THINK OUTSIDE IN

Carrying your friends and their interests with you will indeed be extremely important to the future of the web and commerce.

This post of mine might be of interest:
http://mattmusick.com/post/22081891874/recommendations-inform-almost-all-of-our-choices

I LOVED it!
Its amazing how all my thoughts appeared in your presentation!
I’ve taken with me a few key sentences you said and for sure spreading
around your word!

Hi Paul,

I admire your thoughts, and especially the way you present them. I have been following your blog for some time and read your book. I like the way you dive much deeper into the complex material than other blogs. I was wondering, do you have any reocmmendations for other blogs on the social web that are as good as yours?

best,

Phil

Interesting approach. What we have been working on is helping companies in the social space to bridge the gap between social norms and market norms and that seems to be the space Facebook is heading.

I think the convergence between what is good for the advertiser and what is good for the consumer is how Facebook will enable content and service providers to sustain themselves via new advertising models as traditional revenue streams continue to get interrupted by the web and other technology.

For instance, imagine how much more effective Hulu could be if they incorporated your Facebook data. Instead of Hulu throwing useless car ads at me (a law student piling up debt with the idea of purchasing a car even more distant than earning a salary), it could realize that I like bourbon, it can see what whiskeys my friends drink, and it can then insert an ad for that whiskey instead of the car ad, and even inform me that my friends like it.

To imagine how this could be even more powerful, imagine Amazon inserting advertising into Hulu while using your Amazon & Facebook information. Instead of a traditional ad, it could pull up a screen full of products tailored to your interests and ask you to rate them on how interested you are in purchasing the product (not even a call to buy them). This data could then be used to build Etsy like platforms that recommend gifts for you, could be used for Amazon to insert relevant ads into your Facebook feed, could be used for Amazon to do targeted deals, all on top of the initial exposure to the product.

Finally, it also opens up the window to smaller businesses. Think who sponsors TV shows now – large corporations like Ford, Subway etc. They run expensive advertising campaigns that interrupt people are often irrelevant, and do not have the greatest returns, so they have to cast a large blanket and cover huge regions. If TV or Hulu could incorporate Facebook data, then it becomes possible for companies and brands to run targeted ads. This means it suddenly becomes viable for my local Fried Chicken restaurant to run TV ads because they only have to commit a small amount of cash and they know it will only be spent targeting an audience relevant to them.

All this applies to other content and services, I just used TV as an example because I think soon enough TV advertising will look nothing like it does today.

In brief, I think Facebook will change advertising so that companies get a bigger return on investment and will make the industry more accessible to more businesses. The end result is that it will provide content and service providers with more revenue as they see traditional advertising models fall off a cliff.