Starting soon, the sponsored advertisements on the side of your page will no longer feature ads with written copy, but promoted content from the company's page showing which of your friends have liked/commented on it. This means instead of seeing an ad from Liftopia trying to convince you to like their page, you might see their recent photo caption contest instead, showing which of your friends participated. Additionally this sponsored content will also appear in your news feed as friends like and interact with different brands.
These changes from Facebook make two very distinct statements. The first is that content is king and the second is we care more about what our friends think than what marketers think. The focus on quality content is a function of what I love most about digital marketing. In a world where we have a great scarcity of attention every drop of it counts. Marketers are recognizing more and more that if they are going to get a few seconds of our precious time they will need to offer something in return. If you want my attention you must create something worth reading/seeing/participating in. Facebook shouldn't be a new channel to barrage customers with messaging, but a a flexible medium for both parties to interact within. Another feature embracing this "don't waste my time" attitude is that interactions with sponsored content occur in the actual advertisement. This means to like or comment on sponsored content users don't have to chase it back to the source but can interact immediately and at minimal cost to them.
The second statement, that we give more credence to our friend's opinions than marketer's, adds another interesting dimension of value to what Chris Anderson describes as "the world's largest closed market of reputational currency". Watching Facebook develop over the years, I've taken a particular interest in how people manage this reputional currency. Southpark captures the idea better than most in their episode "You Have Zero Friends" where Kyle learns first hand that "buying" bad Facebook stock, aka adding someone who isn't cool, damages the value of your social capital. The clip below says it all.
I apologize for the atrocious quality. C'mon people, I thought we were past filming our televisions.
The value of your Facebook stock is dependent on much more than your friend list. Take for instance how constantly making meaningless status updates hurts your perception of other's "stock". From my perspective a large determinant of this value comes from the quantity and quality of your content. Someone constantly sharing interesting stories, ideas and video's is going to be more valuable to their Facebook friends than someone with inferior content.
Now consider this concept of reputational currency in the context of evaluating brands based on who else likes them. In a world where not all likes are created equal, the likes of some will have a greater impact than others. I believe this impact will be determined by user's general reputational currency but also by the perceived value of their reputation in specific contexts. I know when I see a DJ friend of mine like an artist I am drastically more likely to check out their page than if it where liked by my friend's Mom. Imagine the discrepancy in value of the most popular girl in a large sorority with thousands of friends liking Bacardi Silver compared to a quiet introvert with fifty friends.
Thinking of your likes in terms of social value is one thing, now imagine those likes having monetary value. Instead of my reputation being good for getting people to check out my new blog posts it is now good for creating concrete marketing value for brands I support. This shift creates an exciting opportunity for understanding and measuring how ideas spread. For the first time ever there will be concrete statistics about who the most influential taste-makers are and how valuable their likes are. I for one am excited to see how this discrepancy in the value of people's likes changes the way companies market.
An important shift I haven't touched on yet is sponsored content appearing in your news feed. This is the only part of the change I am wary off. I liked having sponsored ads on the side because it was easy to recognize them as such. Having sponsored stories in your news feed has the potential to be deceiving and is what I consider to be one of the greatest threats to the internet. I acknowledge that Facebook is a valuable service and am willing to accept the cost of my attention to ads in exchange. However, I object to Facebook manipulating the information that gets to me without me knowing I've been manipulated. It's one thing if they are tweaking filter bubbles to get me more relevant content, but deceptively compromising the service provided to me for their gain at my expense is not, as Eric Cartman would say, "coo". A primary violator of this is Yelp.com. Unbeknownst to their users, Yelp pressures small businesses to pay addition fees in return for deleting negative reviews. Of course everything I just mentioned is dependent on how news feed stories are identified. If the distinction is easy to make I don't think it much of a problem.
This TED talk is not directly related but touches on many of the ideas involved with having unknown filtering take place.
