When a whistleblower revealed Cambridge Analytica had improperly used data on 50 million Facebook users, there was an uproar. Will the data breach drive digital marketers from the platform? I have been struggling trying to understand the issue and what it means for digital marketers — and their clients — moving forward.
The data breach background
A whistleblower accused the British firm of Cambridge Analytica of harvesting data from 50 million Facebook profiles to help shape people’s behaviors. The company’s work has been said to help Donald J. Trump win the presidency in the United States and to lead voters in England to approve the leaving of the European Union (aka Brexit).
From The Guardian:
The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use.
However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebook’s “platform policy” allowed only collection of friends’ data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising. The discovery of the unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election. It comes only weeks after indictments of 13 Russians by the special counsel Robert Mueller which stated they had used the platform to perpetrate “information warfare” against the US.
So, what does this mean?
I wish I knew. I am a walking contradiction. I am a private person, yet very public. What I mean is I share what I want to share online, but there are things I don’t. Essentially, information is power. The more a company knows about my likes, desires, loves, passions, fears and apprehension, the better it can give me what I want. The better companies can target me, the greater the likelihood I will spend money with them.
In other words, companies can better target products and services to me if they understand me. Cambridge Analytica’s uses of data analytics is nothing new. Just about every website uses Google Analytics to understand behavior of users who visits.
Search engine optimization is a core function of what I provide clients. There are several ways to optimize, here are few:
- An SEO audit can be performed on a website to make sure it loads quickly, has the right schema markup language, has the right meta descriptions, page titles, and more;
- Individual blog posts can be optimized to rank higher in search engine results; and
- Photos can be optimized to load faster and contain the right information in the ALT text.
The ultimate goal of optimization is to increase the likelihood of converting a website visitor into a customer. Optimizing a site, a post or a photo, increases engagement and the possibility of doing business. In short, optimizing helps guide and direct behavior.
Will digital marketers exit Facebook because of the data breach?
In a piece published by Adweek, the thinking was probably not.
The gist of the problem: Facebook’s data is powerful and its ads work with hyper-precision targeting and incomparable reach in digital advertising across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook Audience Network (or FAN). According to eMarketer’s latest report, Facebook will generate $21 billion in U.S. digital ad revenue in 2018, up 16.9 percent year-over-year. In other words, Facebook’s tentacles reach so deep into digital advertising that it’s nearly impossible for brands to ditch the platform altogether.
Still, it’s not clear if the data allegations will spook consumers from using the platform, which would change audience sizes for advertisers.
And, therein lies the rub: Cambridge Analytica might have gotten a leg up because of the data breach, but there is still a lot of useful data collected by Facebook to help businesses target the right people. The information collected by Facebook isn’t anything new; Google has perfected this data collection, and it puts the information to good use in its Gmail service, in its search results, through mobile apps and more.
The data collected allows for more efficient marketing and advertising. Think of it this way: When you purchase an ad in a newspaper, you are paying for it to appear in every single copy of that particular edition. In digital marketing, you get to pick a target audience. I usually focus on people who are interested in small business and entrepreneurship. I think they are the ones who might have use of my services. However, I will not only target them. There are times I will target those who like my Facebook page and their friends. This casts a wider net.
Where do we go from here?
If you are concerned about the Facebook data breach, you can take action. Here is how you can download your information from Facebook to see what it has collected.
I downloaded my data, all 1.9 gigabytes of it. I did not encounter any horror stories like others have reported. I saw one person write about how Facebook had collected text messages with his mother-in-law. My data was basically an archive of every message, every post, every video and every photo I have shared on Facebook.
I would love to hear your thoughts on the data breach.
