I'm pretty active on Facebook. I check my account at least once per day, and I frequently will fill downtime by reading through my friends' status updates on my phone. I find Facebook to be a brilliant and incredibly useful tool. It has reconnected me with old friends, given me a closer relationship with relatives who live far away, and helped create a closer, more personal relationship with many of my professional colleagues. And the amount of data that Facebook stewards for me is both impressive and scary.
In 10 years, Facebook will know what an entire generation's boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, and children look like. It will not only have a map of the social graph and deeply understand the relationships between people across the world, but it will also know what things they like, what companies they've worked for, and, in many cases, minutiae of value to advertisers -- such as what products they've owned.
And despite the relative quiet around what Facebook is doing in advertising, the network has created one of the most powerful and elegant advertising tools I've seen so far. For the past six months, I've been telling people in almost every advertising discussion I've had that they should go and create an ad on Facebook. The process is a revelation.
The buying process inherently involves targeting. Keyword targeting is only one method used -- and not required. Ads can be targeted not only to geography and demographics, but also according to workplaces, relationship status, and even ads shown on people's birthdays. The tool implicitly gives you an estimate of the audience size you could potentially reach. And as an advertiser, I can't imagine a buying scenario where I'd trust the estimate more. In a city like Seattle, which has numerous technology companies, an advertiser could even build offers specifically to employees of specific technology companies.
Recently I saw an ad from a guy who was trying to find a job in marketing at Microsoft (I work at Microsoft). His ad had a picture of him, a brief background, and a goal for what kind of job he was looking for. And it linked to his profile. Now, I must admit that I had mixed feelings about this ad, but I was also impressed at his chutzpah and also by the simple fact that it was possible to do this.
Scott Tomlin is a colleague of mine who owns a comic book store here in Seattle called Comics Dungeon, and we've chatted repeatedly about the difficulty he has as a local small business owner with advertising online. This is despite the fact that he has worked as a software engineer on advertising platforms for the past six years, and knows quite a lot about advertising.
Unfortunately the lessons of national advertising don't apply very well to his local small business. He's tried all the "usual suspects" in traditional media, but has really pushed hard on the idea of advertising online, especially given his main career. And he has had a hard slog of it -- with the exception of his efforts on Facebook.
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