The link between social media, crowdsourcing, creating targeted audiences, generating buzz, and greater online distribution of media assets is beginning to transform the PR and Media Relations industry. While this has been in a growth mode in the US, its rare to see it being acted upon in Europe.

Yesterday, Usain Bolt the fastest man in the world, took part in a charity event on the organised by watchmaking brand Hublot, for whom he is an ambassador. He was on the starting line in front of the Hublot’s Headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland pitting himself against 10 child athletes. Hublot had agreed to donate 10,000 US dollars for each child who reached the finish line before “Lightning Bolt”, and ended up paying $100,000 USD to the Usain Bolt Foundation. LABEL vigorously supported the event in creating new channels and online communications through social media channels, assisting the WorldTelevision ENG, video streaming and media relations team to further the reach and awareness event.

LABEL spent time ahead of the event researching and connecting with influencers, Usain Bolt fans, track and field bloggers , watch bloggers and developing the links to existing fan groups on Facebook for track and field , Usain Bolt and Hublot.

In support of the live event a rigourous set of twitter streams were targeted at influencers and media so they were aware of the event on a day when three seperate news items involving Usain Bolt were reported in the world’s media. One of the basic stratgeies employed is that of frequency and consistency of messaging in both buildup, during and post period of an event. This prolongs the news and captures a long tail audience who is both interested in Usain Bolt and Hublot, while delivering and distributing a set of compelling media assets. While everybody may not see it on the day or tune into a live event, the residual effects of well executed tagging and referencing  will ensure that search results will give it greater audience overtime.

Check out some of the videos from Usain Bolt’s charity race against 10 children at Hublot’s HQ in Nyon, Switzerland.
The Race - http://ow.ly/27xrY
Event Highlights with Hublot’s Ambassador Usain Bolt  http://ow.ly/27xt6
General views from Usain Bolt’s charity race at Hublot  http://ow.ly/27xub
Usain Bolt interview http://ow.ly/27xvH
Interview with Hublot CEO, Jean-Claude Biver http://ow.ly/27xxh

While the Forum is being webcast live on www.nestle.com ( from 09:45 to 18:00 CET ) the live audience has the opportunity to ask questions to the panelists or participate in parallel debate online. LABEL is assisting the Nestlé Creating Shared Value Forum and its team in hosting the debate on www.creatingsharedvalue.org

Important links
Creating Shared Value
Creating Shared Value Forum live webcast
Online Debate on Creating Shared Value Forum

LIFT10 – Brands and Online Communities from netinfluenceChannel on Vimeo.

The video was made by netinfluence at Lift 10 where Maria was giving a workshop about the challenges brands face to edge their way into the sacred space of conversation. Download her presentation on Slideshare and retrieve the pictures of her workshop on our Facebook.

The Swiss commerce and economics magazine Bilan named LABEL as one of the 50 Success stories for Swiss companies characterised by their spirit of innovation and their original approaches to the challenges they take on. Being the recipient of this honour, we at LABEL, couldn’t agree more. The shift in consumer media consumption patterns due to digital convergence is having profound changes on all publishers of media from music, print, TV and advertisers and it requires an innovative approach. The importance and growth of digital media through the internet, mobile, gaming networks, digital display advertising, kiosks, and other devices is undisputed. Digital media surrounds us everywhere.

” I was persuaded that it was necessary to associate marketing and new technologies back in the 1990’s . Today, the rise of the digital and social media marketing and the importance of social networks in advertising and communications confirms this.” Arnaud Grobet (41 years) founded LABEL in 2000. Since then, the LABEL group has been a leader and has been at the forefront of this change. In 2008, the company acquired MARVEL Communications, which added its experience as a leader in the multimedia and internet communications to the LABEL group.

The Secret of its success: ” During ten years people used to looked at me as though I was crazy. Today we are ahead of our competitors.”

LABEL has put together a list the top brand and company pages of today, drawn upon a number of research sources to identify the trends and tactics that are driving successful consumer engagement in Facebook. Knowing what works and how to behave in this environment is very important so we present the what and how of managing successful fan, consumer engagement and dialogue that also can be applied across other social media as well.

