As if we don’t have enough profiles, Digg is giving us one more place to build a profile, why? One more profile that can be used to provide targeted advertisements and content.
Posted on Read/Write Web earlier today:

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com

Sometime today, according to BusinessWeek, social news site Digg will launch a slew of new social networking features that will put the site in closer competition with services like Facebook and MySpace. The features will enable easier communication between diggers and allow them to form groups based around their interests. “This is really the first time that we have enabled communications between users,” Digg founder Kevin Rose told BusinessWeek.

The Age of Profile Targeting

In the age of social networking giants like Facebook and MySpace, profile targeting is on the rise. Here I am using profile targeting as simply another flavor of behavioral marketing. ClickZ has a great definition of Behavioral marketing:

Behavioral marketing targets consumers based on their behavior on Web sites, rather than purely by the content of pages they visit. Behavioral marketers target consumers by serving ads to predefined segments or categories. These are built with data compiled from clickstream data and IP information.

On paper this seems logical given the wealth of user information found in these profiles, but delivering the right content and messages requires more than simply segmenting users into profiles and matching them with related information.

Targeting Behaviors out of Context

Users have profiles that span different segments and these different profiles are rarely, if ever, active all at once. Truly effective targeting must also take a user’s context into account before providing ads,content, or product recommendations. While behavioral targeting may often provide an improvement to marketing initiatives, ignoring a user’s context, as done by most behavioral targeting solutions, will continue to yield less than optimal results.

Nevertheless, these sites that facilitate social interactions amongst web communities do indeed possess a wealth of information, and deserve the hype surrounding the bunch. In Part 2 of this topic, I’ll dive into how this information can be used to more effectively target users.