Are Facebook’s Friendship Pages To Become Another Brand Opportunity?
Posted: Friday 29 October, 2010
Pete Goold
The news today of the forthcoming launch of Friendship Pages within Facebook, to commence immediately and be rolled out on a phased basis, is interesting in terms of the direction it suggests at between brands and consumers on the site.
My first thoughts are that it's a simple evolution of the wall-to-wall functionality. The functionality sounds a little more sophisticated but it seems to still hinge around manual tagging, which is understandable given the scale of the task for anything more semantic/automated.
The way that the idea has been presented by the Facebook blog is actually quite sweet - a little sentimental for sure but nevertheless, I fully agree that something genuine to gravitate to is created by focusing on real relationships and their evolution over time. Certainly I know that many of my actual relationships are maintained as a result of facebook - and may have simply tailed off if we were not both users of the site.
The one issue that I have with the concept is the value in looking back over the course of the relationship. Other than pure nostalgia - or indeed reminding both parties what they have in common, which is surely redundant in those relationships which have the most value - I can't see it being particularly useful way of segmenting or presenting information.
The key, which may well be behind the launch itself, might be not in the relationships between individuals, but in using this functionality to capture the relationship between a brand and their fans. Clearly this isn't on the table yet but it does seem to be a commercial opportunity, giving brands one to one access on a two way basis with anyone that chooses to correspond in this way.
The functionality would have to evolve, of course. I can't see many people wanting a picture postcard representation of their love affair with an FMCG brand, for example. But then, stranger things have happened - and if it is possible as a result of being acceptable to consumers, it's certainly going to be commercially valuable to brands.
There's an article on this on Mashable.
