Editorial Articles

Nick Fuller, Senior Director of Customer Engagement and Strategy at e-Dialog looks at what the latest advances on Facebook mean for marketers

Despite its near ubiquity for many European and US consumers, Facebook remains something of a puzzle for some marketers. With more than 600 million users it is very obviously a place where we must be, but it’s also an environment with a very specific and non-commercial purpose from a user’s point of view.

The VCs and commentators take it for granted that the brains behind Facebook will find a way of ‘monetising’ the audience in any event (their valuation being based on this very presumption - as was that of MySpace and Friends Reunited - but let’s move on.)

Facebook’s moves into email via its Messages development could be seen as a move that actually threatens marketers, given that the system will automatically distinguish between newsletters and ‘personal’ messages, thereby placing an obstacle between opt-in user and brand. Facebook Ads have gone down a more conventional road of display advertising, albeit with a level of targeting which is mouth-watering compared to the largely generic equivalent of many display alternatives. However you look it though, this is an ‘old’ model being applied to a new landscape so the big money is on something altogether more radical.

The launch of Timeline – through a partnership with Netflix, Spotify and Yahoo – may be a sign of things to come. It makes good sense for marketers of music, films and news to take up the opportunity of placing their content in front of the friends of those who are consuming it – and Facebook is exactly the place to do it. It’s a much more compelling prospect than the sharing of user data through social log-ins which seems to produce a lot of unstructured personal information that is of limited use to marketers. It’s also the subject of great sensitivity among consumers, many of whom opt out of the prospect of apps which require the transfer of such data – they see it as too high a price to pay.

To commentators, the launch of Timeline in particular (especially in the wake of the aborted Beacon initiative) can look a little sinister. Douglas Rushkoff on CNN.com sees it as a signal that "on Facebook, we’re not the customers. We are the product."

Quite so and, in advertising terms, this isn’t really new. The whole current debate in Europe around the EU’s PECR directive on cookies and tracking is based on the fact that we consumers have taken it for granted that much of the web is free to us, whilst not necessarily realising that the providers of content and services are making money from granting advertisers access to our attention. It’s been that way online for well over a decade. It is that way, of course, every time we pick up a free newspaper or watch an ad break on commercial TV. In this sense, what Facebook is doing is hardly pernicious (or radical) then, but just an evolution based on a far richer seam of data and a much larger audience. Actually – it’s permission-marketing, but its distinction from the more common practices with which we associate the term is that the permission is less defined – when we opt in to an email or mobile programme we volunteer a fixed amount of information and we know what we will receive in return. If consumers have the choice and marketers are clear on what is being shared then this form of ‘social marketing’ will have a future – but that is a big if.

Amid all this debate, maybe we are missing the really big story. Social commerce is potentially the game changer - for some brands the chance for Facebook users to buy there and then removes the issue of how to entice them away from the social community and into a store. Timeline is a step in that direction but for a limited number of digital-only products; the potential for extending this to physical products (via Facebook Mall and many other developments) will represent a far more radical sea change for Facebook, its advertisers and its users.