This from the only friend I've ever had to block on Facebook - cause he constantly sent out his own promotional crap to his friend list. He knows advertising won't work on Facebook, but he sure believes in spamming his friend list.

Social networking is second only to chat rooms as the worst place to advertise. The content there from your friends and your family is more compelling than any advertisement. Google has the greatest advertising in media history -- search advertising. When you type a word into the box, we know what you're looking for. When you're on Facebook, we know you're looking to meet a girl or talk to your friends. It's a terrible platform for advertising. The holy grail of e-commerce forever has been that people are going to buy something online because their friends did, or that everybody here is into skiing so we're going to sell a bunch of skiing stuff. It hasn't happened. Plus, e-commerce is a low-margin business. It's nowhere near search inventory.

Jason Calacanis at the Graphing Social conference

He's right about Google and search intent. But his spam ju-jitsu shows he also intuitively knows how marketing will eventually work on social networks.

"The content there from your friends and your family is more compelling than any advertisement."

Logically, when the content from your family and friends is the advertising, social network monetization will start to work.

Labels: facebook

¶ 10/12/2007