Retargeting is a type of online advertising tactic that identifies a visitor to your website and serves advertising to them once they leave via an ad network. Right now I am buying email marketing services for a client and visited several vendor websites.  Icontact was among them. After I visited their site, their ads were served to me on the New York Times and on MovieFone’s website. While my decision to buy will be made upon careful evaluation of their services versus their competitors, this retargeting campaign clearly made them top of mind.

Clive Thompson, ­ NYTimes, suggests that Twitter is a return to the small town:

This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business.

I don’t agree.

Many of my friends who grew up in these gossipy small towns didn’t have a choice of where they could live. And as soon as they had an opportunity to, they moved away. Twitter is different in the sense that the “small town” in which you live is a small town you create.

In small towns the “juicy” information that tends to surface is usually one that their residents had no intention of sharing. There’s a choice in Twitter about what information is shared, and as a result, more control over how you shape people’s perceptions of you.

I recently met a few people who were hyper-vigilant about their personal brand, trying to control what people were tweeting about them and filtering pictures that showed them in social situations drinking, smoking, etc. Perhaps the small town analogy is a better fit here in the sense that you know your social activities always have the potential to be broadcast to people you would rather not know about them.

I prefer cities.