(Source) Imagine if all the conversations on Facebook were fed through natural language interpreters in order to understand users’ likes and dislikes. Take this a step further and imagine if all of the users photos were fed through image interpreters to find commercial products. In theory, a system could be created sophisticated enough to identify the clothing brand of a person featured in an image, determine who is influenced by this person and use this information to market to specific targets. Think about the impact on a high-schooler who sees an ad delivered on Facebook featuring the beautiful cheerleader at his school with a Pepsi can in the background. This system could work equally well for co-workers, family members and significant others. The possibilities for ‘relationship driven advertising’ are practically endless.
This kind of system would enable companies to stop spending millions for a celebrity endorsement and start buying a guaranteed recommendation from an influencer of a potential buyer for a fraction of the cost.
Is this what Facebook is coming to? If so then you’ll have to forget everything you know about social marketing.
Yesterday, Search Engine Optimization Journal wrote a post predicting that search engines and social networking sites would integrate to revolutionize both search and social marketing. If SEOmoz is correct, we may be closer to that that we can imagine.
Of course, it won’t happen tomorrow. But Microsoft could be poised to take top traffic and marketshare from Google within five years. Unless Google develops its plan first. With Google partnering with MySpace, which is working hard to play catch up to Facebook, and Microsoft partnering with Facebook while working to play catch up to Google in the search arena, this fight could get really interesting.
There is a major shuffle going on right now in the search and the social marketing industries. Google is losing employees – key employees – fast. Facebook is acquiring them. Yahoo! is losing them. MySpace is tinkering in the background. Ask, of course, is just doing its own thing, and doing it fairly well. But unless Ask develops real social applications that appeal to the masses with the cashes, it won’t be a major player. It’s quite possible that within five years the search/social marketing industry will be dominated to two giants: GoogleSpace and MSNbook. That will be interesting to see.
