Criminal Marketing 101 (The Social Media Way)

In Week 3 of of the SMS module, the content covered is on market segmentation and creating personas and finding the appropriate platform to deliver the content to the targeted persona.

For instance, let us take the example of a men's shaving company that sells shaving handles and blades priced at the upper end of the price spectrum for such products. Based on market segmentation research the company's marketing team have come up with two personas. First is Sam who is in his mid 30s and holds a corporate job, in mid-management position, has a house in the 'burbs, two cars, 2 kids under the age of 9, and has some  masters level of education completed. The second is Suzie, who is wife of Sam! Early 30's, working mother with advanced education. Suzie has influence on household purchase decisions.

So if the company wants to market to Sam, its message would likely be feature focused like number of blades, strength of blades, material of blades, some new fancy technology built in to the handles. For Suzie, the message may be focused on benefits of using the blade like clean shave, no bristles, smooth skin, tactile pleasures and so forth. 

Given the personas and the messages, now the company has to figure out the right platforms to use. Twitter is known to have more men users and therefore the ideal platform to communicate with all the Sams out there. Pinterest is more women-centric and therefore would be an ideal platform to use imagery to communicate the message to all the Suzies out there.

So what does all this have to do with criminal activity? As catchy as the title may be, this post is not about teaching you to engage in criminal activity by any means. What it is intended is to make you aware of how modern day cyber-criminals engage in routine profiling to steal your data (and sometime more than that!). 

There is strong evidence to suggest that the advent of social media increased the level of cyber crime on the internet as evidenced in this article by Forbes, and this site, and this whitepaper report.

Simply put, it the ubiquity of all our personal information on the cloud, the volume of information published, the permanency of that information, and the speed at which theft can occur are the primary reasons that cyber crime has increased specifically due to social media platforms.

So how to criminals steal the data? 

While I am no expert on such matters (It's the truth officer!) I can assume with some confidence that the persona profiling technique employed by product marketers above is also used by criminal to target victims. One does not have to stretch ones imagination to identify potential targets for theft - Grandma, Grandpa, Teen rocker, Chatty Cathy etc.

And as technology gets more sophisticated, so do the criminals. The messaging is targeted to the personas in accordance with the relevant platform. For instance, Twitter and Facebook are common platforms where users tend to share to the world their next exciting adventure trip including dates and flight numbers! HELLO! Ding dong. It's not that hard for a criminal intent on committing a crime to identify your place of residence.

So while stopping social media usage is not recommended and not practical, it is advisable to educate and become educated on crime prevention while using social media. Here is one awesome recommendation.

-Abi