InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

The same thing has happened with personalization and one-to-one marketing. Personalization is now depersonalization, and one-to-one relationships are frequently zero to one because there's just a piece of software at the business end.

Personalization can be useful. The suggestions Amazon.com makes about which books I might like--based on the unpleasant fact that even fiercely independent, Fountainhead-toting people become as predictable as a herd of cows when you look at them in large enough groups--are generally accurate and helpful. Personalization also lets merchants dangle in front of visitors an offer to which they're likely to respond. This is no small thing; a blip of an increase in relevance can cause a jump in the top line.

But the situation is ripe for abuse. Even if we solve the privacy problems to everyone's satisfaction (probably about the same time that commercial-grade Flubber hits the market), we'll still be left with the problem that I call "framejacking": the intentional and deceptive misuse of context. For example, when you see trash barrels for sale in a hardware store, you'll inevitably see trash in them. The people who knowingly throw their litter into these cans are engaged in framejacking.

That's just a nuisance. But marketers who framejack have a much more pernicious effect. I moderated a panel a couple of years ago at which an executive at a large bank proudly described how his organization sends "personalized" E-mails to its customers offering them refinancing and loans. These messages carry the name of the local branch manager, intentionally include typos, and are only sent during banking hours, all to trick customers into thinking that the branch manager actually knows who they are.

This perfidy isn't unique to the Web, of course. I once got a series of brief notes in snail mail recommending a product that I could have sworn were written by hand, and were signed simply "J." I'm ashamed to say that it was only when I saw the same note in another cubicle that I realized I'd been framejacked.

Framejacking is bad from every point of view. It erodes the trust that lets the Web exist as something other than merely the latest extension of the marketing battlefield. It will destroy your personal relationship with your customers once they catch you at it. And they will catch you--unless you're a one-off spammer, in which case you're beyond moral redemption, have no friends, and will melt if someone throws water on you.

The irony is, of course, that although the Web is a deeply social environment, Webizens are perfectly happy to have impersonal transactions with companies. Off the Web, automatic teller machines are wildly popular--in part because it's clear that they're impersonal cash bots. They don't pretend to like us or even to care about us. Similarly, on the Web we're delighted to navigate through screens to find the information we want even though--indeed, because--it's so impersonal that it's nonpersonal. The problem comes only when someone tries to jack the frame and to get us to believe that the page or the E-mail comes from a human hand, when in fact it's just uncaring software.

The solution to the problem of framejacking is metadata. In a two-dimensional space such as the Web, where only one sense comes into play, we need to know the context of the information we're looking at. Does it come from a living human being who has a story to tell? From someone paid to tell that story? From software that put together a story it thinks we'll respond to positively? From someone we know? From someone who saw our name somewhere and thinks we might be interested? From a bot that's scraped our name off Usenet? From someone trying to sell us something? If this metadata isn't apparent, we don't know which frame the writer is speaking from and we don't know if we're being framejacked.

So, either take the person out of personalization or put a real person into it. But either way, make it crystal clear which you've done.