Nowadays, digital marketing has made a lot of impact in the commercial world, but what is exactly digital marketing? Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers.
The internet has changed people’s life style in many ways. The Internet has changed the face of digital media in the past decade. It has revolutionized communications, to the extent that it is now our preferred medium of everyday communication- ordering a pizza, buying a television, sharing a moment with a friend, sending a picture over instant messenger. In early days it was a static network designed to transport a small freight of bytes or a short message between two terminals and was basically a storage unit of information where content was published and maintained only by expert coders. Today, however, immense quantities of information are uploaded and downloaded over this gargantuan innovation, and the content is very much our own, for now we are the commentators, publishers and the creators.
In our opinion the biggest challenge in digital marketing is an increase in security risk.
Privacy has risen near the top of the agenda in step with an increasing awareness of the implications of using social media. A lot of the time, people started to use social media with no real idea of the dangers, and have wised up only through trial and error. Lately, inappropriate use of social media seems to hit the headlines every day. Celebrities posting inappropriate comments to their profiles, private pictures and tapes leaked to the Internet at large, companies displaying arrogance toward users, and even criminal activities involving private-data trafficking or social media exploitation. Contrary to what many people seem to have assumed, online security and privacy are critical, and we believe, will become even more important going forward. And, although every user needs privacy, the issue is particularly sensitive for minors.
On the other hand, we think the debate about whether social media use should be subject to an age requirement is somewhat pointless, given that most globally active platforms operate without age restrictions. The European regulatory framework is quite different from the United States and Asian codes. This can become a competitive drawback when the ground rules do not apply equally to all players.
Outside the scope of what the industry or regulators can do, it is vital that users themselves look after the privacy of their data. We believe the information is the user’s property, so the user is the only party entitled to control the collection, use, and disclosure of any information about him/herself. Some social networks seem to have forgotten this fact—they sell data, make it impossible to delete an account, or make it complex and difficult to manage one’s privacy settings. Everything should be a lot simpler and more transparent.
Social networks should continue to devote intense efforts to developing self-regulation mechanisms and guidelines to ensure that user information is safe. The main way of ensuring that social media are used appropriately is awareness. But awareness and user education will be of little use unless it becomes an absolute requirement that the privacy of the individual is treated as a universal value.
Shake it up 