Posted By: Debra Aho Williamson
By many accounts, Facebook has been on an advertising bender in 2010. comScore just reported that the social network accounted for 16.2% of all display ad impressions in Q1, delivering more than 176 billion ads. Yahoo!, the next in line, delivered 136 billion. TBI Research, an offshoot of the Business Insider blog, wrote back in April that “Facebook is gaining an increasing share of online ad spend by major brands–at the expense of large portals like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN.”
eMarketer’s own recent conversations with industry insiders also indicate very positive marketer momentum on Facebook. For many companies, Facebook represents the ultimate combination: a mass audience that can also be sliced, diced, segmented and targeted in myriad ways.
But the brewing debate over privacy has the very real potential to derail all of that heady growth, just when marketers and consumers are truly getting engaged with social media marketing. And that should have Facebook—whose business model is built on advertising revenue—extremely concerned. It could be one reason why the company has called an internal privacy summit for Thursday afternoon.
The common refrain among privacy advocates and many bloggers has been that privacy and Facebook are like oil and water—a feeling that perhaps even extends to Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in a January interview with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington said, “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” Infographics by The New York Times and IBM Research developer Matt McKeon provide a compelling picture of the changes that have taken place at Facebook over the past few years.
I keep a pretty close watch on my own privacy settings on Facebook, and I’ve repeatedly been flummoxed by the information presented to me as I navigate the site and other Websites that have deployed Facebook’s new social features, such as the “Like” button or “Instant Personalization.”
One day I logged into Facebook and saw a message informing me that all of my interests, previous jobs and other bio material were now being turned into mass community pages. I found it humorous that there was no community page for Al Gelato, the now-defunct ice cream shop where I worked back in college. But I was peeved to see that if I didn’t participate in this new community page feature, then whole sections of my “Info” tab would now be blank—including that cheeky reference to Al Gelato as well as other things I liked or participated in that I didn’t want the world to know about.
On a visit to Yelp this week, I saw Instant Personalization in action. A message splashed across the top of the page read, “Hi Debra. Yelp is using Facebook to personalize your experience.” There were three options: to “learn more” (clicking this link took me to a page on Facebook offering details on Facebook’s new personalization offerings), to say “no thanks” (which immediately opted me out of the personalization) or to click an “x” to close the message and continue with the personalization. But upon closer read of the “learn more” link, I learned that even if I opted out, my public information would still be accessible to Yelp if my friends agreed to use the features. It left me wondering: what public information? How would it be used? Which friends used the features? Is there any way to know?
If understanding how my data is used is this convoluted for me, what about average consumers? As Dave Morgan, founder of behavioral targeting firm Tacoda and now chairman of Simulmedia put it in a MediaPost blog this week: “Who reading this blog can tell the rest of us in common, plain language about all of the data Facebook collects, and what it does — and doesn’t do — with that data? I can’t.”
I predicted last December that marketers would spend $605 million worldwide to advertise on Facebook this year. More recently, estimates of 2010 ad spending on Facebook have risen to $1 billion or more. That heady growth is in true jeopardy if Facebook cannot get its privacy issues resolved.
There is much that consumers do not know about how their information is used when they interact with brands on Facebook—or even when they merely mention a brand in passing, in a status update. Although Facebook has said that the “Like” button, Instant Personalization and other new features are not aimed at marketers, they actually are. Although Facebook’s public policy vice president Elliott Schrage told The New York Times,”We don’t share your information with advertisers. Our targeting is anonymous,” it makes it very difficult, or impossible, for consumers to know what IS shared.
Marketers on Facebook are on the cusp of something truly exciting: a critical mass of engaged consumers who are willing to participate, share and spread the word about their brand interactions. But if there was ever a time to assure consumers that their information is safe and secure, and to make sure that their experiences are positive, that time is now.
I like this article because it focuses on the real problem (Privacy) that social media is facing.
ReplyDeletei have a similar article that is related to your post "European privacy advocates have added their voices to complaints about Facebook's privacy changes, and they say certain ways Facebook treats data may even be illegal under European laws." thought you might be interested in read it it :)
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