Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Facebook Social Advertising Part II


I asked Khalid today if he was aware of his name and picture being used to advertise for Veritas on Facebook. To my surprise, he said no. He became a "fan" of Veritas to get a 10% discount on their GMAT prep courses. My gut reaction is that people will not be too pleased to see that they are being used in advertising without being compensated (and I don't think he sees the 10% discount as comp). The better question is: how much would be ample compensation? Will we see "Facebook celebrities" in the future? This could get really interesting.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hey Justin, seems like this post and the last one (about YouTube) are asking some similar questions: what is the compensation model for content creators and individuals who might wield some influence in the web economy?

Maybe the YouTube situation highlights a key point: that the absolute value is what matters most to creators, rather than the relative value (Rev Share).

But are we as individuals creators or are we something different entirely in the FB situation? It seems to me that some of the issue is something that Facebook seems to really struggle with: the concept of opt-in. I suspect that if the "social ads" were all opt-in, the users who opted in could have some interesting conversations with companies about compensation. Until that happens however, the conversation is probably really muddled, because many users probably don't care to show up in ads at all.

What do you think? Is there a way to compensate individuals that would be universally acceptable?