Facebook unveiled their newest advertising platform this morning and I have to admit that after months of poking fun a their attempts at monetization, this one is decent.
If you have Facebook now, you know that you can comment on almost anything: pictures, someone's wall, their status, etc. Facebook is going to let everyone comment on your ad which in turn, will show up in their newsfeed along with the name of your brand. It's like Beacon, but without the evil bits.
What I think the challenges are:
1) Who is going to monitor all of the comments? Surely, there will have to be something in place to keep hecklers and inappropriate comments at bay. From my experience with user generated comments, it can be quite a workload.
2) Will brands allow negative comments to be posted? Right now, I have a lot of brands concerned about negative feedback online, this opens the door to negative comments much, much wider.
3) Will people want to comment on brands and more importantly, does a comment from a Facebook-er mean a meaningful engagement has really been made? Does commenting on an ad really mean anything?
It will be interesting to watch this one.
~ Caitlin
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
With Facebook We Can now Comment on Anything.
3 comments:
I am a marketing student and today in my E-commerce class we talked about social networking sites taking the step to letting users comment on ads. This leads me to wonder about privacy issues though, I mean its sort of creepy that I might be on Facebook and 5 of my friends names/pictures could come up on a advertisement telling me how they loved this so and so product? It makes me wonder where is my name being used to advertise?
On a positive note, I think this will be another way to position ads that are more personalized. A question we should ask is, would we rather have a famous person telling you to purchase something or a close friend?
Your statement...,
"Who is going to monitor all of the comments? Surely, there will have to be something in place to keep hecklers and inappropriate comments at bay. From my experience with user generated comments, it can be quite a workload.",
is the understatement of the month.
The nasty garbage people are willing to post never seizes to amaze me. Who are these people that go out of their way to leave little stink bombs on sites? Why do they do it? What do they get out of it? Were they beaten by school bullies throughout their school days?
I'm also a marketing student, and we talk a lot about this in my internet marketing class at UWO. I think it's a great step after the Beacon disaster. As mentioned, the key will be how to handle negative ads. The issue that comes along with the news feed is transparency. If representatives of a company start deleting negative comments, people will notice that a comment was posted but isn't there anymore. That will certainly negatively reflect on the company. Negative comments can be a good thing for a company. It's cheap and usually honest feedback that can be used to improve the product/service.
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