CRM & Privacy

Two weeks ago, I posted the blog about the relationship between convenience and privacy. I wrote that convenience and privacy are the relationship of inverse proportion. Today's post is also related to it.

Recent marketing trend shifted from mass marketing for gaining new customers to targeted marketing for maintainig existent customers. It was because low economic growth made it difficult to gain new customers. (I heard that according to the research by an automaker, they have to spend $7,000 to gain new customer. If it's true, it's ridiculous.) It is easier for them to maintaining existent customers, so they focused more on maintaining the good relationship with customers. That's why CRM is important today.

To maintain the good relationship with customers, it is important to give personalized service to each customer. They must collect each customer's personal information such as name, age, interest, etc, as much as possible, and analyze it to give them adequate service. Thanks to the development of technology, the management and analysis of customer information became much easier, and also there are many CRM software to help them.

However, as the management of customer information become more important, they have to store more personal information. They will use it for better CRM, so they store it in their server. Of course, I believe they place strict control on such information and anyone can't access it easily. But again, we have to give up privacy for convenience.

Virtual collaboration tools & its ideal vision

Rob Cross argues that physical distance affects the effectiveness of networks. However, the problem of physical distance can be solved by the virtual collaboration tools.

I don't know much about and have much experience of such tools, so I don't know the quality of them. However, if their quality is same level as what we experienced in virtual class, I think they are good enough to use. Even if there is a distance between each attendant of meeting, since they can talk or see each other and share documents online, its almost same as facing each other.

But for effective virtual collaboration, both being able to talk or see each other and to share documents are necessary. I think only document sharing is not enough. Only using Google Docs without any tools to communicate can result in chaos because many users can modify a same part at the same time. They need the tools to communicate and tell something like "Hey, I will modify this part, so wait just a few minutes."

If companies have these tools and they have enough quality, what you need is to fully utilize them. Like Robert D. Hof mentioned, it takes time to get used to these tools. If only those who are familiar with technology can use these tools, virtual collaboration will decrease its value because the diversity of opinion will not exist in such situation. Therefore, they must be simple and easy.

Privacy & Convenience

Privacy and covenience is always the relationship of inverse proportion. To gain more convenience, you have to give up more privacy. For example, social-networking software called Visible Path takes into account the strength of relationships, so it considers the number of e-mails the workers exchanged. It argues that it never check the content of e-mail, but to improve its function, it should consider the content of e-mails. Without caring about the content, it values a very important business e-mail as equally as an e-mail sent by mistake. The content of e-mail is important factors to decide the strength of relationships. Checking the content of e-mails is necessary for the convenience, but it means less privacy.

Another example is Amazon.com's personalization. It gives the recommendation list, and it is based on users' purchase records. It is very useful function, but it means that Amazon.com keeps the record of purchase by every customer who has their accounts. Remaining record of purchase may be uncomfortable for some users. Again, it is the problem of privacy.

There are much more examples, such as Google Earth, Google Desktop Search, etc. They are all convenient, but privacy issue always involves. As Ghahremani mentions, "people have widely different notions of what's invasive". How far users and service providers compromise on privacy is difficult issue.

Experience in ITEC-333

I recommend ITEC-333 class not only because of the class discussion, but also because of hands-on experience. It is very useful to have hands-on experience of many tools especially after I learned how significant influence they have. Creating my own blog and learning its significance at the same time is a good example of it. Other than blog, I experienced many tools such as RSS, network analysis, wiki, social bookmarking,SEO, social news, etc. They are useful and important tools in today's Web world. In addition, most of these tools are for free, so you will get a lot of benefit from learnig these tools.

I won't recommend this class to those who are not interested in social networking and have allergy to computer. It is not very difficult to utilize these tools, but you have to deal with computer anyway. So if you can't endure facing to face with computer screen, you should not take this class. Except such cases, I strongly recommend this class.

Government & IT. Hope or Threat?

Some of the reading for this week mention dual nature of technology. Many people think technology make the world better, but it can be threat. Like McGovern said, "technology is neutral". Since technology has developed rapidly and has huge influence on society, it will be a nightmare if government misuse technology.

It reminds me two stories related to technology and government. The first story is about USA PATRIOT act. It was established after 9/11 and gave the US government the right to access private information. The government can gain the information about what we searched, what we clicked, what we sent by e-mail, etc. Such records remain on Internet service providers or search engines such as Google. It was established to prevent terrorism, but the government can abuse its power, so the privacy issue became a big concern.

The second story is about Google and the Chinese government. Since China is big market and the government demand to eliminate some Web sites, which are adverse to its interest, from the search results, Google accepted the censorship of its search results. Therefore, some Web sites which can be searched by Google in the US cannot be searched by Google in China. The number of Web pages today are enormous and everyone use search engines to find Web pages, so not appearing on search results is almost same as not existing.

If government can control some IT companies, it may be able to control all information. If it abuses its power, it will be horrible.

Online game and its problems

Online game become popular these days. Its connectivity with other players makes it more interesting. However, its connectivity can cause several problems.

First problem is its security. Since it is exposed to outside Web world, it can suffer for computer crimes such as DoS attack. Network problem of Final Fantasy 11 was caused by DDoS attack. Offline games don't have such problems because they work in their individual machines. Like usual Web services, it will be the semi permanent competition between computer criminals and online game companies. Therefore, this problem is hard to solve.

Second problem is Real-Money Trading (RMT). It is the problem that players of online games trade the imaginary currency in games with real money. It is also impossible in offline games because they have no means to interact its data with other software's data. Since online games started to involve real money, RMT can bring more fraud in online games. In addition, other players can be disturbed by those who involve RMT.

Third problem is how to charge the fee. Due to these days price competition, some companies moved from monthly fee system. They started the new system that players will be charged when they purchase in-game currency or some items with free connection. It sounds creative system, but one's wealth can influence how well players can play in this system. It may be inappropriate for original purpose of games.


In addition, although it may be same as offline game, some people are addicted to online games. One guy in Korea died because he keep playing online game for 86 hours in Internet cafe. Similar accident happened in some other countries, so be careful.

Reputation systems and anonymity

Reputation systems help to maintain the order in Web world, and many sites utilize this system such as Amazon and eBay. However, there is still the possibility that someone will cheat in reputation systems. According to Dellarocas, one way to prevent cheating is controlled anonymity which means that the information about the reputation is open, but the information about identity is not open. But I don't think anonymity will prevent such cheating.

I think anonymity and reputation are conflicting concepts. In reputation systems, one is discouraged from cheating or antisocial behavior because such actions will cause bad reputation and that reputation will remain open to everyone. It based on the theory that without such a kind of punishment, people will not take appropriate action. However, that theory should be applied to the people who create reputation, in other words, evaluators. It is not guaranteed that they will equally evaluate. If they can evaluate anonymously, they may evaluate someone unfairly bad or good (maybe because of prisoner's dilemma). I often see that Amazon's some customer reviews are unusually low-rated (ex. I sometimes see "1 of 16 people found the following review helpful" on the reviews which I think pretty good). You need only Amazon's account to evaluate customer's review, and no one can see who evaluated it. Such things happen because of anonymity.

To avoid such situation, evaluators should also be exposed to reputation systems. Everyone should be able to see how they evaluated. Then, there will be the reputation of evaluator, and they will be discouraged from inappropriate evaluation. The reputation of evaluator is impossible with anonymity.