The Web Can Disrupt the Most Calcified of Markets

Who would have thought that you had to protect not only your physical identity, but also a virtual one? I was reading over at La Repubblica that the risks for adults using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are a bit more serious than cyber-stalking and online bullying, they are more along the lines of loss of privacy and identity theft.

In the UK alone, the reported cases of ID theft from these social networking sites have been more than one thousand to date and are increasing. Public information about you and disclosed by you may not be such a big deal when isolated, but with the help of powerful search engines, people are able to literally put the cross fires on you and suddenly a collection of public data, when aggregated, becomes very dangerous -- for you.

Let's say you have a profile on Amazon with a wish list. Then there is a listing under your name on White Pages, and someone finds out you subscribe to a certain publication. Then a site passing itself for social networking like Peek You pays a few bucks for a student to aggregate your data, and suddenly private information is being divulged. Because now instead of one data point, there are 3 or 4.

Never mind that sometimes it is the employee at your bank that shares your personal information with third parties. Commerce Bank Security Team announced earlier that it was only a small number of customers that were affected -- I fail to see how this was good news for those customers. Wasn't this the company that only a few months ago was hailed as the example for how you do retail banking?

The web can be disruptive in good ways, too.

Imagine that there is a credit card that carries no fees, no names, no numbers, just an encrypted code and maximum portability. Today at Fast Company Expert blog I talk about Revolution Card, which was launched with little fanfare in late September. What will the adoption rate of this card be? Given that it's not yet everywhere you want to be, nor have we experienced how priceless it could make our outings, all we may enjoy at the moment is zero charges to go along with the zero fees.

What else would it take you to sign up for it? Too early to tell? And a special challenge to the marketer in you -- how will it work?

[Revolutionary Card with the Flyers hockey team logo]

Comments

[Carolyn Ann]

The Revolution Card isn't even Evolutionary! It answers a problem that doesn't actually exist. Or if it does, it's perceived to exist: and that's the important bit.

There's a complexity to the idea that would take longer than the typical elevator pitch to state; and that's the death-knell for a consumer product.

Consumers already have credit cards, and at least a limited level of trust that online purchases have some protection. They also have the knowledge that some benefits accrue from using existing credit cards - they're a known quantity. (For instance - I use one particular card for just about every purchase I make. As I pay the bill every month, I get the convenience of cash without having to actually remember to go to the bank! And I can use it online, and off-line.)

Within the context of financial security, I think PayPal has the appropriate level of obscurity - you're not completely anonymous, but neither are you completely known. More than that - and you'll have to convince me it's actually in my best interest to have a credit card that's less anonymous than cash! You'll also have to convince me about warranty complaints, and who I can sue if I need to. Credit card companies assume a certain liability; does this card?

Besides, any efforts to persuade me to change how I transact business has to persuade me that it's in my best interest: and it can't do that without some tangible benefits. (I was once forced to use an obscure credit card, one of the high-end ones, for a job I had. The bank I worked for owned that company, and that was that. It was, quite simply, a nuisance beyond description. It was way too obscure for most of my needs; even a million vendors is obscure, and I resorted to actually filling out a dozen forms - each and every month - in order to use my regular credit card.)

Anyway, at this point in time, "credit" is a bit of a four-letter word!

Carolyn Ann

[Valeria Maltoni]

I think the reason why consumers have not heard about this credit card is because they really do not spell out how it works. What does this mean to me aside from giving me anonymity?

I know people whose companies switched from Corporate American Express to Diners' Club, a quasi non entity. As in your example, that made it extremely hard to charge travel expenses on the card. Then again, some companies have done away with corporate cards entirely, asking you to use yours ;-)

Even experienced teams like this one forget that people are not going to flock to something they may at some point remarked about unless you spell out the benefits.