Facebook intends to capitalize on the wealth of information it has about its users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a market research tool.
The appearance, later this year, of corporate polls targeting certain Facebook users because of the information they have posted on their pages is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.
Last week 24-year-old Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg showed the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, how the social networking site could be used to poll specific groups of users.
He asked users in Palestine and then Israel about peace issues before relaying the results back to the audience within minutes.
He also polled more than 100,000 US users of the Web site, asking them whether they thought US President Barack Obama’s fiscal stimulus package would be enough to resurrect the economy. Two out of five said it was not enough.
Giving consumer brands the chance to use such a wide audience to get a quick response to targeted questions would do away with, or at least reduce their reliance on, expensive and time-consuming focus groups.
Speaking to well-known tech blogger Robert Scoble at the event, Zuckerberg said this year would be Facebook’s “intense” year as it tries to justify some of the mammoth valuations that have been placed upon it by making some serious revenues through advertising. He was even seen sporting a tie, which the Harvard drop-out had so far eschewed.
Zuckerberg said the company had been experimenting with analysis of user sentiment, tracking the mood of its audience through what they are doing online.
Such information is potentially very interesting to large brands seeking to measure what their customers think about their own or competitors’ products.
Facebook’s advertising technology already allows advertisers to choose which sort of customer will see their display advertisements when they log on to the site. Advertisers can choose from such categories as where the user is located and their age and gender, based upon what the user has uploaded on to Facebook — which is adding about 450,000 new users a day.
Last year, Facebook launched its Engagement Ads tool, which allows advertisers to publish a poll on people’s home pages. They are then able to see how their friends and other users have voted.
The polls, which can include actions such as watching and rating a movie trailer, are being tested by companies including AT&T and CareerBuilder.com.
The US recruitment Web site used its trial Facebook polls on Sunday to ask people what they thought of the ad that was played during the coverage of the 43rd Super Bowl. However, the first widespread use of polls is expected in the spring.
Facebook also has a tool called Facebook Lexicon, which is a bit like Google Trends, allowing users to track what topics are being discussed by people on Facebook.
While Google Trends uses the search terms that are entered into its site, Facebook Lexicon looks at one of the most visible parts of a user’s profile page — their wall, where people and their friends exchange public messages. It provides a searchable database of trends over time, showing how the incidence of particular words or phrases has increased or decreased in wall posts.
Facebook Lexicon shows that the company already has a significant database of user data that it could exploit and the tools are in place to allow firms to use its information for market research.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS