FriendSpam. Viral ain't all good.

Facebook's SocialAds have great promise. But I hope for their sake they have overcome an issue that seems part of the fabric of this particualar social network.

The default mode of every application I use on Facebook is that as soon as I sample it I am presented with a pre-filled series of tickboxes against my friends - whom it's all to easy to infect with whatever I fancy. It is this which has played a huge part in driving facebook's exponential growth.

This is all good for SocialAds when/if I am selective. But the default is not to be. In other words the balance is in favour of spamming all my friends.
SocialAds will be making a dangerous assumption if it believes all my friends want the same things.

Spam is initially ignored, moves on to annoy, and ultimately inspires an angry backlash.
So the very thing that has driven the exponential growth for Facebook is exactly what could crush its potential for financial success - indeed kill it as a platform. Look at the growing annoyance with vampires and zombies on facebook, for example.

Of course, we have to assume that facebook have worked this out and that the touch will be lighter, that segmentation will be driven by friend interactions and selections. But there are signs the viral imperative is endemic in facebook's build.

For example, I sent a message to the Friends of Faster Future group on facebook yesterday. And then I had to send another - apologising.
It seems many of the group received my first message five times - an error entirely created by the facebook machine (update - I note my facebook ID stopped working this morning [10.10am], turning the friend badge on this blog into a simple link to facebook - and preventing me from accessing my facebook account altogether - not a good time for the tech to go belly up is it Mr Z?). Annoying enough if it's from a friend and relevant to you. Imagine if either of those conditions isn't met?

Did Facebook open the viral throttle only so it could grow to this commercially viable scale and is now ready to close it in the interests of actual commercial success?
The balance between the needs of its users and the needs of its commercial partners will be a tricky one to maintain.

Facebook's SocialAds: Jam today and tomorrow

SocialAds. The clue is in the name. What they do is the simple thing we see replicated elsewhere - serve the right ads to the right people at the right time.

That's a given. It's a big, big step in restoring response rates against the swan-dive of interruptive advertising.

But SocialAds have added something extra. Something, er, social.

They get that word of mouth is the single most effective sales pitch there is - accounting for between 60 and 70 per cent of all purchase decisions, depending on where you find your stats.

So an in-context, related ad is great. But an in-context related ad from a friend? Well that's a different league.

Ratings and recommendations of products from people you trust. Blyk understands this and we'll see exactly how it deploys that understanding as it rolls out its mobile model.

The idea makes use of the self-forming networks of trust that social networks create.

This is particularly effective when you add the understanding that people now have more trust in their peers than they do in brands, authority... the centre.

Recommended further reading on this:
Jeremiah Oywang at Forrester (Here).
Doc Searls (Here)

Now, I could argue that google's adsense does all this. It is in-context, related and served to the right people at the right time (if I'm searching for X and an ad for X is served against it - I'm the right person at the right time). What about the social bit? Well, my friend could forward me a link to a bit of content - that comes with his recommendation. I follow it and get served the ad when I see the content. It's kind of arrived in front of me with his recommendation.

However - there's no automation in that process. In SocialAds there appears to be.

The other element of their new business proposition is Facebook Pages, which allow businesses to have their own facebook profiles (and they are free) - so you can interact with consumers (fan-sumers as Jeremiah describes them - though I feel that underplays their role somewhat). I guess this is the equivalent of google's blogger?

They don't appear to have a way in which users of products create their own ads to share, or get invited into co-creating communities. Pity.

But these could be precisely the things that spin out of brands making wise use of the the two-way flow Facebook Pages are able to deliver.

The Facebook play is based on sound strategy for two reasons:

1. SocialAds are an easy sell for the current marketing mafia. They 'get' in-context related ads. They hear that social networks create trust. They know that trust begats sales. Where do I sign?

2. Facebook Pages offer more engaged (enlightened or willing to experiment) brands an easy opportunity to touch the network themselves (rather than simply witnessing its exponential value generation and handing over their cash). As they learn what it's like to be part of the communities which define brands, they will better serve the co-creational aspirations of Generation-C, Net Gen, the Edglings... the people who are inheriting the earth. Along the journey they should discover that these people want to help rate, shape, create, co-design, engineer and market. And they'll want rewards and ownership. Facebook Pages offer them an easy intro to the new business ecology and in an environment where connecting is made easy.

