San Francisco — Facebook seems to have attracted some attention at the high-profile World Economic Forum in an effort to capitalize on the wealth of information it has on its 150 million-strong members by allowing multinational companies to use its users’ personal profiles to conduct their own marketing research.
According to CNN that reported from Davos, Switzerland, coming toghther of government and business leaders that Facebook, in association with YouTube and MySpace, brought social networking to a new altitude in such elite company, from which it can often seem a generation gap away.
Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg was particularly very high spirited about the response, according to CNN.
“When you think about the audience you can really see this glittering moment in their eyes when they see 2,500 responses come in three minutes,” she said. “It has been really interesting to see how Facebook users are guiding some of these discussions and the way that global leaders are now looking at this as a place for insight and to get a real time pulse.”
It is expected the decision will ultimately start to produce serious profits for the hugely popular site, which has struggled to make money from advertising.
Companies would be able to put questions to specially selected Facebook users — based on such intimate details as to whether they are single or married or even gay or straight — to test the appeal of new commercial products.
Facebook’s Zuckerberg has been exhibiting the site’s new instant polling tool to business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
She said the capability to poll users in real-time feedback from the site’s millions of users impressed businesses used to conducting time-consuming focus groups was a great advantage for the site.
She was equally demonstrative in an interview with Britain’s Sunday Telegraph. “Davos is really a key place to launch an instant tool like this,” she told the newspaper.
“I had tons of people saying ‘this could be so incredible for our business.’ It takes a very long time to do a focus group, and businesses often do not have the luxury of time. I think they liked the instant responses,” Ms Zuckerberg — the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, said in a statement.
Last week Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old founder and chief executive, demonstrated to the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos how the social networking site could be utilized to poll particular groups of users.
He first posed question to users in Palestine and then Israel about peace issues before relaying the results back to the audience within minutes. He also surveyed more than 100,000 American users of the website, asking them whether they thought President Obama’s fiscal stimulus package would be enough to resurrect the economy. Two out of five said it was not enough.
Offering consumer brands the opportunity to utilize such a magnanimous audience to get a quick response to targeted questions would do away with, or at least reduce their reliance on, expensive and time-consuming focus groups.
Last year, Facebook introduced its “Engagement Ads Tool,” which allows advertisers to publish a poll on people’s home pages. They are then able to see how their friends and other Facebook users have voted. The polls, which can include actions such as watching and rating a movie trailer, are being tested by companies including AT&T and CareerBuilder.com.
Nevertheless, the show, later this year, of corporate polls targeted at definite parts of the Facebook audience because of the information they have posted on their pages, is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.