Cheeze Blog

Facebook have recently released Beacon. Beacon, part of the sites ‘new’ business products, enabling a brand or business to capture their user’s actions on their own website and send those actions to Facebook for Social Ad distribution into the News Feed.

This new form of behavioural targeting leverages the way social networks work in a new and potentially revolutionary way by extending the reach of social networks into consumers’ daily online lives.

An example is Blockbuster, where if an opted-in user clicked to rent a DVD, that DVD title would then be fed through as a user-recommended ad within the news feed of people interested in film as well as shared within that users friendship circle as a news story.

This is part of Facebook’s move towards allowing users to share their personal affinities with commercial properties including brands, businesses and products. Is this the beginning of the end then? We’ve seen it all before, with MySpace becoming a labyrinth of ads masking any real social interaction – you literally cannot see the wood for the trees, or the people from the bands as it may seem.

This boom in commercial content may then be the start of a change in favourability of the world’s largest social network, favourability being key here. The platform and software itself is imitable, but is the experience?

We have already managed immersive campaigns on Facebook with some great success, but advertising within the context of user feeds is still relatively new to the tool, and to its users. If Beacon and its new business product buddies really kick off, then our feeds and experiences on Facebook could turn out similar to those seen on MySpace - cluttered, dysfunctional & unsatisfying.

Despite this, Facebook are actually trying to curb these negative experiences, putting users first via informing on privacy policy, accessible and useable control panels for security & stringent recruitment plans for the Beacon tool. This opt-in process for web ads is delivering the beginning of what is coined as the online fan-sumer – who according to Jeremiah Owyang, is a combination of groupie and consumer. But how much do we know about how our data is collected & used? Is there still an underlying issue here or are we actually going to get better relevance in our online advertising exposure than ever before?

These restrictions on privacy set by the platform could in themselves introduce barriers to the success of the new Facebook business model, creating a lack of inventory and therefore advertising opportunity. MySpace recently launched their enthusiast targeting model, or hyper-targeting as they spin it, initially creating 10 categories of interest then a further 100 sub-categories, delivering statistically viable segments to target – which buyers bought into. It is a logical route to take, but as ever it falls down when the environment that these ‘enthusiast’ ads fall into is a visual minefield. Facebook now encourages the evolution of ads into endorsements, creating real fan-sumer bases to connect with.

The Facebook direction for social ads is sure to prevail, on the basis of brand affinity & endorsement rather than a traditional take on user-interest targeting. Opinion and preference can be built on the basis of trust through any social network, offline or online, but in many cases cannot be gained through top-down methods. The age of endorsement seems like it is not only here to stay but more over it will become the driver of web strategy for any digital campaign in 2008.

So it would seem that it is not only within the interest of the advertiser to consider the impact of this new thinking, but also an important issue for consumers to understand. If they are correctly engaged then this harnessing of trust could be vital to future marketing activities on the web, and ultimately, as all good marketers know, it will be down to the consumer as to whether this progression is a beacon or a burden.