Life is grand

Here’s what Facebook can do. Permalink to this paragraph

Let’s say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends “Dave bought a Wii and he likes it.” That’s a lot more likely to result in a sale than an intrusive ad

Dave is right. It is more likely to result in a sale. But how much more likely and from what starting point? Not much more likely and from a very small starting point (as Dave admits, the starting point of AdSense is pretty much zero for many of us, we blank them out.)

Will Facebook already know I have a Wii? While I am glad my friend got one I don’t need to see a targeted Wii advert.

And will Facebook know not to tell me my female friends bought the latest copy of Vogue, and liked it. Or that my mom bought Dove and liked it. Or that my budy Dave got pimpim rims for his ride and liked it but that I don’t pimp my ride so I won’t like it?

Automating and giving over control of word-of-mouth to companies is doomed to fail. They will abuse it, they will assume too much, they will counter their competition in annoying ways to be the exclusive targeted shoe/denim/computer/book/magazine ad I see (actually, there is an avenue for Facebook to explore; auctions on exclusive ads to users in segments.)

I already know when my friend buys a Wii and likes it. He phones me and tells me, he tells me in the corridor, he emails me, blogs about it, IMs me and probably mentions it on Twitter too. I don’t want a Facebook advert about it on top of all that.

And my friends know infinitely better than Facebook whether something they have bought, and liked, will or won’t appeal to me.

(Reading this further piece by Dave highlights why ads on search result pages are the best in the market; they are information to your query. Ads on my friend’s page is advertising to no query. If I read Dave right the answer seems to be a targeted ad system that is watching what you are looking for and suggests “information.” Sounds a bit like a Google/Facebook version of Clippy though.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.