According to Wikipedia informatics is:

‘The science of information, the practice of information processing, and the engineering of information systems. Informatics studies the structure, algorithms, behavior, and interactions of natural and artificial systems that store, process, access and communicate information.’

Personal informatics is information that applies to individuals. Information that is about them that can be gathered, studied, processed and hopefully presented in a useful way.

One example of a very simple type of personal informatics is the Bupa QuitClock, a Facebook application that is designed to help people who have stopped smoking to stay cigarette free. It calculates the number of days since you stopped smoking and works out how much money you have saved since you stopped.  The purpose of this is that being able to see your achievement will encourage you to stay off the fags!

Information feedback is useful because it allows us to see an overview of behaviour. This applies to individuals and organisations as well as, of course, business. Monitoring behaviour can help to create positive change.

One of the criteria for implementing successful change is being able to action measurable steps that we can use to track improvements. Personal informatics provide a perfect way to monitor results that encourage further improvement. Its a form of modern bio-feedback. You input the data, get feedback and adjust your behaviour accordingly.

Personal informatics can be gathered easily by individuals: doing your accounts, tracking weight loss on graph paper, logging the number of miles you run each week are all examples of data collection which helps us to monitor our behaviour and change it if needs be. However advanced technology enables now enables more sophisticated monitoring and business is capitalising on the ability of personal informatics to provide their customers with a better experience.

Search engine Google, for example, tracks our online searches so that each time we enter a new search they provide us with information that is more tailored to our needs. They also offer Google Power Meter a software tool that helps people to use power more efficiently. This is not just useful to the individual but for the global environment.

Amazon is a perfect model of personal informatics which is used to good effect. Product selections that we make inform the products that they suggest we may be interested in.

Personal informatics can be gathered so easily via the internet that there are growing concerns over data protection and the invasion of people’s privacy. For business, gathering information about our clients can only help to improve the service we give and ultimately improve our profits. But the individual may have some cause for concern.

The recent controversy about Phorm, a company which uses behavioural marketing technology.  Via internet service providers it aims to track customer behaviour online in order to market targeted advertisements to them, highlights the public’s concern and the need for greater clarity and opt-out clauses that protect the public from invasion of privacy.

Phorm are a Delaware (US) company which have attracted a great deal of controversy and their service product has not even been launched yet. They will be providing online advertisers with the potential to target their customers with products and services based on the tracking of their online movements.

In theory the service is a perfect example of targeted behavioural marketing. It is market led: What are people looking for and how can we satisfy their needs. In practise its has sparked much controversy around issues of privacy.

The service works via internet service providers allowing tracking programming and data collection through their connection with their clients. In its early stages Phorm attracted the interest of Virgin Media and BT.

BT allowed Phorm to test their product on 30,000 of their customers between 2006 – 2006. These trials attracted many complaints about privacy although the UK government cleared Phorm of breaking any laws.

The European Union’s Commissioner for Information Society and Media, Viviane Reding, said that the Government has failed to protect internet users by failing to implement European laws. On the 14th of April the European Commission began an investigation.

‘Technologies such as internet behavioural advertising can be useful for businesses and consumers but they must be used in a way that complies with EU rules. These rules are there to protect the privacy of citizens and must be rigorously enforced by all member states.’

No UK laws have been broken as companies are allowed to intercept communications as long as there are reasonable grounds for believing that consent has been given. ISP’s will have an ‘opt-out’ option and this is considered to be enough. Privacy lobby groups however say that this is not enough and that an ‘opt-in’ option will protect individuals rights to privacy much better.

According to Phorm they have not broken any laws. In a statement they said: ‘There is a process in place to allow publishers to contact Phorm and opt out of the system, but we do not comment on individual cases.’

They also point out that, ‘Careful choices have been made to maximise privacy protection. In particular, Phorm has quite consciously avoided the storage of personally identifiable information.’

Webmaster Rights
Companies can opt out of their web-pages being included in any data that phorm uses and last week Amazon and Wikimedia foundation publically opted out:

In a blog the Wikimedia foundation said, ‘we consider the scanning and profiling of our visitors’ behaviour by a third-party to be an infringement on their privacy.

Jim Killock, executive director of the The Open Rights Group (ORG), which has been calling for companies to opt-out, said, ‘We would like to thank Wikipedia and Amazon for prioritising their users’ privacy and taking this stand. We hope Facebook, AOL, Bebo, MSN, Google and others can follow their lead.

‘By choosing to block the contentious online advertising system from scanning its web pages, these firms have taken the positive choice to protect their users’ privacy and their own brands.’

According to data from comScore’s World Metrix service, Facebook, has gained millions of new users in Europe over the last year. But what is Facebook and how can it help your company?

Facebook is a social networking site where you add people to your list of ‘friends’ or ‘fans’. Once you have done this all of the people on your list can network with all of the people on everyone else’s. You can start groups and invite members and you can customise your profile to include information that you want to share with others. There are countless, entertaining (often annoying) applications that you can add and invite your friends to use.

You can send private or public messages to your ‘friends’ too and this can serve as a useful communication tool. There is also a powerful search tool which enables you to get in touch with people you may have lost contact with, or infact, with companies that you want to know more about.

Rather than ‘Google’ a company or individual, you can now ‘Facebook’ them, bearing in mind that all the info given will be entirely edited by them.

If you have teenagers who have lots of free time you might be impressed at the amount of their free time they do spend on Facebook!

The European Rise of Facebook
Facebook is huge and in February had 275 million global visitors. In Europe Facebook pushed for a wider audience and increased its visitors by 314% to 100million visitors in February 2009.

The average user spends 3hrs per month on the site and, of the 17 countries surveyed, Facebook took the number one social networking spot with 30.4% of minutes spent in the social networking category.

The countries who most visit Facebook were the UK (22.7m), France (12.4m) and Trukey (17.4m).

How can Facebook help my company?
Facebook can help companies in 2 main ways:

Advertising
Facebook is a free application but gets its revenue from advertising. It uses very targeted marketing information to enable advertisers to really direct their products to more receptive audiences. Facebook asks individuals information about themselves, enables them to join groups and clubs and download applications. All this information enables them to track individual profiles and filter the right ads to them.

For a company, this provides targeted behavioural marketing information that can produce productive results from an advertising campaign. The high volumes of visitors (Facebook boast that they have 200,000,000 active users) enhance the effect and a recent study has found that potential customers are very receptive to advertising when they are using social networking sites.

Advertisements can be paid for either by per click (CPC) or impression (CPM) and results can be monitored in order to adjust targets and improve performance.

Company Profile
Youe company can have a personal profile on Facebook. Lots of organisations, companies and notorious individuals have a Facebook account. McDonalds has over 1.8 million fans on Facebook. If that isn’t incentive enough, here are some reasons to join in:

• Everybody’s doing it – like people expect you to have a website, they will more than likely expect you to have a Facebook account in the very near future
• It provides a good way to communicate with the general public
• You can collect feedback from your potential customers
• Its Free
• Its easy to use and can be done in-house
• Its speedy – you can let people know instantly about any news that you may have
• It helps you create a large mailing list at very little cost
• It promotes your brand
• It allow visitors access to your webpages and promotions

Word of Caution
If you have a personal Facebook page you need to exercise caution in how you use it. If you are very open about the personal details of your life you need to think how that might impact on your business profile. And not just your own information but your friend’s and family’s is readily available to others.