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    Home > News > ShopyCat – Walmart’s New Digital Marketing App

11^th Jan 2012 | Author: James Knight

ShopyCat – Walmart’s New Digital Marketing App

Why would people turn to Walmart, to purchase holiday gifts for the people they love the most? Well, if you consider the fact that Walmart recently launched an app, which helps people purchase better gifts for their friends and family, then you will be able to understand why. Such a digital marketing application might actually work!

Recently, Walmart partnered with one of the companies it acquired (Kosmix) to develop ‘WalmartLabs’, a technological arm that will be responsible for developing smartphone apps and other high-end digital marketing technology. Recently, Walmart launched ‘ShopyCat’, their first Facebook application, which would help users buy better gifts for their contacts on Facebook.

This digital marketing application recommends products, based on the items that a person mentions in their news feed or ‘likes’. It does not look too flashy. The logo shows a shopping bag with a cat’s head emerging from it, with the tagline reading ‘the right gift every time’. This app is being considered useful by digital marketing analysts because of its ability to use social signals to collect information, which would later enable other users to make purchase decisions.

However, this digital marketing app has led to a lot of questions being asked about privacy and permissions. Currently, the ShopyCat app is available to all of Walmart’s ten-million-plus Facebook fans, who decide to give permission to have it installed. Below are some common questions being asked:

• If a particular user gives Walmart permission to install the app, where is the permission for scanning the newsfeeds of all their friends going to come from?

• Will a user be able to give permission to the app for scanning and collecting information from their friends, without their friends being a Walmart fan?

• As soon as a user’s post is displayed in their friend’s feed, does that user give up their right on this content? Will that bit of personal information now be fair game to anyone the friend shares it with?

Well, this could mean that privacy might be getting breached somewhere. How else can a simple digital marketing algorithm like Shopycat claim to know ‘anything’ about a friend, unless someone gave them the permission to snoop around, somewhere? Here, many digital marketing professionals suspect that deep within Facebook’s terms and conditions pages, lies a few privacy loopholes, that enables digital marketing advertisers to use personal user-information for marketing purposes.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency, and can be contacted on 0845 388 5583 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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