Late to the party
Over a year ago Facebook launched a technology called Beacon. This allowed partner companies to send information to Facebook about their users if they had a Facebook cookie. Subsequently something would appear in the Facebook user’s news stream like Benjamin Berry has bought tickets to Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Then all my friends get a little post in their news feeds and an idea of my poor taste in movies.
The upshot for partner sites is they get some highly targeted advertising in my Facebook feed. Bad taste in movies is after all contagious. Facebook gets to finally make some money to go with that spectacular valuation they have. Only one party gets left out in the cold and that’s the user. The transaction implicitly acknowledges there is value in access to the network but does not reward the caretaker of the network. Facebook must acknowledge that these are endorsements and compensate the endorser.
I can imagine a few ways to complete the endorsement deal. Facebook could payout cash to endorsers directly in proportion with their reach and amount of promotion. A couple of sticking points here, one is how to calculate reach. Simply rewarding users for their friend count would promote (even more) gamesmanship in cultivating friends, probably lowering the quality of networks. The other problem is it may be a bit unseemly right now to cash in on schilling bad movies to your friends. I’m sure they would prefer to reward users with some kind of Facebook points that could be exchanged for goods, services, or cash. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t have much of a marketplace right now. The other direction to go with compensation is to use the partner sites. Again in proportion with reach one might receive a free movie poster, or movie ticket for every X titles promoted.
In addition to rewarding users Facebook must also give users control over what they choose to promote. The process must begin as an opt-in, not an opt-out. Users must be able to fine tune which information provided by partner sites is passed on to friends as endorsements. After all I don’t really want anyone to know how many times I’ve seen Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
