The company desperately seeking salvation has entered the search business, which might actually be a smart move. The theory is that your network of friends and likes may provide a more actionable set of recommendations than some alien algorithm. Now, your friends may be lovely people and lots of fun, but it is not yet apparent that their taste in shoes or bistros or personal coaches is above reproach. The theory is that you may take their advice anyway. Yes, it's just a theory.
The problem, or to be more specific, the recurring problem, is that Facebook's disregard for its members' attitudes has become a constant source of friction with...its members. What's yours is theirs and what's theirs is theirs. You dont really feel like sharing? Tough noogies, read the fine print of your contract - assuming you know where to look for it.
The company is absolutely determined to monetize everything associated with it, especially the stuff you provide for free, even as you innocently believe it offers a personal window on your soul. The conflict arises from that fact: you think Facebook is providing a service you can personalize and 'own.'The company believes you should pay for the privilege of membership but since they can't charge without losing most of their billion-plus friends, they have to mine for value in other ways.
The reality is that Facebook's founders created a mighty platform, but one about which members feel rather more proprietary than they do about say, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Crossing that proverbial chasm has not yet been figured out. Facebook keeps trying, but with limited success since every time it launches a new initiative, it alienates someone. Or rather, lots of someones.
In this case, a noble experiment has been launched, but again reliant on the participation of those who belong - and without so much as a 'by your leave.'And at some point, like now, people are starting to ask what's in it for them. Doesnt their contribution to content have a value for which they should be compensated, even if it is only with cents-off coupons at Starbucks? JL
Jonathan Baskin comments in Forbes:
With the announcement of Graph Search, Facebook has confirmed what we’ve known all along: we users aren’t there to enjoy content as much as we are the content. That means we’re the products it intends to monetize. This constitutes a unique marketing challenge. More on that in a moment…
Graph Search promises to let us search through our friends’ likes, photos, locations, and any other info they’ve prior elected to share with us and/or the world. Think of it as a proprietary, closed database that’s an alternative to Google, Bing, or Yahoo. It’s probably a first-step in a longterm plan to turn the postings of its billion users worldwide into a giant closed database that will compete with those older services (not to mention services like Yelp, which is already crashing on the stock market).
It’ll have loads of obstacles to overcome, though none of them are necessarily insurmountable. Your friends list may not be the best place to look for restaurant recommendations or movie reviews, since you didn’t aggregate them based on what expert services they provide to you. Many of my Facebook friends have similar tastes to mine, which might seem like a great resource until I realize it means they probably make the same bad choices as I do. It’s also supposed to be “privacy aware,” whatever that means. Tee-ing up our info to help others make money, no matter that we’ve already posted the stuff, could feel like we’re being used.
Which is the point, of course. We are the product on Facebook, and the platform’s very premise depends on our willingness to share our lives openly (there’s lots of theology on why we should reveal everything about ourselves online, though it’s usually written by people who do no such thing). Graph Search will eventually provide more pages for advertising, perhaps ever-better keyed to whatever it is we’re searching for. Maybe brands will be given a way to crap out the results with sponsored links, so it could get even worse than all those recommendations you get now from friends who made the mistake of clicking on something. I’d bet on ads running down the sides of every page, too.
So back to the marketing challenge: how long can Facebook go before it acknowledges the fact that we’re its product and, better yet, cuts us in on the deal (or lets us fully and completely opt-out)?
We know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, so the fact that signing on, posting, talking and now searching are offered freely just means there’s somebody else getting charged. Right now advertisers are footing the bill. They pay to put stuff in front of us as if Facebook were a glorified broadcast channel, albeit a smarter one. It’s not…we’re there to talk to each other, not to brands and certainly not to get hounded by them. Yet Facebook’s monetization ideas seem to presume otherwise. So do most of the ideas from its competitors.
By coming up with activities that we would never pay for — i.e. they’re not that stunningly great or useful — Facebook is avoiding this underlying disconnect in its business model and branding.
I believe that the key to understanding P2P — not just monetizing it, but building platforms that survive — is to figure out how to make the transactions themselves worth something. The “social” part should have inherent value that people would pay for, instead of having to give it away for free and then putting ads in front of users to muck it up.
Imagine if we could do things on Facebook that had real monetary value or, taken in the aggregate, made us feel less like productized users and more as collaborative members? What if it came up with services and then presented them to us like we were in on the deal, not fodder for its monetization plans? Now that would be a big marketing challenge, but one worth embracing.
They’re smart folks over there, so who knows what tomorrow will bring. But today’s news is that Facebook has found yet another way to use the perpetual motion machine of postings to make good on a hundred year-old advertising idea, however pleasantly and inconspicuously presented.
Will we ever tire of being productized?
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