Since last year’s change to the privacy terms and conditions, a move which in itself attracted enough bad press to sink a government with a decent sized majority, Facebook has endured what some might say was a difficult adolescence. Their difficult teenage years started to intensify even more recently with movements springing up to boycott Facebook by deleting accounts from the service. Anybody who has tried to do this recently will know just how complex and painful a task doing this actually is. There are several layers to get through before you even get the chance to deactivate your account and it takes an even greater effort to actually get them to remove you from the system itself.

The central hub of the objection that the Boycott Facebook campaigners seem to have to the site is that the information they hold about you is being misused to the point of abuse by the service. Whilst I really can sympathise with them on this it does have to be stated that these people are displaying a quite stunning level of naivety in their outrage over the issue.

I’ve been in and around the web for a long time and, whilst I’m loathe to get into the clichéd terms of “The Free Web”, “Web 1.0”, “Web 2.0” etc., it’s pretty clear that the days of the web as a force for good and a haven of free speech/content was over long before we all rushed like crazed sheep to start poking each other and turning our ‘friends’ into zombies and pirates. Facebook, like most of the web’s most successful social brands, started out without any kind of business model or viral strategy. Like any business that starts without a goal, as soon as the product started gaining any traction so did the need to “monetize” (I know, I know. Sorry) it. You can’t expect them to provide the service for free can you?

Facebook has one primary asset that it can use as a saleable product. That asset is you, the demographic data assigned to each user account. Advertisers identify the people most likely to buy their product, they then identify the best vehicles to do that with. For instance and in the most traditional sense, if Boots are looking to promote their sale they are likely to, say, buy some ad space in the commercial break on Desperate Housewives. Likewise, if Carlsberg want to sell their Lager they will run ads in the break of the World Cup. It’s called targeting and companies will pay a certain premium to reach their target market. Facebook holds an infinitely more precise set of demographic information about you than just which TV program you are likely to be watching, everything from your age, your sexuality, what type of area you live in and what products you assign your brand loyalties to. To believe that the information Facebook holds about you, especially given the value of that information, will not be used as some sort of saleable asset marks you out as either terribly naive or some sort of anachronistic idealist. There is a transaction that takes place for you signing up to their “free” service. For some that might not be explicit enough but to believe that it isn’t implicit is just bananas.

That Facebook use your (or their, if you really think about it) data doesn’t make them an evil corporation bent on world domination, what it does make them is a company with a revenue stream. Maybe in a Web 2.0 world that isn’t seen as cool or bleeding edge enough to some but it is a necessity. So, they are neither Snow White or the Big Bad Wolf, as with most things the truth is a far more nuanced grey area. Expect Twitter to be next up in the race to “monetize the user base”, it’s already started with their ad-Tweets, and what’s more I’ll wager they wont make half as good a job of it as Facebook has.

Piano Stairs

World’s Deepest Bin

Bottle Arcade (Teaser)

I have to declare an interest at this point though, I adore VWs, especially some of the late 80s / early 90s examples. My first car was a gorgeous, but slightly careworn MkII Golf GTi which I nicknamed the Millenium Falcon, as much for its ability to make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs as the alarming regularity that things fell off it. I loved that car and I love 80s Volkswagens – even more than the 60s equivalents – and somehow VW have managed to capture a bit of the fun of the Mk1 and Mk2 Golfs or the Sirocco.

I drive a Honda Civic estate now though so I might just be missing the old days.

We are, after all, talking about the same company who thought it was a good move for their band to be plastered across the chests of Chelsea FC who are probably the least likable, most vulgar team in world football. Until new petrochemical kids on the block Manchester City came along Chelsea were the embodiment of the ills of the modern game and a litmus test for just how far the world’s favorite sport had gone from being the working man’s game to the Oligarch’s latest play thing. Confusingly, the brand guardians at Samsung thought this would be the image they would want for their company.

Anyway, petty football rivalries aside Samsung have continued making their brand less likeable by now trying even harder to be likable. Lets face it, there’s nothing like desperation and neediness to make you less attractive. The amazing thing about this is that it’s the second iteration of this campaign, the original got panned so they re-cut and re-released it.

The film itself just feels like viral by numbers to me, you can imagine the “creatives” on this account getting the brief, replete with gems like “fresh”, “out of the box”, “guerrilla” and “edgy”, and rubbing their grubby little mits. They’ve even embellished it with the standard talking heads and, even worse, cringe inducing web speak in the form of “FTW” (which, for those of you who have a life and a soul and may not know, means For The Win).

Ugh, I feel all torrid now and need to go and have a wash. Anyway, have a read of some of the video comments for some extra derision.

Haha Facebook, now you know people who dont like Wispas feel.

Anyway, under the radar of the awful publicity and frantic petitioning Facebook have been making some very shrewd, very quiet changes to the way it works. I have, for some time now, been telling anyone who will listen (and some that wont) that the value of Facebook’s targeting information is worth it’s weight in gold and that they havent even began to exploit it. It now looks like they have began to actually realise what the potential of the data they hold and they have chosen just about the right time to do it. Online advertising spend is conservatively predicted to fall by around 10% in 2009 and Google has just recorded its first sequential quarterly drop in sales since 2004. Even that’s great when you compare it in the virtual collapse of traditional media ad spend which has tanked and is in the process of taking many a newspaper and TV station with it.

So in the face of all of that what of Facebook’s revenues then? Well, as I said above, theyhave historically been awful at making money so it’s from a fairly low basemark. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO says that their ad revenues “may climb 70 percent this year”. Simply amazing, doubly so in 2009, so how are they doing this?

Firstly there’s the ads which have up to “25 characters in the title and as many as 135 characters in the body of the text”, sound familiar? Yes, it’s Twitter. OK, theres an optional photo but that’s what it is, but while Facebook had egg on its face when it last aped Twitter it seems this time it has paid off. Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of product marketing for monetization (ouch, nice title Tim) says the service lets companies target users based on the information they put on their profiles “You basically just have a greater diversity of people using our ad system — lots of businesses, lots of local businesses finding success. It’s really been a steady, successful growth pattern.”

They have also been *ahem* heavily influenced by Google’s adwords system with their new campaign configuration interface. Feedback for this has been pretty patchy and that’s being kind, but as someone who used early incarnations of the AdWords system I can attest to the fact that it has improved immeasurably over time.

They have also, for the first time, emplyed a real, human Sales Team to assist companies with more interactive promotions, rather gloriously called “Engagement Ads.” They can include features such as video and let users do things like become “fans” of a brand. Add that to the fact that that it has 200 million active users and is still growing rapidly, especially among baby boomers, then Facebook’s outlook is pretty rosy.