Internet Marketing Blog

Has Social Media Sold Its Soul?

November 25, 2007 – 10:48 am

And Should Marketers Be Willing to Purchase It?

On November 7, Mark Zukerburg made the announcement that marketers have been holding their breath for over the past few weeks. In an effort to garner more ad revenue, Facebook will sell the information displayed on the profiles of over 50 million users to marketers, and finally allow corporations to build their own personal profiles and interact with users on Facebook like normal individuals.

At face value, Zuckerburg’s moves are a huge break for marketers. With more than a dozen self-describing categories, from politics to interests, relationship status to favorite music, filled out on every page, users generate unmatched levels of useable data about themselves for targeted advertising. This is especially important for marketers, since banner ads on social networks have had substantially lower click-through rates than that of banner ads on more traditional websites.

Companies which create their own profiles (over 100,000 pages launched last week) also gain a new level of interactive marketing and word of mouth advertising through the network. Overenthusiastic consumers can become “fans”, install a corporate image on their profile, or publish images of themselves enjoying/recommending products to friends. Then all of these actions are broadcast to all of the user’s friends via News Feed

There remains, however, an underlying cause for concern amid the excitement over Zuckerberg’s move.

In short, savvy critics are wondering if public access to all of this data will eventually propel users away from the traditionally private, non-commercial environment of Facebook, whose current popularity is largely owed to avoiding the commercialism of mega-network MySpace.

Corporations risk more than they think in stepping all over a traditionally independent, non-corporate culture where carefully scripted company bios are mocked in the face of messages sprinkled with deliberate misspellings and slang. Not only that, but a backlash could loom when Facebook users discover just how much of their profile has been sold away. Will people drop their Facebook profiles completely? Create million-member Facebook groups that slam corporations?

This doesn’t mean that you should drop your social media plan and run. Social media marketing is a constantly evolving, complex phenomena, with tremendous potential for fabulous results, but which also requires one step at a time of careful research and evaluation. Marketers must must weigh the benefits and costs of social media marketing, and ensure above all else that they deal with people who have a solid understanding of the social environment they are entering.

Special thanks to BusinessWeek (”Facebook: Marketers Are Your ‘Friends’”) and DMNews (”Facebook Ads Now Available for Marketers”).