Facebook — blood in the water
p2pnet news view | Advertising:- “There’s so much blood in the water, it’s attracting other sharks.”
That’s Josh Quittner in Fortune on Facebook’s efforts to squeeze advertising cash out of private user data.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in the annals of fast-rising tech companies that fail,” he says, going on:
“It works as well as it ever has, and many of the people who use it (my kids for instance) are unaware of the worsening situation about its privacy-invading Beacon social ads scheme that tracks people’s web-surfing habits even when they’re not on the site. That’s bound to change.
“The market is fickle, something better is in the wings, and as soon as it arrives, the alienated and angry mob will race to it. Delphi’s errors begat Prodigy and its errors begat AOL, which was crushed by the Web.”
But, says Quittner, “What’s surprising here is the speed with which this thing is coming undone – and the ease with which it could have been avoided.”
Actually, the speed with which this is happening isn’t really that surprising. And IMHO, it couldn’t have been avoided.
Thanks to the Net, blogs, web pages, IM, chat, and so on, people now bypass cynical (and lying) statements put out by corporations trying to claim they only have customers’ interests at heart.
These days, Jane tells Jim who tells Mary tales who tells ……..
It all happens in a flash and ironically, in Facebook’s case, it was literally, and painfully, hoist on its own petard.
Facebook users organised a Facebook group to force Facebook to stop making fast and loose with their personal and private information.
The days when you could mess with users have gone and far worse, from the corporate point of view, ‘consumers’ are customers again —- people who not only have free choice and the will to use it, but who can, and do, keep each other informed and updated.
Oh! The horror!
Meanwhile, “What’s harming Facebook – perhaps to a terminal degree – is enormously bad PR,” says Quittner.
“For a social media company, these folks don’t understand the first thing about communication; they have alienated the press by being arrogant, aloof and dishonest. Their idea of press relations is sending a stupid message to a What’s New at Facebook Group that directs you to another website for a canned statement.
“And it is killing them.”
The post adds:
“Facebook has turned all the people who rooted for it into a lynch mob. In the space of a month, it’s gone from media darling to devil.
“The most interesting thing about Facebook right now is who will replace it.”
He could be right. It is, after all, about advertising and Coca-Cola, for one, has lost its enthusiasm.
“We have adopted a bit of a ‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond,” paidContent has Carol Kruse, Coke’s VP of global interactive marketing, saying, quoting the New York Times Bits Blog.
And in update, “Overstock.com suspended the Beacon program on Nov. 21, and as of Friday, hadn’t reinstated it, according to Mediapost,” says the story, adding:
“Also Travelocity, although touted by Facebook as a launch advertiser, was troubled enough by the program that it had not started using it as of Thursday.”
Jon Newton - p2pnet
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