In your new social circle, you’ll never lack for companies
Much talk today about Facebook’s new ad program, based on the premise that a.) people want closer relationships with brands, and b.) they would be proud to help those brands reach all their friends. To CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it’s nothing less than revolutionary: “Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online. For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do.”
But across the blogosphere, in addition to the usual speculation on why this will/won’t work, there were cries of lamentation that the commercialization that has smothered the physical world in branding is now creeping into our online relationships and that we will likely let it without a fuss. Richard Ziade says things have moved “from viral marketing to STDs.” Pramit Singh posted on “How Facebook’s Social Ads system is evil and what you can do about it.”
But it was the eloquent Nick Carr who best summed up the sense of dismay: “Marketing is conversational, says Zuckerberg, and advertising is social. There is no intimacy that is not a branding opportunity, no friendship that can’t be monetized, no kiss that doesn’t carry an exchange of value. The cluetrain has reached its last stop, its terminus, the end of the line. From the Facebook press release: ‘Facebook’s ad system serves Social Ads that combine social actions from your friends – such as a purchase of a product or review of a restaurant – with an advertiser’s message.’ The social graph, it turns out, is a platform for social graft.”
It is sort of sad. Branding cheapens anything it touches. But it’s sad in a way that makes you shrug your shoulders, because it’s just part of the broad and unsettling transition to a postmodern world where powerful symbols become fashion accessories. People have always worn their affiliations on their sleeves, but in olden days, those symbols represented clan or church or state. Those institutions don’t hold the sway they once did, so now people, for all the reasons psychologists can explain, willingly bear the banners of their chosen corporations, on their sleeves, chests, backs and feet. We can’t be surprised to see the same decoration hanging all over social profiles. Sad or not, if you want your online persona looking like a NASCAR driver, that’s your call.
I guess being a geek I have never understood the willingness of people to wear branded apparel, you know Nike, Levis, Polo, Calvin Klein. What makes me really wonder about these people is that they are a walking signboard for these companies and they have paid the companies for this “privilege” of advertising on their bodies! What a marketing stroke of genius. Most of these idiots, given the choice between two shirts, one carrying a brand logo at $100 and one just like it without logo at $30, they will invariably choose the branded shirt and pay the difference. As I said, marketing genius!! So why should Facebook and its members be any different????
Today people can recognize hundreds of brand logos, but not identify the trees and other plants in the neighborhood. I’m a tech guy, but that fact, which was recently pointed out to me, reminded me of my boyhood in Ohio, and how far removed (or seemingly disconnected) so many of us have become from our surroundings.
John I like your point about how we carry the banner of a brand instead of a tribe. I appreciate the negative responses of Ziade Singh and Carr. However we should keep in mind that the cluetrain goes the other way as well; let a brand dip in quality or abuse workers in a sweatshop and those positive conversations turn to negative ones in short shrift. Those badges come off with the gloves when the blogosphere lights up. The conversation is a double-edged sword for companies.I suggest we are less brand loyal than we used to be, at least when we have a choice. As as easy example I point to your paragraph on the Purple one, Prince, and the unhappy fans using his uncompensated content on their fansites.
Well, so much for Facebook. Several friends and I closed down our accounts today, and it seems like more people around here plan to. Just tired of having ads crammed down our throats.
Did you ever see the original Rollerball with James Caan?
Very prescient, very dark.
I don’t have a Facebook account or Myspace, etc. I have a life. I don’t wear anything with someone else’s name on it. People have become so gullible and turned into sheep.
The “good ol’ boys,” goes broadband. Hey, do you know anybody in the film business? I’ve got a friend. Now, the friend gets to market directly. Just the friend is a corporation. Will Facebook provide a way to create an agent that flushes such messages without flushing the friend. Well, no, that would defeat the business model.
The Devil Where’s Prada.
& U all thought they were in it 4 your friendship.
$$$$$$$
John, you said, ” it’s just part of the broad and unsettling transition to a postmodern world where powerful symbols become fashion accessories.” If that isn’t a cave-in to this new process of commercial invasion of yet another aspect of life (whether on the internet, at school, on tv or whatever), please clarify. I wouldn’t go so quietly into the subterranean miasma suggested by this repulsive approach to “friendship”, even though there are people, myself included, who might wear a t-shirt with a logo on it from time to time. That is MY choice, after all, not some outside shill for a corporation, trying to dictate how I communicate. (I won’t take the space to respond to the commenters who suggest those who do so are “idiots” or “sheep”.) Just as I use my Tivo to choose which advertisements, if any, I choose to watch on TV, I would like to choose what I communicate to others. To allow someone into that picture is an abysmal surrender to the dark side.
Nool — good point about the double-edged nature of affiliation, especially in that part of “conversational marketing” that actually involves conversation, i.e. the blogs and boards. As far as this Facebook model goes, though, angrily dropping your Nike widget in favor of a Reebok widget still keeps you in the game. To make a 180-degree turn, I suppose one would need to start a “so-and-so sucks” site.
Tik — I wouldn’t call it surrender, except maybe in the Zen sense; more like an acceptance that we’re carried in the current of social evolution, that the recognition of institutions as social constructs changes the way we view the world, with both positive and negative effects. In this case, the positive angle is that we know we’re being played by the people with something to sell, be it product or ideology. The curtain has been pulled back, and we have seen all the machinery of manipulation and the real motives of those at the controls. So, as you say, we still have the choice as individuals how much sponsorship we will willingly participate in. I’d hope that choice is made with awareness, not out of apathetic acceptance.
John
interesting to think that DARPA back in 69 in the Pentagon created something that would evolve into people just trying to hook-up, and corporations just trying to peddle their imported crap from China…pathetic but true…originally the net was to be a way for scientists to exchange info, etc…next (the net) will dumb down like the McDonalds…push button three if u guys want a happy download…LMAO…
I can only imagine the frothy, giggly and supportive commentary had it been Apple or Google that had purchased an interest in Facebook.
Sorry folks - it’s the cynic in me …
The Facebooks of the world are just the new street corners and barbershops of the world. Places where people talk and exchange information. Only instead of trusting the conversation now we’ll have to be wary that the person with whom we are conversing is “selling” a point of view or attempting to influence a purchase decision. Corrupting the nature of sociability for a profit incentive. Zuckenberg and his ilk are as cynical and anti-social any other huckster who has traversed Madison Avenue. Neither particularly smart nor benign. The tagline for them ought to be: Take the money and run. The fellow who has it right is Craig Newmark. Let us all pray that his model is the one that ultimately succeeds.
The evil runs deeper, and it is epitomized by the panhandler that stands by the door of McDonalds etc., and holds it open for you as you enter or exit, always with the usual extended palm, and the “Can you help me out?” These filthy scum are taking an act of common decency, holding a door for someone, and monetizing it, and I hate them for it.