The Press Room

Social Networking become viable source of Lead Generation
FEBRUARY 24, 2009 (Bellerose, NY) - Social Networking is on the rise. From such sites as MySpace or Facebook maintaining popularity, advertisers make use of tracking and targeting relevant advertisements to end-users. Being that users of these sites willingly give personally identifiable information, this grants advertisers and publishers the ability to learn even more about them without the need of setting cookies. While traditional advertising uses cookies to maintain state and remember what the users were doing over time, this made a clear and apparent security risk. Computers would store these persistent cookies and if they are shared across multiple users (such as Internet Cafes) these cookies which stored information about the previous user could be somehow extracted and read by another user.

With Social Networking, this virtually restricts information from being stored in the client machine but within the social networking site directly. The API's on MySpace and Facebook (via the use of Applications) allows for the advertiser to query the site directly to get the information they desire.

Privacy advocates would state that this invades the end-user's privacy but in actuality the end-user has to personally allow the access of their data when they use the advertiser's application.

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