The best item on The Social Customer’s list of things indicating you might be in a relationship instead of just a simple transaction is stalking.
If you disregard the interpersonal dimension for a moment (To “follow or observe a person persistently, especially out of obsession or derangement“) and consider that stalking can also just mean to “pursue by tracking stealthily“, its appearance on that list is indicative of everything from Cellphone Traffic Tracking to Collaborative Filtering to the old issue of DART Ad-serving.
An organization that’s eager to converse with you can still have a trick or two up its sleeve, to the point where it may be difficult to have an “honest discussion” with them. Yes customers are empowered too, we have the Web at our fingertips and can discern all sorts of things about a company while expending amazingly little time and effort. The flip side of course is that the companies eager to get to know us better also have access to all kinds of sneaky, revealing networked technology.
(All the talk surrounding identity management is, in a sense, a call for enforceable vendor restraining orders but I’m betting “VRO” is one acronym that doesn’t catch on…)
In any case increasing the ability to converse with vendors will be a good thing. It’s not so much a matter of wanting to ask Why are you following me?, we pretty much know why (they want to sell us stuff). The more important questions we want to be able to ask are How exactly are you following me? and How can I make sure you aren’t following me in ways that creep me out?