1. It has a goal – and it accomplishes it.
“Presence” is not just about having a Facebook ( fan )page
# What is the goal of your page? Do you want to bring in more foot traffic to your store front? Do you want more visitors to your website? Do you want to simply get more people to know that you exist? Your goal will determine how you use your fan page. If you’re trying to increase brand awareness, you need a lot of fans and a lot of content. If you’re trying to bring in more foot traffic to a physical location, you need to show lots of pictures of your products and push out information about specials and sales. If you want more website traffic, you need to include links to your site and entice people to click. If its a product or brand promotion page you need to introduce compelling and relevant content about the brand – pictures , videos, experiential or special interest information.

2. Its management combines automation and interaction.
There are lots of great applications that will let you post to your fan page automatically, without ever stepping a digital foot onto Facebook. This allows for content distribution. Administrators don’t want to post a blog, then go to Facebook and post it there, then go to Twitter and post it there, then Youtube etc.

3.Networking with other platforms
As published by Mashable
Building a large following requires a network of other platforms, ( content distributors) working in conjunction to drive visitors to your fan page.

Victoria’s Secrets PINK landing page has a link to their Facebook fan page, MySpace (MySpace) profile. They leverage the traffic on their website and pushes them to their Facebook fan page.

# Never expect your consumers on Facebook to find you automatically. More often than not, a consumer will stumble upon the page, either through a friend or from a hub. Connecting multiple social platforms and a hub from the brand website, can help funnel consumers throughout the network.

4. Creating a unique resource
Adapted from Mashable
Some pages are used as connection hubs, but others offer information pertinent to their consumers. They use the information as added value or can’t be found elsewhere to have consumers create a connection with the brand.
# Offering a resource page often allows a brand to target a new demographic, outside of those that already know and love the brand or company.

5. Engage consumers into activities that include participation
# For brands that want fan pages to have added value (a reason for users to join the page, aside from brand loyalty), but don’t want to become a resource portal; offering polls, promotional contests or even coupons specifically to Facebook users will entice consumers to join.
Offering something to consumers to join can help build a large community. Some examples of things to offer: Polls, Competitions, Coupons, Engaging apps, Shareable content etc.

6. Respond to consumers enquiries by providing a consumer services or social response
# For brands that want fan pages to have added value (a reason for users to join the page, aside from brand loyalty), but don’t want to become a resource portal; offering polls, promotional contests or even coupons specifically to Facebook users will entice consumers to join.

Brand or company responsiveness should be underpinned by services that provides a needs and relationship based response. Facebook, Twitter, social media efforts are defined to the end user as a social place – a place where they expect (and demand) interaction from the business, organisations or brands. That’s why they are on your fan page in the first place.

7. It’s not a dead end. Engage them to do something.
Major brands are beginning to go out on a limb and make social sites their corporate websites # Skittles. Provide a follow through action for the fan (i.e., potential or existing customer) to do something, move onto somewhere, to your store front or your website, traditionally known as a call to action.

Based on your goal in having the fan page, what is the next step you want the fan to take? Be sure to provide the information for taking that step prominently.
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8. It has personality.
The fun of social media is getting to show that your organisation, business, or brand has a human side.
Do not write ad copy. No one wants to read lifeless, monotone sentences.
Think about where you are: Fan page updates are smack in the middle of someone’s news feed. You’re sandwiched between the photos of someone’s family or friends photos and an event invitation to a dinner party.

9. It’s consistent. Content and Consistency
“content is king” and “consistency is king”
In traditional advertising, it’s called frequency.
In branding, it’s called top of mind awareness.
In social media and relationship marketing it’s consistency.
Based on the frequency of communications and compelling content.
# And it is so critical to social media success “ Consistency breeds loyalty, and loyalty breeds true fans.
LABEL recommends a frequency of an update approx * 15 days. (Based on a frequency of update of Facebook’s top performing brand or product pages)

10. It embraces its fans ( those who “Like” it )

“One of the points Mr Zuckerberg was making was that the web has become a lot less anonymous and Facebook is definitely positioning itself as wanting to be the owner of that information,” said Maya Baratz of the Huffington Post. (Given Facebook’s growing and highly influential size the Huffington Post online publication has dedicated a whole section of its site to news surrounding Facebook which you can read by clicking here.)

Zuckerberg told developers at the f8 conference that the experience will mean a more personalized, social, smarter Web. As quoted from an another article on Huffington Post “Facebook is spreading its wings to the broader Web with new tools that will allow users to see personalized versions of websites they visit elsewhere.

