Social-networking friends in ads

The industry term is "behavioral ad targeting." What it means is, advertisers are tracking young social networkers' (and everyone else's) online behavior the better to persuade them to "sell" the companies' products to their friends. "Internet start-ups out to crack the problem of advertising on social networks are developing ad technology that can analyze which people are most influential to their friends on social networks so that they can target those people with pass-it-on messages about Apple's latest iPhone or The Incredible Hulk movie," CNET reports. Widgets, those little applications that social networkers install in their profiles, are the key. Startups such as SocialMedia Networks and 33Across use them to figure out, with a mathematical algorithm, which friends are most important to the person with the profile - to decide which friends should be in a banner ad on the profile. Interesting: using math to qualify friendship. Anyway, here's CNET reporter Stefanie Olsen's example: "Instead of a banner advertising The Incredible Hulk movie, a social banner would ask which of your close Facebook friends, among a short list, you'd like to invite to see the movie. Or a social banner might inform you that a friend Jim just ranked Iron Man with three stars, and it might ask to 'click here to buy tickets at Fandango'."

Targeted Web ads & critical thinking

"Behavioral targeting," believe it or not, could be a great topic for family discussion. Sounds like a big, nasty sociological term, but it's really about critical thinking, or knowing how others might be trying to manipulate us. When teens are wise to that, they know how to protect themselves from manipulation. Anyway, behavioral targeting is quite likely happening to Web users at your house, and the Federal Trade Commission is actually looking into it, the Washington Post reports. Here's what it is, very basically: Internet companies tracking people's Web search behavior and visits to special-interest Web sites in order to target them with ads (read the article to see exactly how with people planning weddings). Here are the two sides of the debate: "while public interest groups argue that compiling profiles of largely unsuspecting Internet users ought to be illegal, online advertisers and publishers respond that their ad targeting tactics protect privacy and may be essential to support the free content on the Web." Indeed, there is money in it, as highly targeted audiences (aka those mostly likely to make purchases) are very valuable to sellers. [See also "How social influencing works."]

The MySpace experiment

Parents and teens aren't the only ones dealing with MySpace's image. Advertisers and MySpace itself are too. Last week the big story was MySpace as a corporate citizen. This week, a snapshot of where MySpace is as a business too - somewhere between "the chaos that is comfortable to many MySpace residents and the neatness that appeals to consumer product companies [advertisers]," as the New York Times put it. Just as in the corporate citizenship space, where MySpace has to strike a balance between keeping youth safe and sending them all to another site in the US or overseas without the safety precautions MySpace does have in place, so it juggles the "chaos" of customization that users love and advertisers hate (or that scares advertisers seeking association with a squeaky clean or at least predictable ad environment). The story illustrates the multidisciplinary challenge of a medium largely produced by its users. By multiple "disciplines," I mean parenting, marketing, copyright law, law enforcement, education, constitutional law, and so on. Advertisers and parents used to be able to count on media that the media companies, the content producers - not the consumers - controlled. Now the medium for advertisers' messages and parents' young content producers and socializers is a mix, some of it "professional content" owned and controlled (somewhat) by the media companies but most of it owned and produced by its own consumers (even the professional content gets sliced, diced, mixed, and mashed up by the Web's young producers). And the experiment grows, as MySpace moves from being a social site and a record label to being an incubator for Web startups. For details, check out this latest snapshot of a very complex picture at the Times.