Archive for marketing

Facebook Reveals its User-Tracking Secrets

Facebook logo

  • Facebook doesn’t track everybody the same way. It uses different methods for members who have signed in and are using their accounts, members who are logged-off and non-members.
  • The first time you arrive at any Facebook.com page, the company inserts cookies in your browser. If you sign up for an account, it inserts two types of cookies. If you don’t set up an account, it only inserts one of the two types.
  • These cookies record every time you visit another website that uses a Facebook Like button or other Facebook plugin — which work together with the cookies to note the time, date and website being visited. Unique characteristics that identify your computer are also recorded.
  • Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity. It deletes entries older than 90 days.
  • If you are logged into a Facebook account, your name, email address, friends and all of the other data in your Facebook profile is also recorded.

    Source and full article: Mashable

The benefits of sorting data

sorting data

Sorting also can streamline processing. comScore sorts URL data to minimize Web site taxonomy lookups. Instead of loading the 40 URLs for Web site pages in the order they were visited during a session, sorting might reveal that 20 of those pages were on Facebook, 12 were on GMail and the balance were at NYTimes.com. The sorted data would trigger just three site lookups whereas unsorted data might trigger many redundant lookups if the visitor bounced back and forth among just a few sites. “That saves a lot of CPU time and a lot of effort,” Brown says. It’s possible to sort data with SQL statements, and custom scripts, but sorting is also a common feature in data-integration software from IBM, Informatica, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Syncsort, and others. At truly large scale, Hadoop is an option for sorting and other processing steps.

Sources:

Article: informationweek.com

Image: john norris

The importance of customer data and social media

Data and Social Media

Findings from IBM showed that in the next three to five years, 82 percent of CMOs surveyed worldwide will increase their technology investment in social media, and 81 percent plan to focus on customer analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, two technologies designed to help them address the impending issues and concerns surrounding the growing amount of available marketing and customer data.

Source: emarketer