Advertising arrives on Facebook in a way that socializes what people do with the products they use, and the relevant ads Facebook can place that cater to those interests.
Facebook Welcomes Users To The Social (Ads)
Facebook’s disclosure of its Social Ads received plenty of attention from the tech world, spanning blogs to the tippity-top of mainstream media. The simple summary of what Facebook wants to do came from the company’s product manager for Facebook Ads, Leah Pearlman, who blogged about it:
Here’s what is changing:
• You now have a way to connect with products, businesses, bands, celebrities and more on Facebook.
• Ads should be getting more relevant and more meaningful to you.
• You now have the option to share actions you take on other sites with your friends on Facebook.
The sharing outside actions inside Facebook aspect of their Social Ads involves websites affiliated with Facebook. Pearlman gave the example of someone dropping Buffy The Vampire Slayer into their Blockbuster queue, where the person would be prompted to drop that information into their Facebook News Feed.
Reactions to the new platform have arrived fast and furious on the Internet. Nick Carr called it “the social graft,” a play on the social graph meme Facebook uses to describe its network of people and how they connect:
Facebook, which distinguished itself by being the anti-MySpace, is now determined to out-MySpace MySpace. It’s a nifty system: First you get your users to entrust their personal data to you, and then you not only sell that data to advertisers but you get the users to be the vector for the ads.
Lots of big-name brands, slavering over the prospects of a captive young audience that has fled their TV advertising, will be part of the Social Ads. Deep-pocketed Facebook investor Microsoft stands alongside Coca-Cola, Sony, Verizon, and others.
Now Facebook just has to hope people will continue to trust their friends as they start making recommendations from these affiliated advertisers. 50 million people might not leave overnight, but Facebook isn’t immune to a similar site coming along, using the old .edu email address membership requirement Facebook used to have, and pulling in the kinds of members Facebook assumes it will continue to draw.
