Facebook’s recent announcement of a new marketing product that allows businesses to join Facebook and users to become their fans is according to Facebook representative the Holy Grail of marketing. Lets do a quick reality check to see why this may not be quite accurate.

First, for those who do not know or can’t see through the vast tooting on their part is that there is one basic function that Facebook allows the members to do. You interact almost exclusively with people you know in real life. In fact, your profile is visible to these people only. While you may argue there are various match making applications in Facebook those applications are certainly not the reason why people join Facebook to begin with. You join because you interact with the people you know already.

When the search engine popularity wars were on and Google won it did that because every other engine offered truckloads of features and content on the first screen. Google did not. They offered a box to type words in and a button to do the search. This is what people needed when they went to a search engine. No one did it because they were stuffed with random news, weather or stock quotes. All that is irrelevant and distracting you from access to the information you came looking for. Relevance? Google still works this way and there is little reason to change it. People expect that when they go to Google. When people go to Facebook they expect to interact with their friends.

Social Media has many interesting aspects to it that make it a huge player in consumer opinions. If you are thinking of buying a new product you may want to do a search to find what other people have to say. Facebook claims that this is true with their service. What makes a world of difference is that in other forms of Social Media the content gets published. You can find new people who write about the product that you do not necessarily know personally, but you can learn from their blogs if their preferences might be similar to yours. The blogs act as tools of digital identity that tell other people what kind of person is publishing the content. In Facebook there is really no need for building digital identity because your real life friends already know.

Why is published content important? To have a discussion you have to let everyone chip in who feels they have something to contribute to the subject matter. Does Facebook have discussions? Not really. It is not what you go there for. There are sad single thread comments in the group feature It is fair to say people might have better ways to find discussions on brands and products than browsing through a company’s facebook profile. Because Facebook is not intended for publishing the entire discussion feature is somewhat non existant in a Facebook users’ point of view and there is really no motivation for doing so. They are perfectly content playing games with their friends and occasionally posting funny pictures and videos on each other’s Funwalls.

So, why would a person sign up to become a fan of Sony Pictures, Inc? The benefits of doing so remain a mystery as rubbing advertising at your real life friends’ faces each time they log and see what you are doing does not seem enticing. You could pay people for advertising, but there seems to be no simple way to do it. Ads might tell random people something about you, but random people are not looking at your profile ever. What use is an endorsement when no one sees it or can not see why you endorsed the brand or what other products you like as well?

Of course, viral videos still work, but that is regardless of the so-called Social Ads. Rest of everything is more or less spam that users will continue to adblock like they have done so far. Facebook will probably monetize their service from a lot of companies who get lured into thinking the visibility of their marketing is a lot more than the basic premises of Facebook actually allow. Facebook could change their service but that might be a disastrous choice. None of this will ever change the user expecation of logging on and interacting with the real life friends.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 8:40 and is filed under Marketing and brands, On the web.

Tags: facebook