Facebook Unlocking the Marketing and Advertising Potential

This week, the facebook execs flew to New York, to address the marketing and advertising executives and press to announce their newest and boldest initiative called Facebook Ads. The next day the articles appeared prominently in the press including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Facebook is unleashing a new way to measure YOU!. As people join facebook, they begin to build their profiles around their interests, whether it is music, reading, games, travel, etc. In a sense, facebook's analytics may know more about you than you even know about yourself or your friends in terms of what you may be interested in. The best analogy of how far beyond existing stats this may be. For most of us, our weekly experience with capturing our interests may be at a grocery store check out line where they ask for our "frequent buyer/VIP card" for discounts. Based upon what we buy coupons print out for existing products or competitive products we may be interested in buying next time we come in.

According to the newspaper articles I have read, facebook will capture information of activities we do in facebook and allow advertisers to target its members and serve up relative content. It will be a fine line to walk between subtle marketing and "spam".

There are also major companies who are now embracing facebook and coming up with strategies to promote your purchases to your friends if you want them to know about it. One example was given about going into Blockbuster Video, renting or buying a video and then opting to let your friends on facebook know about this.

eBay is also entering this area and will serve up content from its auctions in a relative fashion as well.

The New York Times and other media are embracing facebook and allowing a single click to post articles within facebook. (Note: I just personally did that yesterday).

I will be writing and following this subject closely in the next few weeks and months.

Please post or e-mail me any examples which you find which would be interesting to know about. Let me know how you feel or your perceptions of this new initiative.