Clara Shih - Clara Shih is an author, blogger, and entrepreneur who created Faceconnector, the first business application on Facebook. Clara recently left her position as Director of Social Networking Alliances at salesforce.com. She is now CEO of CrowdContext, a provider of social media tools which enable brand marketers to manage and measure social media campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, and their own websites.
Previously, Clara was Product Line Director of the AppExchange, salesforce.com's online marketplace for partner applications, for which she led the development of the Checkout payment services. Clara has also held positions in corporate strategy and software development at Google and Microsoft, and has degrees in computer science, economics, and Internet studies from Stanford and Oxford.
Clara's book, The Facebook Era (Prentice Hall 2009), about using Facebook and Twitter for business, has been featured in The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Industry Standard, CRM Magazine, and others. Clara is a frequently invited speaker on social media at global conferences including Web 2.0 Expo, Enterprise 2.0, Toronto TechWeek, and Social Ad Summit.
She blogs at http://thefacebookera.com and Twitters as clarashih.
The Facebook Era is a newly released book about how social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are ushering in a new era of business, relationships, and culture. Additionally, it discusses what companies need to do strategically and tactically to adapt and thrive in this new environment.
The last decade was about the World Wide Web of information and the power of linking content pages. Today, it's about the World Wide Web of people and the power of the social graph. We are undergoing a radical transformation as traditional one-sided CRM gives way to bi-directional visibility and access, and an unprecedented degree of trusted online identity and access to people are forever changing human relationships and business transactions.
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are changing everything we thought we knew about sales, marketing, and product development -- and empowering companies with new tools, insights, and ability to transform customers into true partners and your most effective sales force yet.
This is kind of scary. I don't want the internet to know who I am and what I like whenever I am online. Is there nothing businesses won't exploit to make a sale? Probably the only thing more annoying than a cold call from a marketer is one from a complete stranger who stalked my facebook page to learn about my personal background to establish a fake rapport with me. Creepy!
For some reason, I don't mind the fact that Google ads in my gmail scan the content of my emails to display related ads, but that's a lot different than scanning my personal profile to show ads that relate to my identity. It's an invasion of privacy, and there had better be options to make your profile off-limits to advertisers.
And on a somewhat tangential note, who here has ever clicked on an advertisement online? In 12+ years of using the internet, I have never, EVER clicked on an ad. I think it's ridiculous.
I don't see how a hyper-targeted ad can be more annoying than "a cold call from a marketer". Would you rather listen to a pushy salesman trying to convince you that you really need a life insurance or simply ignore the Facebook ad, which you do anyway?
I don't understand why you're so angry about marketers trying to customize theirs ads based on your identity and interests. As Clara said, you're the only one who chooses what to share on social networking sites.