Posts Tagged ‘brands’
Facebook and The Transparency Bandwagon
While the tinfoil hatters amongst us who fear the divestiture of liberty keep pointing to the likes of the Patriot Act, the US Census or Google’s caching of every search known to man, the real worry for all of us should be Facebook. Well, all of us that aren’t in marketing, at least. The truth is that the “new openness” that Facebook is propagating has two wildly untapped (and yet genius) ideas at its core.
First of all, it’s tapping into a generational zeitgeist. There’s just something about Millennials that make them not only prone to share intricate details about their lives (and subsequently making them wide open for identity theft) but also willing to let that information be used to help them connect to better products. They don’t feel sold, the feel catered to. And for the generation that lives at home until almost 30, takes their parents to interviews and has never used a card catalog system in a library, why would they expect anything else? This notion of “openness” is also a major tenet of successful social campaigns over the past several years. A certain current president of ours ran on such a platform (never mind that it’s not practiced) to wild acclaim and popularity among Millennials. The concept of opennness is really driven by the use of the web in general, and since Facebook is the standard bearer for all things social, web-oriented and open, why shouldn’t they be the first to sally forth into such unknown territory?
The second thing it taps into is the kind of low-cost targeting that marketers are salivating for. Never mind that Millennials (and that oh-so-coveted 18-35 year old audience) are incredibly difficult to nail down and push your message at, this additional, product and brand-centric style of targeting gives Facebook the ultimate power in the universe to wield over desperate media wonks and marketing directors alike. They will be able to give you more targeted information about their users and segment users better than even Google. It’s staggeringly simple and genius at the same time. About 18 months ago when Facebook made a huge push to be the “login credentials of choice” for hundreds of sites across the internet, it seemed odd. But this, now, makes perfect sense. If Google is out to “organize the world’s information,” then Facebook is out to “segment the world’s people into highly targeted and affordable lists for companies to purchase and profit from.”
But the reality is that Google is loosing its sheen as a kind of do-gooder company. After their initial IPO, people loved everything they did. Now, after a few fumbles with their Android software updates, a couple censorship issues in China and some sneaky backroom stuff with the White House later, Google is mirroring a corporate image as opposed to a warm, smart startup. Whereas Facebook, well, they still have Mark Zuckerburg’s warm, childish face to be the, um, face of their company. They are the living expression of relationships in the 21st century. Therefore, how could we so demonize them? This, mind you, is after the Beacon fiasco of a few years back. They learned and got more sneaky about it. But they’re still tallying buckets of information about you that you are willingly giving them. We, as consumers, are blind to it because it is leading to us getting better access to deals and brands we want. In fact, the level of data that Facebook is able to gather on its 411 million users makes Google’s data from search look more like geo-targeting by zip code. It’s good, but beaten by emerging standards.
And you were afraid of the government.