December 07, 2007 | Friday
UK online retail growing, Facebook Beacon shrinking
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |Online Sales
ComScore has announced that visits to UK online retailers were up by 11 per cent on last year, with 29 million visits approximated for October 2007. European totals topped 160.6 million visits, an increase of 5%. ComScore’s’ conclusion:
The stronger than average growth rates in the UK and France portend a healthy Christmas shopping season there.
Speaking of online sales, the saga of Facebook’s attempt to utilise targeted advertising to increase etail revenues for its corporate customers has taken a rather satisfactory, if somewhat salacious, turn.
Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post apologising for the Beacon fiasco reads a lot like a carefully scripted PR hymn sheet, but at least the apology was made. More importantly, the social networking site released a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely.
Reactions to Zuckerberg’s blog post have been mixed, with Tim Faulkner succinctly summing up the core problem:
It turns out that, all these years later, he still values the trust of Facebook users. Of course, he has to remind us that trust is Facebook’s highest regard every time he oversteps that trust. Maybe someone should remind the youthful CEO of his own views before he introduces a new feature which breaks that trust.
For more on Zuckerberg, 02138‘s exhaustively in-depth profile of the Facebook chief is a must-read - especially for a Friday afternoon, as the details get quite gossip-y. It includes excerpts from the online journal he kept during college and neglected to take offline after Facebook went live. His writings reveal that the motivation for the project that became Facebook was a woman - specifically, one who wronged Zuckerberg (at least if the perjorative term he used to describe her is anything to go on). Sounds like trust has been a core problem for Facebook since the very beginning…
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