Saturday, November 17, 2007

Will social network sites transform ads?

Depending on your age and memory, last week was a week of radically new or reassuringly old developments in the advertising industry.

To Mark Zuckerberg, who is 23 and the boss of Facebook, a popular social-networking Web site, it was the former. Standing in front of about 250 mostly middle-aged advertising executives on Nov. 6, he announced Facebook was offering them a new deal.

"For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people," he said, "but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation." Using his firm's new approach, he claimed, advertisers will be able to piggyback on the "social actions" of Facebook users, since "people influence people."

Zuckerberg's language was strikingly similar to that of Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz in their book "Personal Influence," a media-studies classic from 1955.

They argued that marketers do not simply broadcast messages to a passive mass audience, but rather that they target certain individuals, called "opinion leaders." These individuals then spread, confirm or negate the messages of advertisers through their own "social relationships," by word of mouth or personal example.

Lazarsfeld and Katz, of course, assumed that most of these conversations and their implicit marketing messages would remain inaudible. That firms might be able to eavesdrop on this chatter first became conceivable in the 1990s, with the rise of the Internet. Thus the main thesis of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," written in 1999, was that "markets are conversations" which the Web can make transparent.

Zuckerberg's underlying idea is therefore hardly new. But, says Randall Rothenberg, the boss of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association, the announcements this week by Facebook and its larger rival, MySpace, which has a similar ad system, could amount to a big step forward in conversational marketing.



>> http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/339799_networkonline16.html

Google Confirms Facebook Violation, No Personal Data Stored

via
allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

Earlier this week I reported that applications were secretly transferring personal data to Google via their AdWords system and this was a clear violation of Facebook’s terms of service (TOS). It turns out that no personal data was being stored but some of the AdWords integration was in violation of Facebook’s TOS. Eric Eldon received a response from a Google spokesperson:

“We recently allowed some application partners to send us additional keywords to improve ad performance. A limited number of the keywords sent to Google did not comply with the developer’s agreement with Facebook. When we realized this conflict, we asked the partners to discontinue sending those keywords. We are no longer using those keywords. No personally identifiable information was exchanged between Google and the application developers.”

http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/google-confirms-facebook-violation-no-personal-data-stored/



All About: Facebook

Facebook Videos You Should Watch

The first is a video by Fred Stutzman that was presented to Googlers on the subject of a study of Facebook that Fred did. It's 40 minutes long, but if you have any interest in the social networking space, this is a must see: ...

Have You Ever Considered FaceBook Analytics?
So you know what Facebook is, and you've probably used Google Analytics, but have you ever considered Facebook Analytics? In a world where Facebook is often more popular with users than the 'all powerful' (sic) Google, it's your best ...

Facebook at work?
Are you spending time on Facebook.com during work-time? Then be careful in most cases this is not allowed and can have bad consequences for you. A new calculation based on figures from 65 institutes, in the UK, including government ...


Friday, November 16, 2007

All About: Facebook

MySpace redesign to match Facebook feature for feature [Rumormonger]

By Nicholas Carlson
Why does Facebook seem to have more momentum now than MySpace? Some might tell you it's Facebook's vastly superior user interface. Oh, and that the site actually works most of the time. While they... [[ This is a content summary only. ...
Valleywag - http://valleywag.com

More On the Law Blog's Facebook Foray
By Peter Lattman
Earlier this month we posted on the legal privacy issues raised by Facebook's new "Facebook Ads" strategy, in which it will attach names and photos of Facebook users to ads for products they like. Click here for a sample ad. ...
WSJ.com: Law Blog - WSJ.com - http://blogs.wsj.com/law

New U2 Song Exclusively On Facebook, Not MySpace
By Tim Stevens
Instead, head on over to Facebook, which, together with its hugely popular iLike application, has scored the exclusive rights to broadcast the song ahead of its release next week. The song will be included on a re-release of the band's

Today in Social Networking

I'm going to try to do a daily update on the latest social networking news, here's the first one:

Social networking needs identity delegation strategies
ZDNet - USA
Ever since Facebook opened its platform to outside developers, thousands of applications have been built on top of Facebook. Some have tens of thousands of ...

The Lure of Social Networking
Enterprise Networks & Servers - USA
However, before anyone goes running to the CEO asking for a total block on all access to social networking sites (including LinkedIn by my definition), ...

Study Finds Luxury Consumers Use Social Networking Sites

Furniture World Magazine (press release) - USA
Think social networking sites are just for teens and tweens who post party photos and lists of favorite bands? Think again. A new generation is flocking to ...

Social-networking oversight a slap in the face, group says

Staten Island Advance - SILive.com - Staten Island,NY,USA
by Staten Island Advance First in video games, then on the congestion pricing panel and now on social-networking Web sites, it appears as though Staten ...


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