Facebook To Users: We Know How YOU Live, Work, Play, Vote…
Mark Zuckerberg believes he is on to something, BIG: The next 100 years of advertising. Of course, the Facebook maven can think SO long-term, he is but a mere 23!
What will Zuckerberg’s 50 million Facebookers think, however, when they know he is giddily boasting to advertisers that Facebook knows “exactly” what they do, where they are, where they work, how they vote…
“Advertisers can connect with users by creating a presence on Facebook and targeting the exact people they want.” Once Facebook allows marketers to “target” its 50 million users, and converts the targeted Facebookers, Facebook renames the ad targets “trusted referrals” for brands.
Facebook Pages represents the “brand as friend”; Facebook has unleashed 100,000 such commercial profile pages for corporate products, businesses, organizations and bands. While Zuckerberg hails Facebook Pages as a ”social graph” production, MySpace has long hosted brands as friends pages.
Facebook’s “Beacon” social distribution unveiling is also not quite revolutionary, an application/widgets sharing system for third party Websites aiming to integrate off-Facebook transactions within Facebook.
The third leg of Facebook’s advertising push is “Social Ads,” which further commercializes users news feeds, again not a truly “completely new way of advertising online.”
While Zuckerberg gives an old college try to portray the increasing efforts of Facebook to monetize the private lives of 50 million users as a weighty moment in history, he doesn’t need to try so hard: Facebook’s impressive roster of launch advertising partners speaks to BIG marketer interest.
The real test for Facebook will be user interest, or not, however. After all, social ads, by definition, can not fucntion if they are not socialized with.
MORE: Facebook Puts Freeloader Users On Sale To Highest Bidders!