Sex Drives Facebook Users, Sort Of
Posted by Dave Ambrose on November 15th, 2007 9:25 AMI think Nick hit on an excellent point about the circuitous nature of the media over on The Social Times. Let’s be honest, it’s a relatively slow news week for all things Facebook, so why not throw redundant information in the pot, stir it a few times and then recreate it with a spiffy title. Perhaps it will hit Techmeme?
I wasn’t able to attend the presentation hosted by Lord Zuckerberg last week here in New York City but I knew their social advertising system was going to be big news. It still is (if you discredit lackluster reviews concerning privacy on Beacon and mediocre ROI from SocialAds). However, I feel there’s one major aspect many are forgoing when it comes to Facebook, platforms, and a “universal” social graph: an overarching perspective based on *sexual* scale. (Easy now!) The ideas that came out of a Harvard dorm in 2004 were nothing entirely special. It was how Zuckerberg and Co. materialized them into a functional service. They had a little help on their side. (Bear with me on this, but I think you will get my point).
If we take a look at the rudimentary layer of Facebook, aka “the social graph,” we’ll see that the service stemmed from relationships in the real world (what we’ll call “offline”). So, with the offline relationships established, including varying degrees of nodes and ties, the Harvard team was able to visually port these data points into one, comprehensive list of connections. However, the question remained, “Will this be successful?” This is where scale comes into play (much like Marc Andreessen is doing with Ning). Facebook and the f8 platform has worked because:
- (1) by understanding the “offline” connections in the real world, Facebook merely allowed real friends to continue the conversation and relationship in a virtual environment. I don’t want to join a network where there’s no activity so there has to be some incentive as to why I should join. I can start small, with friends who lived on my residence hall floor and later extend throughout the entire university community.
- (2) but what’s going to make me come back? So what if I my friend from Biology 101 is within my social stream? I need to have a shared idea, a connection, an interest. Once my interests are established, Facebook’s back-end does all the work for me to meet someone new with hyperlinked, user-inputted interests.
These two didn’t make Facebook what is was today. I would argue, that it was, and still is, about the hook-up. (Dave McClure, fanboy extraordinaire, knows what I’m talking about in the genius that is known as “The Zen of Poke.”) Zuckerberg and Co. may have grown up and hired executive veterans within the industry to guide Facebook to IPO riches but it is and always will be about the hot blonde across the hall. In the end, it’s a win (users)-win (advertisers)-win (Facebook) for all parties involved.
Case in point:
(4.64 out of 5)
(4.17 out of 5)
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1. The linked test is bad for several obvious reasons: they have a max CPC of $0.10, they have very narrow targeting settings, and they generated less than a thousand impressions. I checked the targeting and it yields a whopping 2,460 users.
2. ROI is a simple acronym: return on investment. You can calculate it as: profit/cost. Let's plug in the values for the linked test. Profit: 439 targeted impressions. Cost: $0 (outside of the minimal labor cost). How does that translate into "mediocre ROI"?
If you do a legitimate test of Facebook advertisements, you will find it is in fact competitive to other services.
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