The move could change the way people experience the online world, though it could come with deeper privacy implications. By accessing Facebook’s tools, websites will be able to customize the experience based on the list of friends, favorite bands and other things users have shared on their Facebook profiles.

“The Web is at a really important turning point now,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the F8 conference for Web and software developers in San Francisco. “Most things aren’t social and they don’t use your real identity. This is really starting to change.”

In its first steps Facebook has changed the semantics surrounding fans “people who like this” – has replaced the former term of “fans.” Facebook has added these new features to its site,

If you haven’t noticed these changes in the past few days take look.

In conjunction with this step it also launched the concept of what it calls Community pages. The concept of Community pages is to revamp users’ profiles to emphasize the pages for bands, books and businesses that users have become fans of. Facebook has started prompting users to essentially combine the two ( a users “Faned” page , and their profile page ) So if you listed The Clash in the “favorite music” section of your profile, Facebook will now ask you to join his page, if you haven’t become a fan of it already.

Facebook has also announced its working to eliminate the FB Connect ‘brand and replacing it with OAUTH – OAuth (Open Authorization) is an open standard that allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their username and password.

Its also working on projects such as social plugins whch they call GDP (granular data permissions) and continuing to work on user privacy settings.
Zuckerberg said Facebook made sure that its new tools don’t intrude on their privacy. Users’ preferences won’t be logged unless they choose to press the “like” button on websites. If anything, Zuckerberg expects the “like” tools to give people more control over what they want to share with their online entourages.

If users embrace it, Facebook could gain valuable insights that could help it sell more advertising, potentially rivaling online ad leader Google Inc., which typically tailors ads based on keywords in search terms and Web content.

“If I were Google I would be really scared because Facebook might end up with a lot more intelligence than them,” said Alain Chuard, Founder of social marketing firm Wildfire. “Google is just an algorithm, but Facebook could rule the Web.”

So there’s obviously and lot more planned for the near future as the battle for social dominance increases. I wonder what Google will do now since its Buzz launch looks like a knee jerk re action to Facebook’s growing importance and it incremental loses in market share of audience time and visitation online?

The most important reason for the meteoric growth of Social Networks is something called “The Network Effect”.  This equates to a tipping point when the value of a communications network to its users rises exponentially with the number of people connected to it. In the past year,  we have witnessed one such rising star, Facebook ( but it begs the question is it the only one? ). It took 5 years for Facebook to reach 150 million users and then a further 8 months to double that number. Today, according to Facebook Statistics,  it has 400 million users. In 2009 we saw Facebook become almost ubiquitous in every conversation swirling around Social Media and social networks. It was the year in which Facebook exploded into a  global phenomena, dominating the Social Networking market worldwide as it became an international social network giant. While its dominated the english speaking press and displaced MySpace its not the only Social Network in the world.

To believe that Facebook or english speaking social networks are the only “players in Social networks” worldwide would be nothing short of one sided owed to very narrow perspective of the hyper connected world we live in. According to Wikipedia, there are some 1.5 billion members worldwide. Across the world there a number of  culturally, language, local and regionally driven social networks , that both singularly and accumulatively pose the question whether Facebook can dominate the world in Social Networking. As  startling as it is, the ” Facebook Network Effect” is not only a Facebook phenomena and  its also occurring across other Social Networks in the world , albeit with different speeds.

So lets look at some of the Facebook statistics and the insights they bring.

Facebook Top growth by country – Dec 31st 2009

Facebook usage by % population of  country – Dec 31st 2009

Demark and Norway while not in the top 25 countries reveal even high % population penetration

Norway             Facebook users =  2,256,080                        % population = 48.5%

Denmark          Facebook users = 2,262,260                          % population = 42   %

Some of the insights coming out of Facebook’s 2009 growth are :

• The 35+ demographic now represents more than 30% of the entire user base
• The 55+ audience grew enormously at 922.7% in 2009
• Facebook’s largest user base, US, grew from 42 m to 103 m in 2009, a 144.9% growth rate
• SE Asia reprsents and huge growth potential – Indonesia grew to 14.1 m a 1536.7% growth rate , Philippines grew to 8.4 m a 2046.8% growth rate in 2009
• Taiwan’s user base grew to 5,490,300 a 4763% growth rate in 2009
• Facebook accounts for 7% of all time spent online in the U.S, 111.9 million US  visitors in December 2009 double that of December 2008
• In Orkut’s biggest markets (Brazil, India ) Facebook saw growth ( number of users  and number of  users relative to population, however, is still very low )
• Facebook has almost colonized Europe and it is extending its domination with more than 80 millions users at the start of 2010
• Facebook is growing well in Africa amongst the internet connected population

A review of  State of Social Media World from the international perspective shows some other great observations of the growth and importance of Social Networks across the globe.

