Editorial: Monetising Facebook may not work

was a service.

He even went on to say: "We missed the right balance". The problem
wasn't making it 'opt-in', but more that Facebook had omitted to tell
people what it was doing.

It's interesting to see all the affiliate partners go to ground and
refuse to be embroiled in the mess. It must have seemed the perfect
targeting opportunity for them, so it's no wonder they've decided to
leave all the apologies to Facebook.

Their retail offering would be highlighted to someone who had recently
bought an item like their stock or visited a site like theirs. Never
mind the respectable brands that got involved, the site had huge
potential for porn sites, which have always been at the forefront of
digital development, and also gambling sites.

Will this damage Facebook for the foreseeable future? Perhaps. It has
certainly woken its 'community' up to the danger of sharing information,
weakening its friendly brand status.

There are a lot of tech-savvy users out there who know how to block
private information, but they are far outweighed by the ones who are
under the impression that each website doesn't monitor what they're
buying and thinking about.

This year will see digital marketing really come of age. Every brand
wants to leverage social media, but only those that truly have a USP to
engage with their audience will succeed. You only have to look at the
communities created around experiences such as STA Travel and GHD on
Facebook and MySpace to see that when you give a person what they want
and they will fall for you.

The Facebook drama came at an interesting time as privacy experts debate
whether prospective employees should be investigated by their potential
boss on Facebook, MySpace and the like.

Whether privacy laws will be tightened to deal with it, who knows, but
there is a generation growing up that is slowly going to realise their
behaviour on the internet is as transparent as dancing naked with the
curtains open.