Facebook have brought out ‘Pages’ for organisations, bands, artists and celebrities. I’m sure I set myself up as an ‘artist’ but I seem to have come out as a celebrity. Fine by me. If you like my illustrations, add yourself as a fan.
With a ‘Page’ you get a nice chart showing page views. Once I’ve got 10 fans I’ll also be able to get demographic data. Well done to Facebook for realising that if they provided this when you only have one fan, you’d end up being told where that person lived, so they wait until you’ve got ten.
It’s quite an obvious way for Facebook to make money. If I had something to sell (apart from about three t-shirts I have left over from last time I designed some) I’d totally be buying Facebook advertising. You get to choose how much you want to spend and what user groups you want to advertise to. Fabulous. People will whinge about their data that they put into Facebook being used to target them by advertisers, but to be honest, I don’t mind. I think it’s great that if I’m going to see adverts, they’ll be ones about things I’m likely to be interested in. Yeah advertising can get annoying and it’s all a big corporate mouthpiece and the people have no voice on the streets apart from illegal graffiti etc. etc.. But I don’t get why people are more upset about targeted advertising than advertising in general.
So don’t start calling me a capitalist. According to Facebook’s political compass application, out of 20 friends who’ve added it, I’m almost the most left-wing, and almost the most authoritarian. So I’m close to Nelson Mandela, and my friends are all in a cluster close to the Dalai Lama. Pretty Interesting…
One response to “I am my fan”
That’s a good attitude to have. Targeted advertising IS better than vague advertising. Think if the same applied to the article you were reading about Google mobile. You being upset at the dog could be avoided by knowing your context – that you find animal cruelty intolerable.
I think the thing that triggers defensiveness in people is that so much is out of their control. However, there is very little in the world that we have control over. It’s more important to try to change things that we CAN rather than waste time moaning about things, like advertising, that we can’t.
I feel a little bit like Dennis Dimbleby Bagley (post-op) saying this…but someone in California knowing that I like the music I like isn’t that distressing. They could find those details on last.fm. Or look at what I’ve bought on ebay.
It’s a good thing that the advantages of targeted advertising within Facebook have been opened up as ‘Pages’ allowing anyone to sell their stuff, not just Coca Cola.
~biff~