Note: This is a post based on my post on “Are you Paying Attention?“
Disclosure: I am the chair of the APML workgroup and, as such, have strong bias towards open formats, user control and transparent exchanges between vendors and participants.
Facebook have just announced their all new “Facebook Ads” System. The idea, is to further integrate ads into the news feed and enabling users to ‘endorse’ and therefore propagate brand messages. Users will also be able to subscribe to brand updates as ‘Fan-sumers’ (update: This term was apparently coined by Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research - not Facebook themselves).
Advertising as we know it is indeed dead. Word of mouth has always been more powerful than messages shouted from on-high. And now, with Media 2.0 reducing friction to zero and increasing visibility toward 100%, Word of mouth has never been stronger - or more important.
Your words now echo for all of time - and they get louder as they travel.
So moving towards a world where sites can enable brands to better facilitate and moderate the word of mouth network seems obvious. The problem, though, is with the fundamental thinking at these organizations.
For example, the name Fan-sumer is disgusting. FANatical ConSUMER? It’s far worse than User Generated Content! Sure it’s just a name, but it is a revealing insight into their line of thinking.
Word of mouth is not sanctioned, it just happens. Ultimately the best you can do is join in the conversation by listening, learning, asking questions and building fantastic products that people want to talk about. Asking users to give away ‘free steak knives’ to their friends, however, only reduces every one’s credibility.
As usual, the underlying idea is interesting, but the execution is clearly focused on empower brands to infiltrate the conversation rather than helping participants control their experience. It’s almost a form of legitimized peer-to-peer spam.
As a true solution for social advertising it is not a write-off, but the execution needs a lot of tweaking to be truly about engagement and personalization with a true sense of trust based endorsements from your friends.
November 7th, 2007 at 6:31 am
[…] can read the full story here Author Kolton Pruitt Comments […]
November 7th, 2007 at 6:34 am
dude, “fan-sumer” seems to be an expression made up by jeremiah (not facebook).
having brands actively participate in “conversation” with consumers is a good thing. they need to and should be part of the w-o-m process. the rapid pace of feedback will help to ensure that companies keep their brand promises.
my opinion re: advertising, as (we think) we know it, is that it’s not dead. far from it. people will always crave star-power hence the rise and rise of the cult of celebrity.
November 7th, 2007 at 9:53 am
I think as far as advertisers see it, this is a brilliant idea: ads that come from the consumers themselves are bound to carry more weight, and they minimise the effort the advertiser actually has to put in.
In reality I wonder how many people will actually adopt these features. I can’t see myself being that FANatical about anything much, and things I do want to recommend to people, I’ll do in my own good time - without giving Facebook the pleasure of knowing.
November 7th, 2007 at 10:05 am
@leon - I have updated the post to clarify that Jeremiah coined the term. Thanks ofr that. I am sure that companies will always crave star-power. My premise is that, however, is that in the future the best most effective way to get star-power is to listen to your customers, respond to their needs and build great products.
@Josh - I guess we will see how many people adapt to this new ad model. Facebook’s CPMs can’t get any worse :).
I agree though - I will tell my friends about great products on my own time via my own channels - don’t need them to help out thanks.
November 11th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
So where’s the next post?
Personally, I’d love to hear all about how you started Particls, the challenges you faced, whether any of that came from living here and not in the US… You must give the rest of us hope and inspiration!
November 11th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Hi Josh - Next post is posted
I don’t know if a post all about my company would be appropriate on Blognation - but I have a personal blog and a blog for Particls which documents the journey.
April 16th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
[…] Are you a FANatical ConSUMER […]
May 7th, 2008 at 1:02 am
[…] Are you a FANatical ConSUMER? […]