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Facebook and Wal-Mart Join Forces
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Wal-Mart — the retail king of Big Data analytics — will be meeting Mark Zuckerberg for two days in Bentonville, to 'deepen' their relationship with Facebook. The CEO-level strategy summit is intended to bolster the relationship between the world's No. 1 social network and the world's largest retailer. Wal-Mart has been left in the dust online by the behemoth Amazon. An alliance may be poised to challenge this dominance, particularly in light of Amazon's planned foray into same-day delivery nationwide. The companies share James Breyer, who sits on the boards of both Facebook and Wal-Mart. Adding another angle to this, Yahoo's new CEO, Marissa Mayer, was elected to Wal-Mart's board in early June, while she was still at Google. Earlier this month, Facebook and Yahoo settled a patent dispute and announced plans to form another 'strategic alliance' involving advertising and distribution. The implications for online privacy in this series of relationships are uncertain."
Great, at least I can now channel all my negative thougts to one partnership.
Facebook and Wal-Mart. That's certainly a marriage made in... well, somewhere significant definitely.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It's extremely simple.
Wal-Mart's website sucks on a level that is so difficult to describe I would simply advise visiting it to see for yourself.
It's like someone took a hundred teenagers and told them to build a retail website. Nothing fits together right, product descriptions are wrong, incomplete, confusing, and difficult to read. The site itself is difficult to navigate. The search engine is a joke.
All that comes together to create this conglomeration of a website that doesn't fit together well and has no hope of building an online community - which is what it takes for any website to be successful.
The only exception might be their photo website, which I would give a C if I were to grade it. It's at least functional - though for the world's largest retailer, it's much less than anyone would expect.
They also are failing to use their biggest advantage - they've got DCs and retail fronts EVERYWHERE. Yet their shipping is not competitive at all, let a lone their prices. More often then not, you can save a substantial amount of money visiting their store vs online. Their marketing on their own website is terrible, too.
I'm not sure what facebook is going to do for them, I think it shows how out-of-touch with their own failings the corporations executives are. Clearly they don't understand the problem, which to me says they need to replace not just a few but a lot of the management around their internet presence.
"The implications for online privacy in this series of relationships are uncertain."
I think they are very certain. This will, as with every collaboration of large corporations who seek and retain your information, result in increased use of personal (and often private) information to increase the market and profits of the corporation. Any possible benefit to the customer will be inconsequential and very debatable.
Use facebook? Expect a confusing change in privacy policy to follow, with associated double-speak explanation that demonstrates how it's all being done for your benefit, not theirs. Thereafter expect to have a relationship with Walmart on a personal level you may not be comfortable with, whether you shop there or not.
It's almost as if they were intentionally trying to create the biggest, most evil company ever known to man.
When two or more companies that have no idea what they're doing join forces and convince themselves that, somehow together, they'll master the situation due to "synergy" or some other vague buzzword. It seemed like a lot of this happened when the first dot-com bubble burst, too.
#DeleteChrome
WalMart Shopping List:
Cucumbers
Condoms
Large Gatorade
Facebook Status:
Single
While I'm sure Walmart's retail sales are probably solid, they kind of seem to be past their glory days somewhat. Many areas still resist a Wal Mart opening, there has been a lot of bad press and some court losses over labor practices, and so on. Lots of competion online from Amazon and in-store from Target, whose stores don't have the look or feel of a third-world bazaar.
Facebook, while still widely used, recently had some bad press about a slight downtick in membership, their IPO was something of a clusterfuck and the stock price has continued to decline as people speculate about their future and ability to generate revenue growth while facing constant bad press over repeated and widely criticized changes that undo privacy settings or expose information users had assumed was private.
So two companies kind of past their peak, facing pressure and uncertainty. I see why they turn to each other, but individually neither one seems to really burnish the reputation of the other, especially for Facebook, for whom a partnership seems to create a small-town, low-income kind of image.
This will be the greatest melding of core-comptencies since Microsoft and NBC...
WalMart and FaceBook offer things that people seem willing to exchange money/information for. You can opt out anytime.
Actually you need friends with common sense (and actual respect for you, though why you'd be friends otherwise is a mystery...) and some technical skill. Otherwise it's quite difficult to prevent Facebook from ever knowing anything about you. If you had this idea that never personally visiting Facebook.com meant never being in Facebook's database, that's demonstrably false.
The average user of Facebook has little or no technical skill and thinks it is useful or valuable to collect superficial acquaintences. They tend not to realize that every "Like" button you see on a non-Facebook site is a tracking device even if it is not clicked. When you access a non-Facebook site with such a "Like" button, there is no opt-out form presented. You need tools like Adblock and NoScript (among others) to frustrate this form of tracking. You first need to be aware of what tracking is and how it works before you can defeat it, of course. For average users, this is hardly "opting out anytime". This is "they aren't even asking me, they're just taking the info they want while hoping I remain ignorant". This is inherently exploitative because it's done without informed consent.
Likewise, the effect Walmart tends to have on local businesses is difficult to opt out of. So is its impact on wages and benefits. Walmart knows how to play the retail game, that's for sure. They are in a stronger bargaining position than the localities they operate in and the workers they employ. They want to keep it that way, which is why they have so adamantly resisted unionization (unions have their own problems but actually would challenge this, and management knows it). Their overall effect tends to be the transfer of wealth out of local communities, rather than the creation of wealth within them. Maybe you're fine with that and maybe you'll make an apology for it, but in either case it's rather hard to simply opt out of.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
'Jane Smith just purchased Herceptin Herpes Medication and KY Jelly at Podunk Walmart [53 People Like This]'
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I was hoping the story linked under "Big Data analytics" would be interesting but it wasn't. It only has vague statements and a couple small examples. A much better story is "Target knows you're pregnant" from earlier this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
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