A former Fleishman Hillard colleague, Peter Verrengia, has written a take on privacy worth noting, whether you are steeped in the subject or just now coming to grips with the danger misuse of customer data represents.

Writing on the firm’s Reputation Point blog, he offers this caution:

For now, businesses that come to be known as privacy thieves will face a serious reputation problem.  Those companies pushing for the use of more private information from their online users should ask themselves if their advocacy of personal transparency is matched by corporate transparency?  So far, it’s a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation.  Most online information harvesters are saying that their proprietary business interests prevent them from sharing all the information they gather.  Understandable from a business point of view, but perhaps not from a public policy viewpoint.

In fact, companies that have misused their customers data, either by not protecting it, reselling it or using it in ways never intended, have long been subject to such a penalty.  In my comment to the blog I noted:

It was 14 years ago that a group of (mostly) technology executives gathered at the now defunct PC Forum conference in the desert and saw the same thing. The emerging Internet needed the confidence of consumers to thrive and TRUSTe was created to help promote the values of privacy, security and trust.

In the time since then, smart companies have come to embrace a commitment to those virtues in hopes of building stronger customer relationships. For these companies, privacy, in particular, begins with a willingness to inform people of what information is collected, why and how long it will be kept.

All this is a result of the constant negotiation that goes on between customers and the companies they support. Ten years ago, “notice-and-consent” was the rule. Its effect was the adoption of privacy policies for all to read (though few did).

Today, the watch phrase is “data collection and retention,” wherein customers know what is collected, for what purpose, for how long it will be kept and to which they have access to review and limit.

What is clear, no matter which generation, is that information that comprises a person’s identity (a definition that is also still in flux) is protected from loss and abuse, whether by third-parties or the company collecting it.

Companies that are found to be doing less will pay a heavy reputational price.

As the governments in the United States and elsewhere focus more closely on privacy, security and trust, enforcement will go beyond the market’s ability to affect a company’s reputation.  It will, as is often heard in the halls of Congress, add up to real money.

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The landing of the Android-driven smart phone has fomented a frenzy of  “it will” and “it won’t” kill the iPhone commentary.  This persistent portrayal of the market as a zero-sum game distracts from the real benefit of the competition for share.  Computing devices are going to emulate more of our behavior.

The disconnect between they way computers have worked and the way we live was best captured in a snarky back-and-forth between Microsoft and General Motors about 10 years ago.  Bill Gates suggested that if the car company had kept up with technology, its vehicles would be more efficient and less costly.  The response from GM was along these lines:  yeah, but would you want to crash a couple times a day?

Both companies are a bit different today but GM has come further than Microsoft.  It is hard to imagine cars with more computing power and software applications than have today and as for Microsoft, well, let’s hope 7 really is a lucky number.  But now that devices have come untethered, it is the smart phone, e-book reader, tablet that are setting the pace for human-style computing.

Credit Motorola and its clam-shell cell phone, kudos to Palm and its hand-sized design and add a shout-out to companies like NCR who took touch screens from science fiction and added them to automatic teller machines.  The career achievement award for making computers more like us, though, has to go to Apple.  Which brings us to the iPhone.

Much like the ATM changed an industry and the way we interact with it, the iPhone is making ease-of-use and value — two relatively new concepts in computing — essential to success.  The new black.  Looked at in this way — from our perspective — the competition won’t be based so much on the number of applications, but the way the apps work, not so much on the power of the network, but if the connection is reliable.

There is early evidence of success, but what comes next will be the real test of how competition can shape a market to look more like the customers is says it serves.

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When Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame catcher for the New York Yankees, uttered his famous, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded” assessment of a popular spot, it was merely an ironic twist.  These days, it may be read as an epitaph for any business — retail, entertainment or travel — that needs people to get up and go.  More than a bad economy, more than changing fashion and more than the TSA, the reason we are staying put is technology.  It is delivering on the experience without the inconvenience.

That retail space is going begging is no new story.  The 10 percent drop in air travel in the United States is also well-documented.   But when the NFL reports that the opening game of the season played by a team in the last Super Bowl is not sold out and so may be blacked out, well, that is news.

Long viewed as the most popular sport in America, the NFL has sown the seeds of its in-stadium problems by aggressively courting new technologies that make the in-home experience different to the point of betting better.  After all, in high def, with DVR pause and playback, the action is more real — and controllable — from the couch than the loge level.  In fact, this beat is continuing with the emergence of 3-D.

But more than just planting the seeds, the NFL has fertilized and watered them by making the trip to and from its stadia difficult and time-consuming, its ticket prices expensive and its arenas unruly.  If CDs and movies are better bought online, and shoes no longer need to be tried on before purchasing, then it should come as no surprise that football fans feel better bar-be-que’ing at home than tailgating in the parking lot.

Sports have become software for our domestic entertainment hardware.  The die was cast 35 years ago when Ted Turner, anxious to turn his Atlanta UHF television channel in the nation’s first satellite-delivered superstation, bought the Atlanta Braves so he could broadcast every one of their games nationwide.  It wasn’t a deal driven by the sport, but by the hardware — the television — and the advertising it could sell.

The trend will continue.  So too will NFL black-outs (a policy adopted, in the first place, to get people to go the the game).  But if site-based businesses can’t make going different enough to be better than staying home, another of Yogi’s phrases might apply, “It gets late early out there.”

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The current “noise” about whether President Obama was really born in the United States may seem a view from the lunatic fringe, but we have long been captive to various urban myths, like the Satanic symbolism in a corporate logo or spider eggs in bubble gum.  It makes one wonder, how come?

In an interview this month on NPR, Princeton neuroscience professor Sam Wang, co-author of  “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life,” offered three reasons why we might believe things that just aren’t true.

According to Professor Wang, we know things — like the capital of Wisconsin — but we don’t always remember where we first heard it.  “As we recall things,” he said,”it’s currently believed that we rewrite them a little bit so that we gradually separate a fact from context.”  He called it “source amnesia.”

And when we begin not with fact — Madison! — but with fiction, things can roll down hill even faster.  There is “biased assimilation” which causes us to accept statements, true or not, that align with beliefs and “we tend to question or be more critical or even reject statements that don’t fit with our beliefs.”

Getting people — as voters, consumers or parents — to act differently may not only be about the facts they are given, but the way they get them and how those facts are reinforced.

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As reported in the May 2009 issue of the digital marketing magazine, OMMA, another brand has discovered that it is not about them, but about us. The story is about Scotts Miracle-Gro, a company of many brands and, until recently, many web destinations.

In seeking to quiet the confusion and drive greater customer loyalty, the decision was made to put the customer out front, not the companied. This created a more cohesive and useful presentation. Instead of each brand making its own promise, the company presented its brands in the context of the customer.

The insight is not new, but the discipline required deserves applause. It is more proof that the debate between “the customer is always right” and “the customer can have any color car as long as it is black” is settled.

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