Using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, enterprising marketers are finding ways to  target your friends, based on information about the products and services you use. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Marketers Watch as Friends Interact Online”, the emerging trend for marketers is to map out connections, and start marketing their products or services to your friends. As a result of their “connections” marketing strategy, Sprint saw sales increase four-fold for the roll out of their Palm Pre last summer. eBay is hoping for similar results using the same strategy to tag customers who purchase products, so that they can market similar products to them at a later date.

To a lesser extent, many online retailers have similar plans to up-sell their shoppers. If you add a long sleeve dress shirt to your web shopping cart, smart retailers let you know about everything from pants to cufflinks to ties to go with your shirt. Up-sell situations also occur in real brick and mortar stores by wise sales associates, so it should not bother shoppers when those same recommendations are made with online purchases. Marketers even collect data from the magazines you subscribe to. Subscribe to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) and you’ll get information on medical conferences and writing opportunities for doctors. If Fortune is on your must read list, expect invites to financial seminars and offers from wealth management experts.

Marketers collect data from many different streams of information to target a market in the most precise manner possible, and there is immense value in this data. Highly intelligent companies are finding ways to add information to that mining stream of data, find connections that other companies cannot, and target ads specifically to that target market.

For example, a company that markets continuing education radiology courses to doctors and nurses needs to target their exact client. A subscriber to MMWR may be a radiologist or could be a nurse, or another medical specialist. It would be a waste of money to market to everyone on the MMWR mailing list. Marketers can narrow their search by adding criterion of known data to the stream. Find out which MMWR subscribers attended radiology conventions, and you’ve pinpointed your target market. You narrow with more connectable data to target your market, the exact same thing that companies on the Wall Street Journal article are trying to do. By making connections, they can better target their customers, thereby saving money that might have been wasted on uninterested customers or general mass marketing campaigns.

If marketers are adding additional information to try and target their market better, it should not become a big problem. However, educating the online community on the methods used to collect the data can quell some of the fears associated with the compilation of that data. If the information is being gathered in a transparent fashion, and used in a defined way, it will lessen the worries of online consumers and the affects their purchases will directly and indirectly have on their connections. This awareness campaign would allow marketers to continue to narrow their target markets while keeping consumers in the loop about their practices.

The link to the Wall Street Journal article by Emily Steel is below

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304159304575184270077115444.html