These Weeks in Social Analytics (TWiSA) provides easy to read summaries of recently published articles or studies that have crossed our desks at CyTRAP BlogRank.2. Why are smart phones used for this ?
3 Could Massive Open Online Courses ever be a success?
1. Attention shoppers: No privacy
Your favourite store is probably tracking your cellphone. Nordstrom clients learned this in May 2013. Of course, quite a few were upset and voiced their concerns on Nordstrom’s Facebook page.
The public first heard about a British marketing start-up called Renew around January 10, 2014. The company tracked passers-by in the City of London through technology in recycling bins. Renew claimed that customers could opt-out, but privacy campaigners questioned the premise of opting out of something you didn’t know was taking place.
City of London authorities quickly served a cease-and-desist order.
As the video shows (see title above), stores increasingly start tracking users with the help of in-store cameras, as well as a smartphone’s MAC address. Just like every other internet-capable piece of hardware (i.e., computers), each smartphone has a MAC address that acts as a unique identifier. With it, users can be tracked to see how they move in the store or a city. Such data can then be matched with other data to build a picture of the shopper’s behaviour.
Tip: From a security and privacy perspective, you are best advised to turn off your mobile’s WiFi capabilities when not in use. With your WiFi turned on, you will be tracked by all kinds of organisations and who knows what they will do with these data!?
2. Americans watch 40 percent more porn in January
This is a great story about how one can use analytics smartly for marketing purposes. This even applies in an area that might not be that accepted: porn.
The January deep freeze caused people in Maine, Michigan and Florida to watch about 40 percent more pornographic content than is usually the case for January.
By the way, according to statistics, the least amount of such content is watched on Sunday. Most is watched on Mondays.
Pornhub also reports that 52 percent of the site’s US traffic in 2013 came from mobile devices (up from 47 percent in 2012).
Tidbit: I left a comment on the above blog using their Disqus commenting system. Seems they either do not want to engage through social media – just broadcast – or fail to check their spam folder. Looks like, moderator failure 101, so Web 1.0, right?
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3. MOOCs: Poor are unlikely to benefit much
This University of Pennsylvania study about Massive Open Online Courses analysed the movement of a million users through sixteen Coursera courses offered by the university from June 2012 to June 2013.
- Fully 50 percent of registered users view one or more lectures of a MOOC they might have signed up for.
- About 4 percent of registered ‘students’ complete the course (2-14 percent depending on the course and measurement of completion).
Source: TWiSA: Privacy, porn and smartphones
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The author: This post was written by social media marketing and strategy expert Urs E. Gattiker.
His book, Social Media Audit: Measure for Impact, appeared in 2013 from Springer Science Publishers.
His latest book about social media fashion with passion will appear later this year.
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