As a follow up to my last two posts regarding targeting options available through the Facebook ads platform, Jennifer Stoddard, Canada’s privacy commissioner, recently stated that Facebook doesn’t meet Canadian privacy law standards. The complaint raised is focused on the default privacy settings of a Facebook account, the collection and use of data for advertising purposes, and the disclosure of personal information to 3rd party developers.
Personally, it’s the information available to the 3rd party developers that worries me. In most cases, we’re openly providing the data to Facebook. I don’t mind that my birthday is posted, and I don’t mind if an advertiser targets me on my birthday. If I did mind, well then I shouldn’t give Facebook my birthday details, should I? That’s a choice I made when signing up to Facebook. For the early adopters, the Facebook applications that run rampant now never existed. At the end of the day, Facebook shouldn’t ever be a burden to it’s users. If it’s too hard to delete an account, that’s a problem. If privacy settings are too complicated or buried, that’s a problem. In my opinion, a Facebook account should be locked down by default. But if that had been the case since the beginning, would Facebook be as successful as it is today?
As far as the privacy commissioner’srequest – Facebook was given 1 month to comply with recommendations. That deadline was on August 17th, and itworldcanada.com reports that discussions between Facebook and Canada are going well. Right now the Stoddard has Facebook’s reponse in hand, and has 15 days to review and reply. I’d like to get my hands on both of these documents…
Facebook is chalk full of groups and pages – you can join groups to support your love of campfires, your passion for sex on the beach or if you live in BC, your concerns about BC Harmonized Sales Tax. It’s easy to create groups, and for the right business, it can be a powerful marketing tool. One of Facebook’s three new targeting tools is “target by connections”, which allows an admin or owner of a Facebook group/event to create an ad targeting only members of a specific group, or to exclude members of a specific group.
This is an important feature for a number of reasons. Say you’re promoting an event in your town with a Facebook Ad. You set it up as a cost per click campaign, meaning you’re going to be spending 30-50 cents on every person that clicks on the ad. To get the most out of your advertising dollars, you don’t want to be spending that money on someone who has already RSVP’d to the event that clicks on the ad simply because they forgot what time the event starts. No, you want to focus on those who haven’t converted yet, and that’s exactly where this targeting feature comes into play.
Targeting by connections does present some complications by placing more power in the hands of people that are group admins or officers. For example, if I was a competitor of Nike and wanted to get an ad in front of people that had joined a particular Nike group, all you have to do is wiggle your way into an officer position of that group. Volunteer your time by removing inappropriate posts and posting pictures of your vintage Nike shoes and suddenly your trusted by the Nike group. Maybe you sell knock-off Nike products – now you have a targeted audience for your ad, and there’s over 2.5 million Facebook members that have joined a Nike group!
I’m sure it’s already going on for other reasons, but Facebook group administrators will be selling officer & admin positions within their groups simply for the sake of this ad targeting feature. Now the administrator of that silly I love campfires group with 250,000+ members can potentially generate a revenue stream for himself by selling access to his group to outdoor gear stores. The perfect ad headline would read Do You Love Campfires?…
I don’t think Blist ever made any serious ripples amongst the various web based applications available out there. It was an excel like program with some great visual features, but unlike excel and Google Spreadsheets, the main focus was sharing data. In my opinion, it was very clean and provided a new angle on a tired platform. Afterall, it’s hard to make something like excel look exciting. The only complaint I ever had was I couldn’t figure out how to make a web form submit to the “blist”.
None the less, Blist is no more. Socrata has taken over, with the aim of being a social network for data lovers. I’m assuming Blist didn’t have a sustainable business plan, so they adapted. Who knows, maybe they were hoping for a buyout. None they less, they didn’t pack up and leave. There were some very interesting Blists, so they built a platform that will, hopefully, facilitate the sharing of “data sets” more productively.
The first interesting data set I found covers a handful of venture capital investments. It very well may become an interesting source of information – the type of information that makes writing an article or news story far easier.
Twitter’s growth has been quite exceptional, and maybe you’re wondering what all the hype is about? To put some perspective on the attention Twitter is receiving, take a look at this comparison chart with Twitter.com and Foxsports.com, courtesy of Compete.
The video below is very simplistic, but it conveys the basics of Twitter quite well.
I used to be a huge fan of Digg – it was such a cool site to find unique, interesting news! When I speak in past tense regarding web properties, “I used to be a fan of Digg” means I was using it fairly regularly 2 years ago. As of today, I probably haven’t visited the site in over one year. So when I stumbled across this Digg article explaining that the Digg homepage is controlled by 50 websites, it confirms what everyone sensed was happening.
First we experienced Digg rings that would unify together to drive specific Digg articles to the front page. I didn’t have anything against this as long as it wasn’t a paid Digg ring and the news was appropriate. At the end of the day, Digg was still less “influenced” than the average television station anyways, so who are we to complain?
In my opinion, Digg was valuable for “digging” up the unique content and allowing it to gain exposure based on a good, old fashioned voting system. But I don’t see the point of Digg anymore if it’s simply regurgitating articles from mainsteam news sources. For Digg to save face, I propose they move their current Digg website to everydaynewss.com (lame I know, but hey, at least that domain is available) and drastically rethink their approach for Digg.com before they loose even more momentum.
