Friday, November 09, 2007

'Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with the important matters'

Something about Facebook's social ads thing doesn't smell quite right to me.

Yes, a referral or recommendation from a trusted source/friend is worth a million ads, but the key word in there is trust. Its got to be genuine to have any meaning.

So I add myself as a 'fan' of a particular brand and give them permission to market to my friends on facebook via my updates in the news feed. i don't see much revolutionary thinking in this, it's the same old intrusive model except now the individual is the advertising channel.

Trusted sources? Listen, its probably the 3 strikes rule if you start spamming me.
After all, for me anyway, a decent percentage of my 'friends' on facebook are fairly vague acquaintances whom I've connected with via this blog, their blogs, twitter or met at social or business events etc. I can just about tolerate the majority of zombie bites or sheep being thrown but I 'll draw the line at flogging stuff.
And to think, we all had a good laugh at get paid to twitter.

Its not the same as genuine referral because it's the advertiser controlling,
we trust our friends precisely because they do not spam us like this (and if they start they won't be 'friends' for too much longer methinks)

For a start, the early adopters where this is initially targeted at
will more than likely utilise the blocking mechanism ie opting out of social ads.

How will these brands sign up fans anyway? banners? ads? bribery?

Here's an idea. What if brands spent more time trying to make their products, services and (yikes) even their ADVERTISING so good and so cool that people genuinely want to rave about them?

And for Facebook theres the trust question too. Beware the fickle users of social platforms...

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