Given the amount of attention paid to Facebook, I thought that I would share a nice little article about the implications of Social Networking Sites (SNS) found on Slate.com.
http://www.slate.com/id
The article highlights the humourous but all too real issue of managing an extended network of friends on SNSs. What does it mean to have 13,000 friends? I am not too sure. Am I offending someone if I turn down their friend request or if I de-friend them? Real decisions … real dilemmas 
Perhaps what the author of the article failed to note was that indiscriminately connecting to a large network of “friends” has benefits. It’s been highlighted in Granovetter’s renowned paper “the Strength of Weak ties” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
However, it is precisely the structural properties of networks that PR/marketers are exploiting when the embed their ads in SNS. A nice example was raised in the new york times last week about how chase targetted college students by having their ads embedded in facebook ( http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09
I think that this brings up an interesting issue with how poorly the PR/Marketing/advertising industry understands how Social Networking sites work. We’ve seen the large migration of teen users from sites like friendster and myspace to facebook in the past year. One of the oft cited reasons was that the teens were tired of being hounded, not just by fake profiles (which is also a PR/marketing type issue), but by advertisers. danah boyd articulates this better than I can on her blog when she says:
“More significantly, MySpace has turned into a massive zit full of marketing puss. Most teens don’t mind advertising but when things look more like spam than advertising, you’re in deep shit. Every PR organization and marketing arm is leeching onto MySpace like a blood thirsty vampire. Problem is that vampires kill their prey. Teens who wanna hang with friends are mostly protecting themselves by privatizing their profile (more cuz of the marketing predators than the sexual ones) but this quickly loses the luster, particularly when it’s fundamentally hard to do what you want to communicate with your friends. (Simple things like friend management and better messaging tools would go a long way.) I’m very worried about how, unregulated, spamming and over-advertising will kill even the coolest social hangouts. I keep wondering what the regulation solution will have to be. (Is it law or code cuz it ain’t gonna be market or social norms?)”
I was actually at a PR/Ad/Marketing industry conference over ssummer called PodCamp 2007. It was articulated during this conference that the industry feels threatened by the power and attention that the users/consumers and consumers have gained through the enablement of social applications on the internet. In fact, a lot of the conference revolved around strategies of managing perception and maintaining the balance power with the users/consumers. I was a little troubled by this use of thie frame to represent engagement between users and companies. It would seem that this framing would tend to lead to exploitation of the open mechanisms of trust and identity that social software systems are reliant on.
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