San Francisco startup SocialMedia has launched three new social media ad formats that portend what is likely to come, provided users are comfortable with the amount of personal information the ads share.

• Twitter Pulse integrates a live feed of tweets that match the advertiser’s filters, and also allows users to tweet their own. The ad unit can be integrated with a larger-form microsite, and targeted ads.
  
• Friend to Friend ads are similar to the “Your-friend is a fan of…” ads you might have seen on Facebook, which is where the data is drawn from. A product gets a picture and an endorsement from one of your Facebook friends.
  
• Community Poll and Community Stream prompt visitors for an opinion on a product or question, and either shares the community’s responses in the form of percentages, or a friend’s response to the same.
  

It’s not hard to imagine that the ads will perform well. Seeing a friend’s picture or name and implied endorsement of something has been the key to Facebook’s apps’ virality. Given social media users’ aversion to anything other than something bearing a friend’s face, and the explosive popularity of Twitter (thanks, Ms Winfrey), the new ad formats exploit novelty and social graph data to drive attention and engagement.

But are all visitors going to be enthralled? Some are likely to quickly draw some conclusions that they hadn’t anticipated: what I write on Facebook and Twitter isn’t limited to my friends and followers. The next question will probably be: who else has access to this data and what are they doing with it? And the next thought could be: how do I change my settings? or I’m never using Facebook/Twitter again or How do I contact my Congressman?

Maybe an exaggeration, but we all remember the uproar of Facebook Beacon, and in that case, we knew who had access to the data (Facebook only), and the data was shared within the private confines of one’s social graph on Facebook. My suspicion is that many don’t know that the Twitter firehose is publicly available, and that Facebook shares activity data with advertising partners. We’ll see how discomfiting users find this, and whether this is just another form of targeting that raises the ire of Washington.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.