Over the past few months I’ve been creating some social media marketing privacy guidelines and requirements for a couple of my large clients. Today I read a post from a fellow IBM Midsize Insider contributor, Jason Hannula, “Social Media: Enterprise Content or Customer Relationship Information?” It stated that “93% of marketers are using social media for business.” A large number of these are from small and midsize organizations. It is important for these organizations to not only keep Jason’s suggestions in mind, and follow the business’s data governance requirements, but also to make sure privacy is also appropriately addressed. Many, perhaps most, small to midsize businesses do not yet have social media privacy requirements in place. (more…)
Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Avoid this Common Privacy Choice Mistake
Monday, August 25th, 2014Many marketing professionals have a common temptation; they want to send as many marketing messages to as many people as possible, and they would love to send it to all folks who have ever been customers or clients of their business, and often times actually want to simply send to everyone whose email address they can obtain in any way.
Privacy professionals make many efforts to guide marketers on what is acceptable and not acceptable. After all, (more…)
Using “Compliant” Stuff Doesn’t Result in Full Compliance
Wednesday, June 11th, 2014In the past couple of weeks I’ve spoken with five different small to mid-size organizations who have had a software or hardware vendor basically tell them, “Our product is HIPAA compliant! Use it and you will also be fully HIPAA compliant!” How can that be? In three words; it can’t be. Here’s what is most likely going on with those claims. (more…)
Lessons from 3 Organizations That Made 3 Privacy Mistakes
Wednesday, May 21st, 2014Even with the number of privacy breaches increasing, and with numbers of privacy sanctions coming from the FTC and other regulatory agencies and courts snowballing for companies doing irresponsible things with personal information, putting growing numbers of individuals at risk of identity fraud as well as physical safety risks, companies are still asking for way too much unnecessary and sensitive personal information purely for their marketing purposes.
And too many online media outlets, often reporting on or promoting these marketing efforts, are perpetuating these very bad privacy practices. Then, so they will not upset their advertisers, they actually are deleting comments that point out how bad those marketing and data collection practices are. I recently just experienced such a situation with (more…)
Dairy Queen Will Trade Your Privacy and Safety for Free Ice-cream Cake!
Friday, May 9th, 2014This morning I heard that in honor of Mother’s Day, Dairy Queen would give you a free cake if you would just send them an email with your baby’s birth certificate attached. What!? Did I hear correctly? So, I did a search, and sure enough, there it was; on a list on the ABC News Blog (see screen image below): (more…)