Italian Vincenzo Cosenza’s  blog , Vinco,  publishes a visual map of the worlds social networks upon which can see the changing  geographical spread of social networks. Facebook in the past nine months has seemingly homogenised the map somewhat. However,  our research indicates that in some countries the map may not be correct and it hard to get an accurate number of the exact numbers. In  India , Orkut still ranks as the number one social network , and while Facebook enjoyed good growth and made inroads into the Philippines and Indonesia, Friendster still dominates the SE Asia region. So the light green spread of Facebook indicated on Vincenzo’s map remains relevant in the Americas, Europe, Australia and Africa. It is worthwhile noting that in the South East African countries there are new social networks being created that we predict will compete significantly against Facebook in countries outside of South Africa.

“South Africa has shown for years that social networks in Africa will be run over mobile phones in the future. Mxit in South Africa, a mobile social network application with more than 5 million members, lets one engage in a community independently from location and time.

According to Appfrica, South Africa has 1.1 million Facebook members, Morocco 369,000, Tunisia 279,000, Nigeria 220,000, Kenya 150,000,and Mauritius 60,000. It is also Appfrica who presents an interesting little project, where Ugandans can interact Facebook through their mobile phones: Status.ug is a completely mobile gateway for Ugandans to also interact on Facebook. Appfrica estimates around 60,000 Facebook registered members in the Kampala area. Erik Hersman wrote on his blog about Sembuse, East Africa’s first mobile social network “Sembuse is a mobile social network. It’s a way for East Africans to connect with each other via short messaging, cheaper than normal SMS messages (much like it’s counterpart Mxit in South Africa).” # extract taken from The Next Billion – The Rise of Social Network Sites in Developing countries by Christian Kreutz

In other parts of Africa Facebook continues to grow the following table showing user numbers in Africa was complied by Possicon from the  Webtrends Nigeria blog

Around Africa

” Egypt has overtaken South Africa as the largest country with Facebook users in Africa, though Facebook penetration in Egypt is much lower than south Africa, it show that there is room for more growth. For now, South Africa’s Facebook users seem to have reach climax as the growth rate is almost flattened. With the table above, Tunisia has the highest penetration up 11% from last November of 45%, given the number of internet users in Tunisia, the growth might not last for too long before it stops. Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria are the top countries in terms of Internet users and as such, we should expect growth from these countries. Morocco has just 12.4% of its internet population on Facebook while Nigeria with 9.4%. Ghana also shows a good Facebook penetration but insignificant as its internet users are still hinging below 1 million mark.” # extract taken from Web Trends Nigeria

Using this map and a number of other sources LABEL .THE Brand.intelligence company came up with a conclusive picture of what the regional and local competition is for Facebook around the world.

Facebook’s Regional and Cultural Competition as of 31st Dec 2009

• Qzone – 200 m users as of 31.01.09 , reportedly 300m as Dec 2009 , Main land China- more that 150 m monthly active users
• Myspace – 130 m users – 115 m monthly active users, 15 languages  has some 5 million artists and bands on MySpace Music and has plans to increase the development as a entertainment content network
• Friendster - 115 m users – 61m unique users per month and 19 billion pages views per month  predominantly SE Asia Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India
• Orkut - *100 m users – 48 languages – 51.09 m user Brazil , 20.02m users in India , 17.28m user in US.
• hi5 - 80m users – 50 languages, main demographics 18 – 34 ( 67% of users )  *15m Mexico, *10.5m Thailand, *7m Peru, *7m Portugal, India, Latam , big interest in developing social games and entertainment content
• Vkontakte - 61 m users- Russian (cyrillic ) speaking world inc. Eastern Europe , is a Facebook clone.
• Cyworld -  *16.2 m  users – 33% of total population of Sth Korea , 90% of Sth Koreans in their 20’s are members of Cyworld.
• Bebo - 40 m users – languages  English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish
• Maktoob- 36 m users, Middle East,  bought by Yahoo , Aug 2009 combining 16m Maktoob users with 20m Yahoo users, originally an email service that has extended into social network and news content
• Hyves – 9m users , The Netherlands only , 53% of total population of The Netherlands are registered users
• iWiW – 4m users, Hunagry only, 40% of total population of Hungary are registered user through invite only

