Opinion: Facebook: a case of advertising acne
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
The social networking site may have caved and modified Beacon, a controversial advertising system, so that users can more easily opt out of it, but Facebook is still fending off flak over privacy violations.
Beacon sends information on users’ online purchases from participating vendors (like Overstock, Fandango and Blockbuster) to their networks of friends — which soon raised questions about how much information Facebook should be collecting on its users’ online activity.
To be fair, the program might have escaped relatively unscathed had it not crashed the holiday party: Many users are still seething over having surprise Christmas gifts ruined, when the purchase stats were sent to the intended recipient. From The Times:
Sean Lane, who joined the online protest after a surprise gift to his wife of a white gold and diamond ring from Overstock.com was broadcast to everyone in his Facebook network, posted on MoveOn.org’s protest wall: ‘This is a pretty powerful feeling. Honestly, I didn’t think that people could make changes like this through civil action. I am very proud to be a part of this!’
(So are people ticked off because the recipient knows about the gift, or about how much they paid for it?)
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is showing appropriate and earnest remorse on the Facebook blog:
We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. [...] It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.
Even though the idea sounds foohardy in retrospect, it’s not hard to see why Mark Zuckerberg and company went forward with the plan. Facebook’s a free service; if it ever wants to turn into a truly profitable enterprise, it’s going to have to rely on some serious advertising bucks. And from advertisers’ perspectives, each profile is a potential gold mine for individually tailored marketing.
And let’s not forget that while Facebook users balk at changes that crack open the gates of their personal information — remember the storm surrounding the News Feed, which provides a constant digest of all your friends’ recent activity? — people eventually settle down and adapt. And why wouldn’t they? After all, Facebook plays upon two of our basest social instincts: stalking and preening.
However, noted Zuckerberg,
Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.’
Good point. So Facebook has switched Beacon from an opt-out to an opt-in service, and retailers are coming up with solutions of their own. Says Larry Dignan at a ZDNet blog:
Overstock will deploy a double opt-in with Beacon. You’ll have to ok sharing of information on Overstock and on Facebook. [Said Jonathan Johnson, an Overstock VP:] “We want to be sure that the double opt-in is crystal clear.” “We need to be sure that the Facebook community understands how it works. Mark’s blog may have gone all the way there, but we don’t know until we see the reaction to it.”
Still, it’s anybody’s guess whether Beacon is dead in the water at this point, and advertisers don’t seem ready to jump back in yet. Again, ZDNet:
For Beacon to ever work again there will be a few issues to monitor. Will enough people opt-in to Beacon to make it matter? Will a critical mass matter to advertisers? Is 500,000 users enough? How about 1 million? What’s critical mass for Beacon? Will advertisers remain gun-shy after this initial hubbub?
Who knows? Maybe it will be reborn in both a user-friendly and profitable form. Users now post what they’re reading, watching and listening to. So why not what they purchase? Music, books and movies all count as goods, so extending the feature to other types of consumption seems like the next logical step.
But even though so much of Facebook is about self-advertising, I’m betting people are still too self-conscious about the whole ‘You are what you buy’ philosophy for Beacon to take hold in the near future.