Thursday, September 28, 2006

Facebook's new ad format like chain letters?

In Mediaweek


"The new Sponsor Stories ad unit will initially be placed in the third position
within each user's News Feed - as either a small banner-like placements or video
clip. When users elect to click on these ads, their entire network of friends
will be automatically alerted and then given the chance to interact with that
particular marketer's group."

If I understand this correctly, I'm on Facebook I click on one of these ads and then all my friends will be alerted of the ad I clicked on.

Remind you of something?

Those great chain letters that you get from friends or those jokes you never want to read.

In my opinion this is not the way to leverage social networking.

Social networking data needs to be leveraged in a non-explicit fashion. There needs to be more relevance than just one degree of separation.

If "friending" is a true phenomena the relevancy of association is greatly reduced, thus increasing the annoyance factor of these, "hey I just checked out this ad alerts." The strength of each connection needs to be valued individually to determine the proper group to pass along a similar marketing message.

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