Grounded In Reality

Matthew Creamer of AdAge wrote an article entitled Facebook’s Map Might Lead Advertisers Astray about the ever approaching ‘social graph’ for Facebook. The ‘social graph’ will be a tool that, by using profile information, will help advertising and marketing campaigns be successfully targeted to a desired demographic or network. This author appears to be a mild skeptic, pointing out the Achilles heel of all social network profiles; how honest are they?

He posts:

“What (Mark Zuckerberg) is essentially proposing is a new cultural role for the mass online social network that recasts what has been mainly a time waster as a useful and efficient communications tool for business and personal use. …In Mr. Zuckerberg’s high-minded conception, one’s collection of Facebook friends should reflect one’s real-life social network by providing accurate data about users and by being a close-to-comprehensive map of all the important nodes in one’s life.”

He best summarizes the problem with this concept by giving an example from his own life that I feel is fairly universal:

“In the absence of empirical data, I turned to my own circle and asked how well their online networks of Facebook friends reflect their real-life, offline networks — the sum of their business, familiar and social connections. For some, their day-to-day contacts aren’t there. For others, Facebook is wholly a work thing and family members are missing. Two middle-age respondents even expressed frustrations that their college-age children have so far declined to join their network. Without being pressed much, just about all of the respondents — generally heavy users with oft-edited pages — indicated significant gaps or holes in their networks.”

I find this to be very true. I, for one, have complete segments of friends, co-workers and family members who aren’t on Facebook. Admittedly, I’m a heavy user of the network and update my information often, but with key people and information about my life not being represented on my profile, how does Facebook except to capture a true picture of my social network for its graph?

So, the main thought is this: If the information presented on a Facebook page could be false and if your network is incomplete with your real-life counterparts, why introduce a graph that is based on this information? As much as I personally advocate the use of Facebook for networking and brand awareness, I must say I’m pretty skeptical of this new social graph they are proposing.

I liked the author’s concluding statements on this topic and felt it best summarizes the “take with a grain of salt” attitude that many people don’t tend to use with digital media:

“Even if Facebook ends up ‘only’ succeeding as a major ad play, Mr. Zuckerberg can always take solace in the example of a company that’s been an enormous success despite not meeting its high-minded goal. A little firm called Google started out with boasts on nothing less than organizing the world’s information. Its only unimpeachable achievement has been to own the area of search advertising — and a $210 billion market cap.”

Christy Leger
GCI Read-Poland
Austin, TX