As many of us read in the Silicon Valley Insider yesterday, Facebook is about to pass MySpace in terms of global traffic. This morning, Facebook unveiled a series of new features that enable a more split-personality type experience, allowing users to separate their work lives from their personal lives. This development was likely nine to twelve months in the making.
The key development was a selective privacy feature that trumps just about every other social network, especially MySpace and LinkedIn. Here's a few use cases:
- A college student is about to begin seeking employment; she changes all of her college party photos to only be viewable by a small group of close friends
- A startup company realizes that their CEO is posting some not-so-inspired content on Facebook; they ask him to "shrink" his circle of influence
The iconic Facebook privacy lock will likely inspire imitation by other social networks, and we can expect them to follow suit in a matter of months. There are two implications for brands, from a social media perspective:
Human Resources: Doing stealth background checks on Facebook (and, soon, the other social networks) just got a lot harder. Unless the candidate's a total moron.
Marketing: Targeting just got amazingly better, within social networks, if you have customer evangelists in these channels. The down side of this is that you won't be privy to seeing a lot of information, since people will only be sharing it privately, with their select groups of friends. A typical use case of this would be a record label doing a customer evangelist (street team) marketing campaign.
They may grant their street team exclusive rights to share tracks from an upcoming album within a social network (and users who previously would not have shared content will now participate), but they will have to rely upon this street team for reporting data, whereas it may have been publicly assessable before.
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