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Facebook is marketing your brand preferences

FACEBOOK wants to put your face on advertisements for products that you like.

Facebook .com is a social networking site that lets people accumulate “friends” and share preferences and play games with them. Each member creates a home page where he or she can post photographs, likes and dislikes and updates about their activities.

Tuesday, in a twist on word-of-mouth marketing, Facebook began selling ads that display people’s profile photos next to commercial messages that are shown to their friends about items they purchased or registered an opinion about.

For example, going forward, a Facebook user who rents a movie on Blockbuster.com will be asked if he would like to have his movie choice broadcast out to all his friends on Facebook. And those friends would have no choice but to receive that movie message, along with an ad from Blockbuster.

There’s a guy on Fox or at least there was the last time I watched it, on its financial news roundtable whose answer to everything is “let the market decide”. Intertwining your on-line social life with corporate marketing is just away to give up a little more of who you are; but if that is what people decide they want to do then good luck with that. Ultimately the users at Facebook or MySpace or wherever will decide if they want to become an unpaid marketing rep for people that make tons of money for doing relatively little work or they’ll opt out. “Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend,” Zuckerberg said. We listen to our friends experiences with products and services, but that doesn’t mean we like the same thing. I’m probably going to my grave without ever owning a pair of Nikes or having a PC made by Hewlett Packard regardless of how much people might praise either of those companies. I think there is a different dynamic when people talk about what shoes they prefer compared to sending someone an advertisement for those shoes. This approach to probably going to fail. FaceBook might pay for that failure, as will the corporations that participate, but ultimately the money that is burned in this little exercise will be the money that could have gone to employees of the corporations or giving consumers a price break.

first snow wallpaper

I was sorry to see this, MIT Sues Famed Architect Frank Gehry. I love the building’s aesthetics, but if there are structural flaws they should be fixed. Since the contractor says he had warned Gehry about the possibility of that these problems might result if some changes were not made in the design it looks as the responsibility rests with Mr. Gehry to at least make repairs at his expense.