• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, January 16, 2012

A massive new survey from IBM reveals that consumers really are not all that concerned about online privacy, as long as it’s clear there is something in it for them.

“We were very surprised to see how open-minded consumers were this year,” Jill Puleri, global retail leader for IBM Global Business Services, tells Marketing Daily. “They’re saying, ‘I really don’t mind sharing certain kinds of info with the retailer, just as long as I get something back.’ And they aren’t looking for monetary rewards. For instance, 75% say they’d be willing to share their media usage, and 73% don’t mind sharing demographic information. What they are saying, though, is that ‘in return for that, I want something more tailored for me.’”

She says IBM also expected consumers to register some burnout on shopper information -- and that they think retailers give them too much information online, and too frequently. “But the answer came back that it’s not frequently enough, and that it’s in the wrong channel,” she says.

The survey, which included some 28,000 responses from 15 countries, also reports that 61% are willing to share their name and address, 59% don’t mind answering lifestyle questions, and 56% are happy to disclose their location, as long as that information is used to create a shopping experience they can see is both more targeted and better for them. Only 36%, however, say they are willing to divulge financial information.

Stores are still the most important way that people become aware of new products, followed by traditional advertising, friends and family, with search engines coming in at fourth place. (That’s up from eighth place in 2010.) Online videos were ranked fifth, and retailers’ Web sites jumped into the sixth-place spot, from No. 10 in last year’s survey.)

IBM also turned up some evidence that retailers are not yet managing social-media tools to their best advantage, and are not as fully aware of just how much consumers are relying on other consumers for shopping decisions.

“Part of this research included intensive listening in on the Internet for six months, monitoring Facebook, tweets, forums and blog posts about sporting goods and apparel,” Puleri explains, looking at some 1.2 million publicly available documents. “And we found that most communications either focused on a transactional level, where the key words were price and availability for some brands, or a lifestyle level, for others.

“People would say things like, 'I can’t live without this brand,’ or 'It improves my life.’ There is so much marketers can learn from this. People trust other people’s opinions, not retailers’ or brands’. Smart retailers are grasping that now, and know if they want to become something other than just a dressing room, they have to leverage their employees and channels a little differently.”

Of course, if done wrong, she concedes, online marketing efforts can be really annoying: “Not long ago, I bought a baby gift for a niece, and I’ve been inundated with baby offers ever since. My own kids are in high school. The technology exists for retailers to look at me and say, 'That was a one-time purchase; she’s not our target market,’ but many haven’t. It’s amazing how simple it could be if retailers just connected the dots, but they’re not looking in the right places yet.”

IBM plans to release the findings at the National Retail Federation, kicking off in New York this week.