Web Business by Ken Burbary

Can you trust user-supplied data?

I’ve been recently involved in helping some people within our company on Social Media/Networking projects for clients. The focus has primarly been on Facebook, both implementing social ads and Facebook Platform applications. One of the goals is to target a specific demographic among the Facebook user community. No one questioned whether or not the demographic data supplied by Facebook to determine who and where targeted ads will appear was legitimate.

However, after reading this excellent article on the quality of social networking user-supplied data, I need to think about reconsidering how we should approach the advertising component of these projects. The article, by Mike McCamon, suggests there is a dark side to user-supplied data and outlines the risks in blindly accepting it as fact. Doing so will undermine the success of any marketing effort targeting an audience whose demographics data is false or misleading. Now while this may represent only a minority of the overall target, it calls into question whether or not demongraphic data is the most relevant.

The article goes on further to suggest that the future may lie with “intentional data”, information about what a user plans to do in the future. This is what marketers really want to know, a consumer’s honest intentions. Getting users to provide this info will prove to be more difficult than the standard social media demographics which may, or may not, be accurate.

Question of the day: Which social networking sites do you use? Do you reveal personal demographic data that marketers are interested in, or keep a barebones profile?