<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"The term \u201Cpermission marketing\u201D seems pretty self-explanatory. It encompasses activities like someone opting-in to receive emails from your company or promotional offers from partners. Simple enough. But evolutions in social data gathering have advanced the concept and opened a treasure trove of ways that brands can effectively reach and understand their audiences.\nWhile social data opens up a world of opportunity for marketers, it\u2019s also important to balance gathering data on your customers and, well \u2026 creeping them out. \nOne of the easiest ways to gain access to social data is to enable social login on your website. Visitors can log in to your site without needing to manually fill out registration forms and you get a glimpse at their social graph. Below are some ways to effectively gather and use social data via social login while doing right by your customers and prospective customers.\n\r\nTransparency is a Good Thing\r\n\nGaining access to social data doesn't have to be a shell game. Your users will actually appreciate the transparency of a social login because they benefit from their social identity being pulled into your site. It allows them to see if their friends are also on site via activity feeds, game mechanics or whatever other social elements you have on your site. When you\u2019re pulling in their social data, show your users exactly what you\u2019re accessing and give them a sense of what you\u2019re going to do with the data. \n\r\nDon\u2019t Get Greedy\r\n\nSocial network profiles come with more information than you really need. Don't tick off your visitors by taking more than is useful \u2014 for example, their profile and interests may be more than enough. Facebook, however, offers 39 specific permission object queries (78 if you count looping in a user\u2019s social graph) and LinkedIn has more than 200. You probably don\u2019t need to see that much from your site visitors and, in fact, asking them for more than four specific permissions during authentication can lead to a significant decrease in conversions.\nSo just ask for the pieces of profile data which you think will be most helpful to your business. If you decide that you want to gain access to different pieces of profile data, you can always go back and change the permissions. \n\r\nWhat to Do With Social Data?\r\n\nGaining access to social data is only half of the equation. Once you have that information, you have a number of options for cleverly and tastefully keeping your users active on your site and eventually marketing to them. One technique is to use the friends list data to show them what their friends are doing on the site (via activity feed) or show them their rank relative to their friends and other users (via game mechanics). Once they see that their social graph has been pulled into the website, your site visitors will be much more likely to engage with content and share with their friends.\nAfter you've built a healthy user base, you'll be able to pick out your power users and influencers. For example, if you own an online sporting goods store, you can use social profile data to dig into your visitors and establish which influential users (those with high numbers of social network friends/followers) are interested in basketball. Having that information is incredibly valuable as you can subsequently offer those specific sets of influencers relevant, targeted content. This will make their experience that much more enjoyable and entice them to share with their social graph.\n\r\nWith Great Data Comes Great Responsibility\r\n\nHyper-specific ad targeting is another means to monetize social data in a safe, non-invasive way. However, as with collecting that data, ad targeting should be done without violating your individual users\u2019 privacy. This is especially important in ad targeting since their data is handed to third-party advertisers. Advertisers salivate over the prospect of being able to target influential and high-intent consumers. Consider segmenting your users by degree of influence and essentially place a value on each of those segments so that advertisers can decide how they want to spend their money. This way, you can target without releasing your visitors' identities.\n\r\nSocial Data Doesn't Have to Be Creepy\r\n\nMarketers don\u2019t need to act like Big Brother in order to effectively gather and use social data to benefit their business. Your site visitors shouldn\u2019t feel like their privacy is being violated when they log in. Instead, they should feel like they're entering a tailored experience. That trust needs to be nurtured through transparency and moderation. Permission marketing is set to grow through the next few years. However, marketers will quickly find that collecting and using social data is done best with some restraint.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, kizilkayaphotos"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/08/12/social-data-marketing/>