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Facebook Is Using Minors To Advertise Alcohol

November 22, 2011 | 4 Comments

Social marketing holds lots of potential but also many perils, especially when it involves minors.

This is especially true for alcohol advertising. It is both illegal and improper for a 13 year old to promote Coors Light or a vodka brand in a television commercial or print ad.

But it appears that Facebook is clearly violating state and federal law – and its own policies – by using its rich social graph to promote alcohol advertising, on the Facebook pages of minors.

The fact that this is happening shouldn’t be a surprise to Facebook. They not only have known about it since 2007 when they launched ads – this is exactly what social graph based advertising was supposed to do. Here’s what Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said in 2007 when Facebook launched Ads

Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online. For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation. And they’re going to do this by using the social graph in the same way our users do … Social actions are powerful because they act as trusted referrals and reinforce the fact that people influence people. It’s no longer just about messages that are broadcasted out by companies, but increasingly about information that is shared between friends. So we set out to use these social actions to build a new kind of ad system.

Want proof? Here’s the ad I saw yesterday on my daughter’s Facebook page. My daughter is 13.

 

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Social Media and Ant Colonies

July 30, 2010 | 4 Comments

Dozens of articles are written daily about ways that businesses and individuals can leverage Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, and other social networks. Many of these articles assume that one-size-fits-all when marketing on social networks. But for every individual or company that has successfully marketed on social networks, numerous others fail – even when supported by vast marketing budgets and expensive consultants. For example, Cisco tried to imitate Old Spice’s viral social media campaign and nobody noticed.

Why? And what do ant colonies have to do with social media and social networks?

Ants are fascinating insects. E.O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler, in their 1991 Pulitzer Winning book The Ants, described an ant colony as a superogranism – a vast social network. The ants in the colony communicate with each other by following chemical trails left by other ants.

(Photo by aristeos)

In one sense, the strategy for success on social networks is not vastly different from the chemical trails that ants leave to guide other ants. Companies can leave digital “trails” by connecting users with each other and by engaging users in a dialogue with and about the brand. Old Spice successfully did this in their recent campaign.

If people were like ants and followed “chemical” trails, it would be easy to predict the success or failure of marketing efforts.

People are not like ants. People aren’t “programmed” to follow digital “trails” in the same way that ants follow the chemical trail left by other ants.

There are vast opportunities on social networks. They don’t all revolve around widgets, fan pages and viral videos. If you’re developing strategies to market on social networks, consider how you can differentiate yourself from others, not just in form, but in substance. Bring something new to the conversation. Find a different way to engage your customers. Develop a unique voice. Challenge yourself and your consultants to build new “trails” – like Old Spice did in their campaign – and not to merely recycle those left by others. Don’t feel compelled to do something merely because others are doing it.

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media, Startup Tips, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Welcome To The Social Media Revolution

August 17, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Did you know that it took television 13 years to reach 50 million users? Facebook reached 100 million users in only 9 months. And Facebook isn’t even the largest social network. QZone – a Chinese analog, has 300 million users.

If you still think social media is a fad – the following short video (4:22) offers some compelling arguments that could prompt you to reconsider your views.

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy Tagged With: , ,

Are We Becoming A Little Less Human Online?

July 27, 2009 | 8 Comments

2676960860_fa358c04a1_oI’ve been watching the TV series HEROES. The show is about people but with special abilities – flight, invisibility, ability to predict the future, melting solid objects, instant healing from any injury, and many more – who live among the normal population.

During one of the episodes.  Claire Bennet, a high school cheerleader who can instantly heal from any injury, loses her ability to feel pain. Pain was one of the few things that made Claire feel human.

After I watched that episode, I started thinking about my own experiences – offline and online – and about the many ways in which many of us are just a little less human when we’re online. Part of the problem lies in the medium – we can’t usually see the people we’re talking to online, and that makes our conversations a bit more detached and impersonal. We send @ messages on Twitter, post updates on Facebook, send emails and direct messages, and think of those activities as conversations. And they are indeed conversations – through these conversations, we learn, share, teach, laugh, discuss, debate, etc.

But as we continue to become a society that spends increasing amounts of time looking at a computer, are we losing a bit of emotion with each conversation? In the quest for popularity and followers and/or  friends, are we losing perspective? Are we more likely to forget when we’re online that harsh words and criticism can hurt others? And we quicker to judge others when we have the cloak of invisibility surrounding our online activities? And is this trend impacting our offline relationships too?

What do you think?

Image credit: 파파곰

Filed Under: Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , , ,