I’ve just been reading a slideshow that a Google staffer has put out recently. The basic premise is that Facebook does not accurately reflect ‘real social networks’. When you ‘friend’ someone on Facebook, they go into a big pool of all your friends. There’s no distinction as to whether they’re work colleagues or not and that can cause problems.
This great levelling of one’s social network into a homogenous mass not only has implications for the person running the social network, but the brand marketer looking to leverage social networking. The more targetted, the better – right? That has always been the way with any other marketing strategy, hasn’t it?
There’s plenty of improvements that social network designers could make – improvements that would have a real impact on the ability of the brand marketer to use said network for targetted marketing. We’re not there yet. There’s more to come.
And if this Google staffer is representative, it seems like they’re giving this some serious thought – which is only a good thing, right?
You can see the whole thing here:
