Explaining Social Media`s Friendship Ranks - Are we looking for the Most Popular Person on the Internet?
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Well, no, this is definitely not an Internet popularity contest. What FriendRank is really doing is more like an attempt to push advertising as if it were not directly from sponsoring companies, but instead from your friends or co-workers. They do this by using a variety of information-gathering techniques, like digging into Facebook information (within established privacy policies) and drawing relationships with those you have interacted online, either in Facebook, MySpace, or even playing games, or sharing files.
An example of how this might work goes like this: instead of advertising, say, the new Coldplay album, it would ask you to list with which of your online friends you would like to share your feelings about the album. The same banner could be shown to this list stating that you, as the referring sender, have rated it highly (or poorly as the case might be) while of course providing a link to reviews, and to buy that CD immediately.
Social Media also says that someone is nearly 200 times more likely to purchase an item sent via a social networking device versus traditional online advertising. In an advertising experiment, Social Media tested this theory with those with a budget over $100,000, explaining how to customize aspects of the BMW 1 Series, to create a VR Test Drive. At the same time, these social banners would be delivered to the person's list of close friends, stating that the sender was currently taking a test drive, and then offer you the ability to quickly join the referrer, creating your own test drive.
So it sounds very cool but the historical background behind advertising developments is rife with problems. First, people are not very excited to see any form of advertising on the Internet, especially when they are in the middle of tasks or communications. Another issue is the inherent question of usability of these targeted sites where content is primarily controlled and often misused by children. This inherently creates risqué areas and controversial topics/images that advertisers might not want to see their advertisements around.
Imagine yourself as an advertiser, with a great, new and fantastic "green" cleaning product, finding your ad next to someone stating that Global Warming is not only a myth but outright scandal as well. Or pet food, next to someone who has a problem with PETA. It doesn't seem to add up, does it? It seems a bit hard to control, as Social Media is definitely all about volume. To date, it has ramped up to serve over three billion ads per month (to an estimated 20 million unique users), divided by geographic, demographic and appographic boundaries.
What is an appographic boundary? This is a term that Social Media itself came up with to signify a new way to classify people based on the types of applications they use and how they use them. Social Media's appographics are based on over 5,000 available company applications, driven by 900 developers. According to Social Media, the definition of appographic segmentation is the ability to target impressions to specific groups of applications that fulfill the advertiser's needs.
Next: Haven't We Seen This Before? Well, sort of... >>
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