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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion