Don't compare Facebook's new ad system to anything you've seen on Google, television, or any other advertising medium you can think of. That's because, while advertising as we know it today may very well be a good profit engine for the social networking company, its new Facebook Ads program is also about e-commerce -- that is, selling.
Take the user reviews on Amazon. They're often useful when making a purchase, yet we don't know much, if anything, about the people recommending a product. Facebook aims to fix this by adding what it calls its "social graph" on top of such a rating system. In effect, your friends -- not strangers -- will be giving you the thumbs up or down on products you might buy.
According to David Kirkpatrick of the Fortune: "Facebook's strategy is based on a relatively new concept known as word-of-mouth marketing." But isn't it the oldest of all the selling concepts, the word-of-mouth publicity. Ironical that we are turning to the oldest means of advertising and selling.
It makes sense, however. And now Facebook is automating that process -- combining e-commerce with word-of-mouth marketing. When a Facebook user buys something, the seller will ask for permission to promote that fact to his or her social network and may pay a fee as well.
The flip side to all this: social networking grows more than 50, you do not know that person personally. It is just that he is a open-social networker like you are and it hardly makes a difference than as to who is adding whom. How will a person know that the person actually publicising a product or giving thumbs-up to the product is not a company-sponsored shopper. The reality is that after your network on any
How many of us actually know each person in their social network by name or how many can swear they know the occupation of the other person??
The social networking companies need to refine their data and make sure that the person being added and the credentials that he is adding are vetted.
Till then it is just data..not something that I would trust on!!
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