Sitting in my office Tuesday morning listening to WPSU, I heard a news story on NPR’s ‘Morning Edition.’ The story was about Facebook and the launching of its new e-mail service. The premise behind the new service is the ability to bring all of your communication streams into one platform—your wall posts, your chats, IMs and now e-mail in one area.
In a very short time Facebook and other social media have become a part of our lives in ways we never would have imagined just a few years ago. Now Facebook is looking to become an even bigger part with an e-mail service.
It is being pitched as a convenience for the consumer. But it is a two-way street. The more you use the e-mail service, the more time you spend on their page and the more they learn about you.
In a press conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned how the new e-mail service will help Facebook users.
“Because we know who your friends are, because you put in your friends list and your friends have put in their friends list, we can do some really good filtering for you to make sure that you only see the messages that you really care about.”
On the face of it, it sounds innocent enough, but listen closely: We know who your friends are. Some days it seems I don’t even know who my friends are, but thankfully Facebook has got that covered for me.
Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy Facebook. I find it is valuable as a way to reconnect and stay in touch with people over long distances. On top of that, it’s free.
Or is it?
Over time it has become an information-gathering site and a profiling site. The information gained about its users is the true value of any social media company.
The more you play Mafia Wars or Farmville, the more quizzes you take, the more things you like or become a fan of, the more they know about you.
Why does that matter? The more information they have on you, the more they can predict your behavior and—more important—what products you might buy.
As of Tuesday night there were 240,223 people who “like” the Penn State Football page on Facebook. It is no coincidence that many of those people get ads on their pages for rental units for home football weekends, or ads for Penn State clothing or T-shirts.
How good is this system? Scary good. When a woman on Facebook changed her relationship status to engaged, ads for a local wedding photographer began appearing on her page. By simply connecting her relationship status with her location information they could instantly match a location with a need and a potential customer. It is genius and is envied by many in the advertising world.
In today’s age of fragmented television viewing and decreasing newspaper and magazine readership, the battle is on to find ways to target and reach consumers who are most likely to buy the products being advertised.
Dropping an ad into a popular television show doesn’t guarantee you a hit because so many of us TiVo or DVR them. We watch later and skip the commercials. A lot of those shows are also available “On Demand,” allowing us ad-free viewing.
Whether the founders of Facebook consciously set out to create this great profiling system or they evolved into it, they are sitting on something incredibly valuable.
In the Information Age, Facebook offers the greatest consumer information-gathering device ever known to man. And it takes little to no effort on the company’s part, which makes the business model even better. People sign up and just hand over the information.
In the summer of 2008 I was in then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s national campaign headquarters in Chicago. There I met one of Facebook’s co-founders, Chris Hughes. In our conversation he mentioned how effective Facebook had become in gaining insight into each of its users.
When I told him that I was on Facebook, he joked that “We may know more about you than you know about yourself.”
His point was well taken. What has amazed me is how Facebook and Twitter and other social media have changed the way we live our lives. It has created a society where we live out loud and in a very public way. We hand out personal information through a portal where it is mined for potential value.
As we continue to rely on social media in our daily lives, the question really is, how much do we really want anyone to know about us? Think about that the next time you head onto a social media site.
You may be surprised to know how much some companies already know about you.
