Matt Creamer of Ad Age provocatively picks up where my recent "Giant Facebook Sucking Sound" post left off in this week's cover story entitled "Would You Let these People Friend You." On the marketer stampede to Facebook he writes....
"...it's as though the ad business, frustrated with voyeuristically looking on at the rampant growth of younger-skewing sites such as MySpace, finally has a network of its own and has responded with an eruption of self-expression. And unlike the very serious LinkedIn, the industry's previous network of choice, Facebook is spewing a strange blend of content, part high-minded engagement with marketing topics of the day -- such as consumer-generated media and, natch, social networks -- and part dillydallying with mundane exercises such as the microblog Twitter and games such as Food Fight that are almost Beckettian in their embrace of pointlessness.
Nicely put! Also worth mentioning the story is accompanied with a video (Madison Avenue Stampedes onto Facebook), a format that's becoming increasingly common in online publishing. In fact, it's hard to know these days whether sites like the New York Times are derivative of print or TV. It's all getting blurry. Even my local newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, now features regular video content. What clear and obvious is that consumer video creation is inspiring many of these moves to multi-format content.
CGM 200 Member Mark: Meanwhile, my CGM forum on Facebook just hit the 200 member mark (see above graphic). Not bad for zero advertising. Looks like a fun group, and only about 20% overlap with folks subscribing to this blog. We'll see where it all leads.
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