out in the open right now.
If this were a public forum, I’d probably get my hand slapped for the level of candor I’m about to engage in (it’s happened before, which is why some of my own threads have been pulled in the past). But you guys are my guys, so I’m willing to put my cards on the table.
The community group’s top priority right now is encouraging users to fill out their profile pages so we can know more about them. We have every intention of mining that data so we can tell advertisers and vendors exactly who our audience is, and what subjects they are interested in. We’re no different from any other media company that way, except we want to collect data directly, without going through Nielsen ratings.
Does that mean you’re going to get spammed because you fill out the profile? Only if you want to.
The only way a vendor or third party will get your e-mail address via TechRepublic (or other contact information) is if you explicitly give it to them during a white paper download. A high percentage of our white papers are “gated” and require that you tell the vendor about yourself and your employer, data which the vendor will then use to generate sales leads.
Will TechRepublic be skipping the middleman and directly selling your profile data to these vendors, so they can spam you without your permission? Absolutely not. That’s bad business, and could become pretty painfully illegal here in the short term. So no, we won’t do that.
Why the interest in the profile data, then? Because vendors pay us for most of the whitepaper downloads that occur on our site–but only if the “right” people download the white papers. Hypothetical example: Novell wants network admins downloading their NetWare white papers, but it has no interest in high school students who download the white paper so they can hack their school network. That’s a useless lead. When Novell comes to us and says they want x number of leads–but they have to be netadmins from companies with at least 250 employees–we need to know whether we have enough people who fit that description on our site. Otherwise, we’re taking a lead order we can’t fulfill.
The profile data is necessary to help us ensure we aren’t populating our white paper directory with content no one wants to consume, as well as help TR develop new articles, downloads, and newsletters that our audience most wants to see.
In a very real way, we’re using the profile system to combat spam. Direct marketing–the root of much spam–is a pretty crude science. Take x number of names, assume y percent of people on the list will respond, blast the list and await conversion. Rather than ever try and target the list, you just get it as big as possible, and assume that some minute fraction will be interested and responsive. Sending more gets you more, inboxes be damned.
With the profile, we want to serve up hypertargeted content, based on the preferences you explicitly state. Our content. Vendor content. Third-party competitor content. Community content. All equal, all based on what you tell us.
Ideally, you’ll be able to fine-tune the content you receive, so the only white papers you even see are those that precisely match what you’re interested in. And even then, you’ll have to explicitly download them and explicitly fork over contact data; we won’t tell vendors a thing.
Moreover, the profile data will also be the basis for a host of social networking connections, but that’s a secondary goal right now. Of course, it’s Monday, and that could all change by Wednesday, but I wanted you guys to know what’s going on before the spam paranoia overflowed.
We don’t need to know who you are, just what skills you have, what duties you perform, and what you’re interested in. That helps us cut down on spam by making sure vendors don’t have to settle for crappy direct marketing.
Jay
