So Facebook wants brands to be your friend
One of the big terms used in Social Media is that of personal and corporate brands and how important they are. The idea being that as individuals we can create a recognizable brand around who we are, what be profess to believe and how we act. With corporations the idea isn’t much different that what corporate brands have been considered as for a very long time only now they are suppose to include the idea of being open and transparent.
Twitter not long ago created a bit of a furor when they added a recommendation system with people wondering how they were benefitting from that placement of obvious celebrity names and other famous people so front and center. Twitter has stated that they aren’t receiving anything for people’s names figuring prominently in this Recommended list.
It look now though that Facebook could be headed into the same firestorm as they have just turned on a feature hat promotes the recommendation of brands as friends. This isn’t just having Coca Cola or Kotex showing up as recommended brands for you to add as a friend. It also includes so-called tech luminaries and other miscellaneous famous people.
When Nick O’Neill from AllFacebook first spotted this he noticed names like Britney Spears, Sara Lacy, the Colorado Rockies, Chris Pan, Sheryl Crow and Carmen Electra begin recommended brands for him to add as friends.
I was also recommended to the public profile for “I want to sleep … 5 more minutes!” An entertaining group but I’m not sure how many of my personal friends are actually fans. Based on the diverse selection of public profiles that I’ve been recommended to, it appears as though recommendations are a mixture of pages your friends are fans of as well as popular public profiles in general.
I’m not really sure how much of an uproar this further commercialization of Facebook will cause because unlike Twitter Facebook is all about making money – at any cost and by any means. People who have been on Facebook for sometime have obviously come to accept this as part of the deal for using the service so they will probably just slough if off. New members to Facebook will just think that is is how it always has been and won’t care one way or another.
Personally it just give another reason to keep my visits there to a bare minimum.
[Facebook pic courtesy of sitmonkeysupreme on Flickr]
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