What You Should Know About Facebook’s Brilliant Trojan Horse

The folks who work at Facebook are a smart bunch. They realize that in order for their ads to be effective and their ad platform to be more value-driving, they need to allow corporations to more intelligently target their userbase.

What better way than to get someone else to do it for them?

What better way, than to coax other corporations to spend their marketing and development dollars to build a system for users to “like” their products and hence populate each Facebook user’s profile with more information about the kinds of products and news items that they like?

The IMDB.com Example

Right now, if you do a “Facebook Like” on IMDB for the movie, “300″ (disclaimer: I love that movie), you will have indicated that on IMDB’s page for “300″.

You are also then sharing that information with your friends in your newsfeed activity. What IMDB can also do now is enter that information into your Facebook information tab, adding “300″ into your “favourite movies”.

Facebook says that IMDB will be able to deploy “hooks” to leverage upon this database in future, to target updates to everyone who likes the movie. Say, let you know when 300′s prequel comes out…

What a great story to sell to companies like IMDB.

So What’s The Trojan Horse?

The simple definition of Trojan Horse is the mechanism with which a third party can now “enter your premises” based on a “pretext”.

IMDB opens the door for Facebook with its effort to make movie fans do “Facebook likes” on its content (movie pages). Facebook takes the game further by selling that user data to future advertisers. A more detailed database makes its advertising platform much more valuable.

The catch is this: IMDB is now not the ONLY entity that can take advantage of this information that is updated in the information tab of your profile. For example, a clothes retailer can now advertise Spartan Warrior Halloween Outfits to you, by targeting FB users who like the movie “300″.

What Do Levi-Strauss, Gap and Armani Jeans have in common? Jeans.

I’ll give you another example. Levi-Strauss has implemented the “Facebook Like” on its listing of jeans on its own website. What happens next is that The Gap or Armani Jeans can now leverage upon that information to advertise jeans to you.

My guess is most people don’t realize this. IMDB probably doesn’t; Levi-Strauss probably doesn’t either.

But now that you know these implications, my hope is at least you’re a better informed consumer/Facebook user.

Key links to bring you up to speed:

- Facebook Hobbies and Interests Are Now Connected To Pages – Now FB can target you by hobbies and interests based on your FB page likes/fans.
- The Levi’s® Brand Creates Personalized “Social Shopping” Experience

This piece was originally published here. Image courtesy of mjuhah.

About The Author

Kien M Lee is the founder of SENATUS, an online and offline professional and social network for the Aspiring. It is an exclusive community in which membership is by invitation only.

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