Apr
17
first 2 pages of draft
Filed Under Uncategorized |
Advertising on Facebook; the Future of Marketing
by Pete Todaro
April 16, 2008
ENGL 202 9:05
Dr. Kenneth Sherwood
Over the past year, the social networking site Facebook has evolved from a simple social utility open only to college students to the new stage to advertise from. The website has developed an entirely new method of advertising through social network relationships and personal user information compiled in a data base. The aggressive and intrusive advertising methods have begun to discourage facebook users from logging on. Some feel offended that a site originally made for people to communicate to their friends turned into a site suited for advertisers to communicate with consumers. At the same time, this type of advertising has not yet found a way to truly become profitable for the parties involved.
It was only about three years ago when I gave in and agreed to set up a facebook profile. I had been resisting the social network sites because I figured I was just a fad. So ahead I went filling in all my personal information devil may care. My friends and I had just started our first semester at IUP and we wanted to meet all the hot college chicks, so I put a lot of stuff that would make girls think I was cool. My interest column included my love of bullfighting as well as my devotion to rock-skipping. With so many details about my personal life to fill in on my profile page, I wondered why anyone would really care about it. It turns out I was contributing to building the next biggest advertising boom of the century.
Mark Zuckerberg gave birth to the social network site as a project at Harvard University; he later dropped out to manage his business. It moved from Harvard to every college across the nation. The exclusivity of the site was what made it different from its competitor, MySpace. After a short period of steady growth, the social network opened up to high schools, then businesses, then anybody who had an email address. I think this was about the time when Mark Zuckerberg realized the money making possibilities of his site.
On August 22, 2006 Facebook and Microsoft joined forces giving Microsoft rights to running banner ads and sponsored links. At the same time, Zuckerberg and co. were preparing to unveil “news feed” and “mini feed”, which published stories about what users were doing on the website. In Zuckerberg’s own words, “All the most interesting stuff that is going on is now presented to you. The analogy would be instead of an encyclopedia, it’s now news. We’re emphasizing what’s going on now (Time).” The homepage was now filled with stories about who is in a relationship with whom, what somebody wrote on their friend’s wall and the like. As a result of this invasion of personal space, users quickly banded together in opposition to the changes. Groups with names like “Official petition against news feed” sprung up all over the network within 24 hours (Time). Despite the initial reluctance to accept the new format of the website, naysayers soon quieted down and the news feed became a permanent addition to the site. I wonder if the new strategies of targeting advertisements would have come about had the news feed not been accepted.
The introduction of news feed was the first act of intrusiveness that would set the stage for later actions to target advertisements at people based on their personal information. In February of 2007 Facebook announces that it will be opening up their application program interface (API) to third party developers. The purpose of this move was to attract more users to the site with fun applications that give the user something more to do than browse profile pages and join groups. “In tech jargon, these are called API’s [application program interface], and they’re the software hooks used by developers to build new applications that can communicate glitch-free with existing programs (Business week online).”