Will you be my Facebook "friend?"

Facebook is not about nurturing friendships and connecting with people.

Facebook is about me.

Sure, people use it to stay in touch with friends, but it is actually just a socially acceptable venue to grandstand about ourselves and feed our precious egos. We boast our accomplishments, showcase our hobbies and interests, and make sure everyone knows what's on our minds at any given moment.

And the more "friends" we have, the better! Not because it means we are so lucky to have all these wonderful people in our lives, but rather because it means we have more people who are willing to listen to us talk about ourselves! And of course we all know, the higher our friend count, the more inherently awesome we really are. It doesn't matter if we actually know or like all those people. Of course, we all do these things to varying degrees, but you can't deny the underlying fact that we use Facebook to make ourselves feel good about being "me."

So what are the ramifications of this for companies who are using social media tools like Facebook in their marketing strategies?

The Economist published an article about conversational marketing and whether websites like Facebook and MySpace were going to change the world of advertising. The article mostly talks about how word of mouth advertising and the concept of marketers engaging in the conversations of their consumer are NOT new ideas. Instead, the article indicates that these strategies have been around for a very long time, but the internet has made them more powerful than ever.

What I found most interesting was a comment credited to Paul Martino, the creator of Tribe. He said that the quality of the connections made on soical networking sites is quite low. So markters who think they are utilizing these tools to spread conversational or word of mouth advertising might be in for a surprise.

I know that I have a lot of "friends" on Facebook that I don't have much of a connection to, but I accepted the request because (1) I didn't want to make the person feel bad and (2) it boosted my friend total, thus making me look more popular and feel better about myself! But when it comes down to it, there is no real connection, and I usually wind up ignoring or blocking any feeds associated with those type of people.

So my network is actually much less powerful than it appears. If corporations are expending resources to exploit our social networks, their ROI is bound to be less than they were expecting. The Economist called these networks "visual clutter about the banal doings of increasingly random people."

Time will tell, but this is defiantly something marketers should keep in mind when developing social networking advertising strategies.

btw... are we friends on Facebook yet??