So it offers both a wedge of cash from the old guard right now (SocialAds) and a ticket to the future for the new (Facebook Pages).

It sounds like a winning combination to me.

This from the facebook blog (I would point you to the link, but it would only work for you if you were a member of facebook... as google's adsense may wish to point out)

What they say: My first reactions in red:

"Today we announced an entirely new advertising solution for Facebook. Right now, we want to make clear what's changing—and what's not—for you.

"First of all, what's not changing:

• Facebook will always stay clutter-free and clean.
• Facebook will never sell any of your information.
• You will always have control over your information and your Facebook experience.
• You will not see any more ads than you did before this. See anymore ads? I didn't 'see' any in the first place. I appreciate they were there, but they didn't register.
  

Here's what is changing:

• You now have a way to connect with products, businesses, bands, celebrities and more on Facebook.
• Ads should be getting more relevant and more meaningful to you.
• You now have the option to share actions you take on other sites with your friends on Facebook.

Engaging with businesses and buying things are part of your everyday life. Advertising doesn't have to be about interrupting what you're doing, but getting the right information about the purchases you make when you want it. We believe we've created a system where ads are more relevant and actually enhance Facebook.
Ah, so they get the engagement over interruption thing. But I'm afraid this IS just about serving the right people with the right ad at the right time. Yawn.

You now have a way to connect with things you are passionate about. We've launched Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook.

We noticed people wanted to connect with their favorite music, restaurants, and brands; but there was no good place for these types of affiliations to exist. Now, there is a place for them and you can become a fan of whatever pages you choose in order to interact with your passions in new ways. You can post reviews for a local restaurant, buy tickets to a new movie, or be the first to get a heads up about new promotions.

Ads will be getting more relevant and more interesting to you. Instead of random messages from advertisers, we've launched Social Ads. Social Ads provide advertisements alongside related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like "Leah is now a fan of The Offspring" (if I added The Offspring to my music) or "Justin wrote a review for Sushi Hut" (If Justin wrote this review on the Sushi Hut page). These actions could then be paired with an ad that either The Offspring or Sushi Hut provides.

A sample Social Ad.

Behind the scenes, we've instituted a system that tailors ads to you and your interests, which should make ads more appealing. Advertisers never have access to who is seeing their ads, personal information about you, or even what social actions accompany their ads. In other words, all of this completely respects your privacy, while providing you with a better Facebook experience.

Hmm wonder what kind of social data analytics they have going on at the back? Can they discern the most viral within each community, and offer them for sale?

You now have the option to bring actions you take outside of Facebook back in. Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share your off-site actions with your friends as well.

This is the notification you'll see whenever another site wants to send a story to Facebook.

For example, adding the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to your queue on Blockbuster.com might be something you want your friends to know about, so you can have a marathon. As usual, you have complete control over this information. Affiliate websites always notify you of any stories they want to send, and you'll have two opportunities—one on the website, and one on Facebook—to opt out of that story. Facebook always gives you the choice to decline a story the next time you log in.
They've watched and learned from the likes of the Visual Bookshelf and Blogfriends apps.

We want Facebook to reflect and enhance all your real-world relationships—the movie you see this weekend as well as the friends who are seeing it with you. If you have any questions or suggestions for how we can improve this, let us know.

Well yes I do: Take a look here.(How Facebooks SocialAds should work, but probably won't)

Facebook's SocialAds: How they should work - but probably won't

The blogosphere is a-buzz with the rumour that Facebook's 'SocialAds' will be announced at New York's ad:tech conference on November 6.

This is the long-awaited out-google-adsensing proposal that makes Facebook worth that multi-billion price tag - allegedly.

Interesting that google is fighting back with its new OpenSocial to kick Facebook where it hurts.

Between them, you have to hope that someone is about to crack the 'how to make money out of social networks' conundrum.

There are plenty of guesses about how SocialAds might play: This from TechCrunch...

"It will be how Facebook will actually start to make real money—both through ads on its own site and on other sites through a new ad network... (presumably with its ad partner and new investor Microsoft). SocialAds will be an attempt to be like Google’s AdSense, except that it will allow ads to be targeted to Facebook members’ individual interests and profile data rather than the text on a given Web page. This targeting will be done by placing cookies on Facebook members’ browsers when they visit the social site, so that they can be identified later when they visit other sites hosting SocialAds."

