Friendrank, All about using your Friend to click on that Ad

By sahel • June 24, 2008

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I had written before that in one of my article that for a web 2.0 model to survive , there will be a model which will be customized for it and there will be companies which will be built on that model like the Google Adsense model had SEM specialist companies. One of the comapany Socialmedia is trying to find compelling ways to advertise on social network is offering Web 2.0 advertisers a new product called “FriendRank.”

SocialMedia would track your activities on Facebook which includes your groups , applications and the way you interact with your friends
This way they have developed a system which analyzes who your best friends are and then ranks them according to their nearness with respect to you.

Matt Marshall in his blog for Venture beat said

“I sat down with SocialMedia co founder Seth Goldstein last week, who told me that the response rate to standard display advertising on social networks is abysmal. People click on ads about 0.02 percent of the time, he said, because people have started ignoring ads.”

Through one of the Early tests ,the company says that it has proved that people are 200 times more likely to respond to the social ad. (A non-social ad might command a click-through rate of 0.15 percent vs. a social banner at 0.5 percent.)
In one of controversial moves, even Facebook had tried the beacon services which resulted in bad publicity, as their were privacy concerns which were reported by the users which led Facebook to abandon the service.

As I have highlighted above,One of the biggest issues that could arise with this is the privacy concerns as it happened with Facebook.
It is very much possible that this policy of Social Media might backfire. Suppose I don’t want to view that ad which has my friend’s description in it. Though I do believe
that there is a high probability of me clicking on it, but if it is frustrating or time wasting, I might become immune to such ads in the future as have most of the internet users
around the world.

Though it also seems that People at Social media fully realize this and have seriously thought about this. This is what Nick Gonzales (who previously wrote for Techcrunch) feels who is busy evangelizing company’s products.
The company provides consumers a notice and a choice to personally opt out of sharing their information within the social network. From a privacy page, it also lets users opt out of the ad itself by clicking on a “what’s this” text.

If you really want to know how such a system would work, just look at the images below and you wil understand what a “social banner “is like.

IMG Source:: http://blog.socialmedia.com/