Don’t Dis the Customer

The communications and content industries spend a lot of time talking about how their focus is on the customer. Yet, in their quest to increase revenue and retain control of consumers, there’s an awful lot of effort around manipulating Internet content, often at the expense of the individual.

It’s already been established that one of the great things – maybe the greatest thing – about the Internet is how it democratizes information. The Internet not only allows folks to get the information they want when they want it, it let’s them create, share, comment on and vote for what’s happening in the online world and the world at large.

But these abilities are being sullied on several fronts.

A piece in The Wall Street Journal this week talks about how spyware makers and others have software that tries to boost the prominence of specific items on some sites that rank viewer visits or input by clicking on certain items repeatedly or through other means.

No big surprise. Of course, sites that rely on user input are incredibly easy to manipulate. This kind of thing is nothing new, only coming in at new angles. Remember the stories from many years ago, when the commercial Internet was new, about how certain media companies were planting (and not identifying) their people in children’s chat rooms to talk up certain recording artists or other content?

One of the more recent angles on Web manipulation has companies trying to take more control of the user experience by presenting Internet users who type in nonexistant URLs with ad-filled Web sites instead.

For example, some EarthLink customers took umbrage to being redirected to an ad-filled Web page when the ISP was testing its redirect capability. And VeriSign, a domain name registrar, among other things, reportedly was called on the carpet several years ago by some in the Internet community for redirecting folks from a nonexistent domain to a portal with information about VeriSign products and partner site links.

Nominum earlier this week unveiled a Web error redirect solution, which it says service providers can use to help folks that mistype URLs with alternatives so the users “avoid the frustration” of getting an error page. Offering this kind of redirect can be monetized by the service provider, it added.

That’s all well and good, but service providers need to be extra careful not to tick off their customers in the process.

I think few of us are naïve enough not to realize that there’s already plenty of content and presentment manipulation that goes on behind the curtain that we don’t and can’t see, but companies – particularly those that sell directly to end users – need to take care in how they play god. They don’t want the converted to leave the church.

Nominum Inc. www.nominum.com

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