If Marc Canter were not so far away right now I would hug him. He gets the purpose of these massively huge social networking spaces. The real purpose is to create a marketplace for brands to engage thier customers and find ways to interact and project value.
I am slightly skeptical of these systems because I want to see if this is nothing more than hyper targeted advertisement or real genuine customer engagement, the later being so much harder to do than the earlier - which I am so happy to see (oddly). Facebookâs new ad system, Google's Open Social, and Hivelive are all looking at how to do a better job of targeting adds to those who want / should see them.
I had an interesting conversation with an advertising executive the other day and he and I really got to foundation of things - Advertising has alwas been a funnel - you throw a big wide scope out there in hopes of getting to the correct one consumer. But the Net has turned that upside down. You cast a very small targeted piece to the right people and they in turn spread it all around for you. I'll be interested to see how intrusive these systems are and if I can tweak my own profile to get certain products.
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