What’s Your Digital Footprint?

Forget your carbon footprint; do you know what your digital footprint is?

Tomi Ahonen wrote a very interesting blog post about how companies can utilize consumers’ movements, mobile activities and social interaction (their digital footprint) to more effectively market to them. As with pretty much everything Tomi writes, it is worth a read. It is also worth some time actively considering the implications of digital footprints and their use in marketing.

First of all, he talks about how a digital footprint is created:

Take a typical London resident, working in the City. He (or she, we don’t care at this point) spends most weeknights and weekend nights at one area of London, regularly. Lets say the Earl’s Court area. If this customer spends most nights there, that is the real home, the real address. While we don’t know necessarily the street address of this guy, we know at least by cell identity, which section of Earl’s Court the person lives in.

He goes on to explain in a lot more detail about this concept including how to know a person’s interests, lifestyle and decision making processes by what they do and where they go with their mobile phone. It is fascinating reading.

I don’t know about you, but I read these kinds of things differently depending upon whether I am thinking like a marketer or a consumer at the moment I’m reading it.

As a consumer I am shocked to think that someone would be tracking all of my movements and activities based on the fact that I happen to have my cell phone with me at all times. It feels like 1984 all of a sudden (and not in that good-I’m-still-a-senior-in-high-school kind of way).

As a marketer I am excited by the possibilities of being able to use mobile marketing in such a way that it adds so much value to peoples’ lives that they don’t even realize it is marketing. After all, if all marketing/advertising that was presented to you was actually valuable to you, it wouldn’t even feel like marketing. It would feel like life.

After all, providing value with mobile marketing is critical (with or without the whole digital footprint concept) and one I strongly advocate. As I’m explaining in my series about what value to provide with mobile (started here), consumers simply won’t engage with mobile marketing unless there is something in it for them.

What do you think about this digital footprint concept? As a consumer? As a marketer? I’d love to know.