Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester’s new social media analyst, has the best analysis I’ve seen of what Facebook and MySpace’s new ad platforms mean. TechMeme has the live blogging news from Facebook’s announcement.
I’m sitting with Jeremiah right now and we’ll be doing a video about this topic shortly on Kyte.tv.
Scobleizer 
Not sure what their platform means but I hope to god it stops them plastering the site / my news feed with Experian ads every time I visit (UK-based leeching credit record company).
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Not sure what their platform means but I hope to god it stops them plastering the site / my news feed with Experian ads every time I visit (UK-based leeching credit record company).
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Facebook had (and still has) the opportunity to do something really unique around SocialAds. Today’s announcement is a major anticlimax. Brands are basically being told build it (and wave your hands furiously in a bid to get our users’ attention) and voila you’ll have fans.
IMO there are very few brands that can claim to have the strong consumer affinity that this takes to work. The brands outside of this very small niche will likely find Facebook’s experiment to be much of what they’ve experienced on the web in general: not a whole lot of value.
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Facebook had (and still has) the opportunity to do something really unique around SocialAds. Today’s announcement is a major anticlimax. Brands are basically being told build it (and wave your hands furiously in a bid to get our users’ attention) and voila you’ll have fans.
IMO there are very few brands that can claim to have the strong consumer affinity that this takes to work. The brands outside of this very small niche will likely find Facebook’s experiment to be much of what they’ve experienced on the web in general: not a whole lot of value.
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So let me get this straight…
I, Facebook user, have to ask another company to be my “friend” so they can spam me with ads?
And they are planning to make money of this?
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So let me get this straight…
I, Facebook user, have to ask another company to be my “friend” so they can spam me with ads?
And they are planning to make money of this?
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Jeremiah Ultra-Condensed: Sheer mass is good, Community masses = Trust. Mass + Trust = Success. Yay! Let’s start a Brand Cult, Fan-Sumers! Fan-Spammers! Friend, Fan or High-Five these Brands! P.S. – call it “long-term experimental marketing” if it doesn’t work.
Sheer mass can be bad, (guided missiles work better over simple carpet bombing), and sheer masses of what? Mass alone isn’t very strategic. And the ‘wisdom of the masses’ or community, is usually not very trustful at all. You need inside-the-trenches real experts, not YouTube commenter’s, Facebookers, Diggheads, or buzzword-mad “analysts”.
I can already see massive problems with this approach, and I haven’t even spent more than 5 minutes on “analysis” of such.
1. Limited scale, only works for a few brands, and those brands it works for, don’t much need it.
2. Game city. Easy to astroturf, in fact, ready-made. Get Steve Rubel on this to fake it all up, creating illusions of value.
3. The more massive, the more it dilutes it. Being a “friend” to someone with 5,000 other friends, makes you just a number, not a person.
4. The rabies-fested mouth-forming fanatic, can backfire. Do you really want all these people representing your brand? Celebrity endorsements are handled with care, as such could negatively impact the brand, and now people are just going to hand over brand representation to the Facebook freaks? Not wise on any level.
5. Fan-Spam. Instant Cult Creation. The crazy types that would do this, are the anti-social types, that only ever talk about one thing, one-topic-heads. It’s like being trapped at a party with a vinyl collector. And just because THEY have an obsessive unhealthy hyper-focused interest in said topic, doesn’t mean anyone else will. After awhile, the only friends such person has, be others of like mind. So you create mini-cults, that hurt the brand. But, like the blog and social media hype, you can talk to yourselves, thinking it’s creating something of worth, pointing out the few temporary success stories.
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Jeremiah Ultra-Condensed: Sheer mass is good, Community masses = Trust. Mass + Trust = Success. Yay! Let’s start a Brand Cult, Fan-Sumers! Fan-Spammers! Friend, Fan or High-Five these Brands! P.S. – call it “long-term experimental marketing” if it doesn’t work.
Sheer mass can be bad, (guided missiles work better over simple carpet bombing), and sheer masses of what? Mass alone isn’t very strategic. And the ‘wisdom of the masses’ or community, is usually not very trustful at all. You need inside-the-trenches real experts, not YouTube commenter’s, Facebookers, Diggheads, or buzzword-mad “analysts”.
I can already see massive problems with this approach, and I haven’t even spent more than 5 minutes on “analysis” of such.
1. Limited scale, only works for a few brands, and those brands it works for, don’t much need it.
2. Game city. Easy to astroturf, in fact, ready-made. Get Steve Rubel on this to fake it all up, creating illusions of value.
3. The more massive, the more it dilutes it. Being a “friend” to someone with 5,000 other friends, makes you just a number, not a person.
4. The rabies-fested mouth-forming fanatic, can backfire. Do you really want all these people representing your brand? Celebrity endorsements are handled with care, as such could negatively impact the brand, and now people are just going to hand over brand representation to the Facebook freaks? Not wise on any level.
5. Fan-Spam. Instant Cult Creation. The crazy types that would do this, are the anti-social types, that only ever talk about one thing, one-topic-heads. It’s like being trapped at a party with a vinyl collector. And just because THEY have an obsessive unhealthy hyper-focused interest in said topic, doesn’t mean anyone else will. After awhile, the only friends such person has, be others of like mind. So you create mini-cults, that hurt the brand. But, like the blog and social media hype, you can talk to yourselves, thinking it’s creating something of worth, pointing out the few temporary success stories.
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