A personal experience

The Internet promises one of the most personal experiences available to customers, yet right now it one of the most impersonal. The concept of one-to-one marketing has been bandied around for years now, but there are very few Web sites that embrace the practice.

For some reason, having a Web site know about you is far worse than having your favourite clothes store know all about you in intimate detail

With the availability of personalisation technologies built into Web software, one would think we would have seen more Web sites using it, but again it is spoken about a lot, but not employed. Why would one of the most promising concepts on the Web not be used?

It seems the simplest explanation is concern over how your personal information is to be used. For some reason, having a Web site know about you is far worse than having your bank, favourite clothes store, insurance company, security company and retail store know all about you in intimate detail.

There has been a lot of press coverage recently about information being gathered by Web marketers, and then being used for purposes the giver never intended. Junk mail is bad enough without putting up with more as your personal details get spread around the world. One day you are browsing the latest news, you subscribe to an excellent e-mail newsletter, and then you magically start getting invites for holidays all over the world. This has already happened enough times to put off even the most information free Netizens.

On the other hand, how do we expect to get a personal Web experience if we don't provide this information? We want sites that react to our visits with personal messages, news, searches, offers, but we won't tell them our name, our likes and dislikes. Some of us won't even tell them a simple thing like our hobbies. In many Web databases you would be surprised how many "Mickey Mouses" exist in the world.

Good sites are already gathering tons of information about you every time you visit. Implicit profiling is the mechanism used to gather this information. A cookie is placed on your system or you are asked for an ID and password to gain access. From then on everything you do on the Web site is tracked, you click on the "cricket" news section and they know you like cricket; you don't click on the banner ad about wine and they log that information. Next time you come back to browse or purchase, they show you a special for beer at the cricket, and you wonder how they knew that is exactly what you want.

Throughout all of this they never know who you are. All the information gathered is nameless, they know a lot about you but not who you are. Only when the questions need more specific answers, do they resort to explicit profiling. From then on you know what info you are giving, but not what it will be used for. There are a number of companies which now ask you if you want your information to be given out to other companies, but far too many don't. The privacy of your information is not guaranteed, but yet each time we are asked for more and more.

We all want the best out of the Web, whether you are into marketing, a consumer or an online sales site; and we all want the famed "personal" experience. However, we might have to be prepared to give-up a little of ourselves in order to get that experience. As a Web marketer, we need to take cognisance of consumers' concerns and adapt to them.

In order to fulfill the ideas of one-to-one marketing, we will have to find a solution to personal data security. This is not only a problem with the Web as anytime you give your personal details on a form you are at risk. Is the solution to allow audit control of these databases, or is it to just not give-up our personal details? Whatever it is, in order for the Web to deliver on promises, we will have to find a way.