Sources : Alexa, Google,Kohl, Orkut, hi5, NYtimes, Techcrunch, iwiw blog vkontakte.ru, Maktoob
* Estimated user numbers

The numbers are significant and tell us that language, culture, location are strong determinants in the Social Network world. What is obvious is that while MySpace lost its dominance in the english speaking world it has a very special offering in music and youth culture that means its still a powerful force in social networks.

• QQ, leader in China, is possibly the largest social network of the world (300 millions active accounts)
• MySpace has lost its leadership everywhere (except in Guam)
• VKontakte is the most popular in Russian (Cyrillic language) territories
• Friendster still dominates SE Asia , while Facebook has seen high growth in this region in 2009
• Orkut ( owned by Google)  remains dominant  in India and Brazil with Facebook making small and growing progress
• Hi5 is still leading in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other scattered countries such as Portugal, Mongolia, Romania
• Maktoob ( bought by Yahoo in 2009) is the most important Arab community/portal and growing very fast , 6 million unique visitors in June 2008 to 21.8 million a year later
• Cyworld, Hyves, iWiW, One, and other language or country specific social networks have user numbers that are very high % of population and maybe hard to compete with

The following chart is a ranking provided by Vinco on what  social networks dominate in , what are arguably, the top ten Social media markets worldwide. The interesting note we have here is on the emergence of Twitter. It still has a long way to go for worldwide acceptance , however, it is important to note Twitter has spawned over 50,000 apps that tie into the service.

The rise of the importance of the  Facebook fan page has become an integral part of companies social media campaigns or presence. Its not hard to understand why. Facebook is the web’s most popular destination after Google ( it is number 1 in Indonesia, Philippines , Malaysia and Singapore )   where the average user spends in the order of 33 minutes per day and its registered user numbers are upwards of 350 million. As the use or entry to a brand’s website are in decline due to a shift in how consumers use the web this days it makes common sense to to add Facebook into the online marketing mix. With number of brand, star, cause or business fans ranging close to 5.3 billion , that means News Feeds to user’s pages are carrying  a range of  brand content and updates.

View  a full review of Facebook’s internal statistics

Last November  “The Big Money” part of Slate Magazine,  ranked  50 brands that they see as making the best use of Facebook. The ranking is based on factors like number of fans, page growth, frequency of updates, creativity and fan engagement, not just numbers of fans. According to “The Big Money” Coca-Cola is ranked as the brand that makes best use of the social network thanks to its “organic fan-centric page without a corporate feel” and some extremely good apps the currently coin the phrase “Share Happiness” in a campaign to boost the diffusion , awareness and contact with the brand in social media.

On Facebook currently  there appears to be no common thread to a brand campaigns or successes in appealing to users. Brands such as Starbuck’s , Papa John’s Pizzas, TGI Fridays all have gained large numbers through a tactical “promotional friending” or free food and drinks in exchange for friendship amongst other tactics. Others with very popular ratings either use the channel for fast paced entertainment updates, customer interactions and feedback, user polls, and contests. “Flavour tournaments” have driven large fans bases for food brands and beverage brands  where consumers have been asked to create or give opinions on developing new flavours. The winners in this type of engagement are Pop Tarts, Mountain Dew, and Vitaminwater.

Here are the Top 10 as presented by The Big Money with the current fan numbers as of today:

A very interesting view from Pete Blackshaw, The Nielsen Company, on what to do and how to prepare for the future of online marketing. Responsiveness is key to success, but also being aware of what you need to respond to and planning for what the consumer might do next. Pete suggests “that there is a new accountability standard that has been put on the table by consumers and that may lead to better advertising” . He also cites the Nielsen research that suggests that “consumers trust each other more than they trust advertisers” , ” if advertisers can figure out a way of co creating with consumers, everybody might win”. Brands should be both reactive and proactive in planning for what consumers might do through better websites and better feedback loops.

The behavioral advertising tracking platform Phorm hits the news again last week as the UK ISP Talk Talk followed a move by BT (British Telecom) when they canceled their trial with the company.

