Facebook's new ad service, as has been documented, is a three pronged approach:
- Company Sites. It allows companies to create their own webpages, where other people can add feedback and become fans of the company, upload videos and pictures (not sure of what -- company parties and picnics? I guess promos.), etc. Really, it's not much more than a tweak of current facebook framework for people. But it's already working. You might even find a Liquid CV Facebook presence...
- Social Ads. I'm still getting my arms around this, but apparently this is a system whereby facebook has a cookie on your computer, and when you come upon a facebook "social ads" customer or partner's website, that website reads your facebook cookie to determine your networking profile, and produce a targeted ad. OK, so that sounds a LOT bit like what I was talking about in an earlier post. ( check out this interesting BLOG I found. )
- Data Mining. This is where customers of facebook get some kind of access to the network mapping information in raw form, which the customer can use for targeted ads on their own. How boring a topic. Data mining is so 90's.
Again, point 2 sounds like the cookie-driven job-ad filtering mechanism I was talking about. OK, so that phrase is a mouthful. Let's call the cookie-driven job-ad filtering mechanism....the cookiejob mechanism. And the job ads that people see with this mechanism are...cookiejobs -- because they're preselected based on the cookie info. I think what will slow the development of the cookiejob mechanism is simply the anti-competitiveness of the online HR industry in general. But it will happen. Hell, I'll inquire about becoming a Facebook cookie partner and think about implementing it on Liquid CV.
But what I really want to talk about is point 1 above -- Company Sites. This means that, owing either to Facebook's reuse of people-oriented website frames and widgets, or by Facebook's grand scheme (I think the former), companies will begin to take on a human face via Facebook. Pardon the almost-pun. This falls in line with the whole concept of corporate citizenship. Now, while I'm cool with CSR, what really intrigues me is that once the company takes on a human face, we begin to expect information about the company as we would a human -- friends, references, maybe even personality (Aha!! Corporate Culture!). And thus, Facebook has helped generate a bit more towards bi-directional flow of information between companies, potentially hiring, and candidates, albeit in a convoluted and perhaps unintended way.
This is good for hiring! This contributes towards the Liquid HR economy. We just have to figure out how to get a piece of the action.
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