I hope there is more to it than that. Adsense isn't just contextual - it's real time too. At the time I'm interested in content (as revealed by the fact I'm viewing it right now) about X, I get served ads about X.

If, as a result of knowing from my social comms that I'm interested in X, the net effect is the same. And if I'm served that ad long after I've left the content that relates to X, isn't it just in-my-face spam when it hurls itself at me when I'm viewing content on other un-related sites?

I'm guessing Facebook have worked that much out.

So what are the possibilities?

Isn’t the truly imaginative solution to try to work out what advertising/marketing looks like in a networked world?

Talk of ad networks, targeting to personal interest and data, it’s all very web2.0, but is it addressing the fundamentals of change here?

We have a generation of collaborators, with a network to collaborate on (the internet) and an economic infrastructure which makes out-sourcing, the means to produce, cheap and easy to find and do. The perfect storm that wikinomics refers to is upon us.

We accept that this has and will continue to disrupt the way content is created. It’s why social networks of the Facebook variety have succeeded while old-style broadcast sites stare wide-eyed at their Reed’s-Law-driven exponential growth.

And it’s dawning that the same disruption is happening to the way in which products and services are created (co-created). It's graphically illustrated in the information industry by Linux, for example.

And yet the predicted response from the cutting edge is, more ads, pretty much like the old ones, but better targeted to the individual's social data.

Haven’t we missed a (the) point here?

If a community is involved in the co-creation of the products and services it has decided it needs to call into existence, this has two key impacts.

1. It has the potential to be a perfect fit. The people who’ve been involved in the co-creation of the product or service that results will love it and 'buy' it (that which we create we embrace, as Alan Moore likes to say). They will also rave about it – marketing it to other like-minded people, attracting more with the same passion/purpose to join their niche global community of collaborators.
2. Doesn’t co-creation of this kind imply a perfect fit between supply and demand? What's the need for traditional ads. The community does its own marketing - and it's powerfully peer-to-peer and with all the ramped-up trust that implies.
   

Is this the end of capitalism? We only create what we need. So who needs someone else making something I don't need and then trying to sell it to me. Skills get matched to product production on a global scale - cheaply and more efficiently than ever before.

And if it is the end of the mass industrial model full stop, must it also be the end of advertising?

As I wrote once before: "How do you sell a mass produced one-size-fits-all product to people who want their content disaggregated and delivered to them exactly where they want it, when they want it, and honed to the interests they self-select and/or navigate to/discover through trusted communities?
"One answer might be to tailor the advert to the segmented user group. Take a look at realtimecontent.com for a vision of this.
"It's a brave attempt to solve a difficult problem. But I'm not comfortable with it. I wasn't sure why before. Now I think I am - it doesn't address the fundamental miss-match here - that we're trying to sell the same mass produced product to different people by effectively pretending (spinning that) it's a different product.
"It ain't, it can't be and it won't be until you let the community of shared interest take a stake in the creative process. "

However, the problem is, there are still things we need which we can't ALL participate in the creation of.

I need medicine. But I'm not passionate about taking part in making it. How do I get my medicine? I could contribute something to the process I suppose (can you make it taste nice? can you change the colour, I thinkthere's a need for a non-stain version etc etc). But can I contribute something of real value to the process of production (co-creation) of every good and service and public utility I'll ever need? Time would seem to be a barrier, if nothing else.

It feels like common sense to say no. So I'll still need to offer something in exchange for my medicine. Cash/Capital works pretty well as the representation of this. So capitalism gets to roll on.

And for the matching of supply to demand in those cases, we'll still need some form of connecting agency (marketing of some form or another). So if we can get ads working in a much more engaged way - more like content we want, like and trust - through the use of powerful social data analytics - then it has to be better than the interruptive models we see struggling all around us. Perhaps get some recommendation and rating from members of communities involved.

We see some giant leaps toward this with Blyk. Perhaps we'll see a further taste of it with SocialAds.

But wouldn’t it be wild if SocialAds really do what the name suggests: they simply act as the way in which you are recruited to join co-creating communities through a system of brilliantly executed, real time, taste and recommendation engines.

Now that, I would stand up and applaud.