It comes as no surprise to me. Phorm has developed technology which collects information on web use in order to serve Internet users with highly targeted adverts and serves ads to people based on their web-browsing behavior. Relying on deep packet inspection, in which every data packet is opened and examined, Phorm builds a profile of consumer’s web-surfing habits. The service surreptitiously tracks and interpolates their behavior without disclosing itself or without asking permission.

BT (British Telecom) had conducted two trials of the Phorm technology, without obtaining the consent of the broadband customers involved, leading to allegations of illegal activity from its customers, peers and privacy campaigners. This led to a lawsuit initiated by the European Commission against the UK government for failing to comply with European data protection laws.  Apparently BT completed a further trial in December 2008 and following further and obvious consumer backlash, it deleted its forums discussing the technology.

Phorm is not a consumer-based service, or entertainment or publishing network that provides an obvious value to the consumer by servicing a need.  Its an online advertising network that centers around gathering intelligence and contextual serving of advertising, Phorm’s mistake is that it doesn’t use the good manners approach of asking the consumers permission (the 1st step in any relationship based marketing is to ask permission) so it is in breach of any trust a consumer might have in the platform.  Here in lies its problem, collecting intelligence on a consumer’s browsing habits or behaviors, without them knowing is an invasion of privacy.  Google, also cited over privacy concerns in recent years, currently collects and stores information from each search query, holding information about the search query itself, the unique IP address and details about how a user makes their searches.  Google is different to Phorm in that it doesn’t intercept and spy on content a person is browsing, but its not benign either. It stores the search behavior and attaches it to an identifiable IP address.

The controversy surrounding Phorm’s technology is probably going to continue but I don’t think that this will stop the adoption of behavior based advertising; Quite the contrary.  What is apparent in Phorms case there is a clear breach of trust with the consumer and technology is viewed as “snooping” or spying technology. The only question that remains, is Phorm considered as a spyware? Uncannily spyware is  where the company has it roots and effected larger commercialization of the technology under going a name change to Phorm. They are not the only company doing this type of tracking. Consider Google’s Adsense, it calls its behavior based tracking  “interest based targeting” or DoubleClick’s DART cookies.  DART cookies are used to serve ads specific to a consumer and their interests (”interest based targeting”).  The ads served to a consumer are targeted based on their previous browsing history. In closed and permission based systems companies are able to apply simple or even complex business intelligence to apply predictive models on consumer behaviors.  This is not new nor is it “snooping”, its consensual. In CRM systems these behaviors are tracked as type of consumption, frequency of consumption, volume of consumption, and the demographics of the persons consuming, whether it’s a product or a service.  Highly targeted advertising will fast become the norm and its already is in deployment in many forms. It will become more intelligent as the web approaches the emergence of the semantic web. The mantra of right message, right time, right place will not only be online but across all digital channels. Consider these notes made in the past two weeks by  UK based Sky TV.  They are continuing to promote high-definition (HD) television—partly because even non-HD television viewing appears to rise in HD households—and because they will develop “addressable ads” for launch within two years.

The reason is purely driven by data points it knows and controls. The consumer accounts, their location, viewing times and programs are all at their finger tips.  Sky can profile the viewing interests and habits of its subscriber households, and will be able to sell ads matching those interests and charge advertisers a premium for more personalized and targeted advertising.
Marketers need to tread very carefully when it comes to personalized or more specifically behavior based advertising—and for good reason. People currently perceive it as an invasion of their privacy in online media. As the world become more connected these concerns may change, but there will be many more privacy battles and barriers to overcome similar to Phorm’s case in the near future.  In the HD TV world it will most likely not be viewed as such. TV is still a passive medium and advertising is still interruption based. In mobile it will be a serious issue, the phone is very personal , users need to control what, who has access to engage with them. In Online people don’t feel comfortable about being tracked its too much like “big brother” behavior, but are okay in disclosing small pieces of information about themselves if there a value proposition attached.
Studies  are showing that a majority of consumer are willing to provide information in exchange for personalized ads. The key will be only if marketers give them something in return. Better offers, value added services that entice a consumer to part with a little bit of information to participate in direct, relationship driven, and possibly socially driven marketing. What’s clear today is that there is a  huge distrusts , consumer and government backlash against companies that use spyware technologies to track behaviors.

Marketers beware! Ask Permission first!