Facebook as a marketing medium for libraries

After Facebook fails. [Doc Searls] Michael Wolff writes: "The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency." This is in full agreement with The Advertising Bubble chapter in The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. "The results of personalized advertising, so far, have been lousy for actual persons … Tracking, filtering and personalizing advertising all compromise our anonymity." Here’s what Michael says about the utopian exhaust Facebook and its “ecosystem” are smoking: "So far, the sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way eludes Facebook."

The buyer is a person. That person does not require either a social network or absolutely-informed guesswork to know who he or she is or what they want to buy. In a subchapter of The Filter Bubble titled “A Bad Theory of You,” Eli Pariser calls both Facebook’s and Google’s data-based assumptions about us “pretty poor representations of who we are, in part because there is no one set of data that describes who we are.” Three problems here:

1. By its nature advertising is not personal.
2. Making advertising personal changes it into something else that is often less welcome.
3. There are better ways to get to achieve Michael’s objective — ways that start on the buyer’s side, rather than the seller’s.

Facebook makes 82% of its money by selling targeted display advertising. Because Facebook knows so much about each person on its service, it can target in ways Google and others can only dream about. But as many have pointed out, Facebook’s approach to advertising has a problem: People don’t (yet) come to Facebook with the intention of consuming quality content (as they do with media sites), or finding an answer to a question (as they do at Google search). Do those Facebook ads work as well or better than other approaches?

Vince Writes: Is Facebook a useful medium to market the library? Do users want or expect public institutions to be 'intruding' into their social stream? Is this the best way to develop a relationshp with our customers?