A New Perspective

Well, it’s been a little over a week since my first post – and I’ll confess that I’m still trying to get into a routine with blogging – I plan to be posting about once a week at the very least.

There’s been a lot of talk and discussion lately about just how effective social media is, especially when it comes to using mainstream venues like Facebook.

Well, as a recent college grad (UT ’07), I have to say that advertising on Facebook is a little iffy for me. A few weeks ago I set up a Facebook Event for my friends and I to go see Iron Man on opening night and I decided to purchase my tickets on the internet early. To my surprise, the next time I logged into Facebook it had posted on my newsfeed “Dominic just purchased tickets to Iron Man from –Internet Site-!”

This was even more disturbing because I had gone out of my way a few months earlier to make sure that my newsfeed was shut off and all of my privacy settings were as high as possible.

I explained this situation to a colleague of mine, who told me of a similar situation she had heard of, except that it happened when a young man bought his girlfriend an engagement ring.

I’ll be the first to say that movie tickets pale in comparison to an engagement ring – especially when it ruins the surprise of the proposal. Had it been me, I’d have been furious.

The most daunting aspect of the entire situation is that somewhere along the line, I know I probably agreed to it when I just scrolled to the bottom of some set of T&Cs and just hit “I agree” without fully reading them.

It’s situations like these that can end up alienating people from using the site. That’s why advertisers have a long way to go and it unfortunately seems like it will mostly be by trial and error. I don’t really think this sort of “brute force” method is the most effective way to get advertising best practices, but that’s one of the problems of social media – it’s pretty much all uncharted waters and we’re all still trying to find the best way to communicate with our publics.

I doubt Facebook or advertisers have a lot to worry about though – with literally millions of people on the site and it’s popularity in high schools and colleges I think it’ll take a lot more than a few advertising blunders to really hurt the site.

As for the advertising, I think it’d be a better solution to see what events/groups a person is in and just advertise, “Buy Tickets for Iron Man on –Insert Movie Site-“ rather than have unsuspecting individuals endorse that particular company. It also begs the question – is any of my online shopping safe from Facebook?