I have to confess that I simply don't get Facebook. Yes, it's been useful for rediscovering some old friends that we'd lost track of, but other than that I really don't see the use. It certainly isn't getting me away from the stable of blogs that I follow.
Except the new Facebook that everyone is moaning about looks like it's something that I may embrace. Eagerly. You see, Robert Scoble says it will give me spam:
This is so important that it's hard to overstate. The problem today is that we all suffer from a lack of information. What are the cool new bands? Who has a car with the feature set that I need? Where can I grab a good nosh?Let’s say you’re walking down University Ave. in Palo Alto, California in a couple of years (or, really, any street in the world) and you’re hungry.
You pull out your iPhone or Palm Pre or Android or Blackberry or Windows Mobile doohickey and click open the Facebook application. Then you type “sushi near me.”
It answers back “within walking distance are two sushi restaurants that more than 20 of your friends have liked.”
Wait a second. “Friends have liked?”
Today, all marketers can do is spam you - and not just you: low value email blasts to thousands or millions of people who probably don't care, because they don't have that need right now. This is why spam is evil.
But imagine if I could get spam about something I care about, at the time I care. It wouldn't be spam, it would be information. That's a pretty big win, but not the transformation that Scoble is talking about.
It will give me information recommended by my friends. This is huge.
I know my friends. I know what they like. I know when their likes overlap with my likes. Facebook is fixin' to give me high quality information about stuff I need, when I need it. In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson discusses the need for recommenders to help sort through the vast amount of data available to us. This new Facebook may allow that. Letting the hundreds of millions of facebook users easily recommend businesses and services to their friends.
So go ahead, spam me.
2 comments:
That's not spam, it's "targeted marketing".
What you say makes sense, if the community in which you are participating is really made up of people who share your interests, likes and dislikes. All too often, however, the majority of our extended online community is people with whom you've interacted briefly, old high school classmates that barely remember you, and corporate weasels using a dog-eared copy of the Social Marketing for Dummies book. For this to have real value, you're going to need much more control over the context of relationships and the level of intrusiveness. Good post, 'Patch.
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