Web Marketing

Facebook has recently taken advantage of the social facet of giving feedback. The introduction of the “pose a question” feature on the wall is an attempt by the social networking site to jump take on the role of social organizer in terms of opinion. Individuals are increasingly posting on Facebook and Twitter questions for their friends about products, services, opinions, and other types of questions. Feedback solicited has the benefit of coming from your entire extended network of connections on Facebook, reducing the time required to solicit the same feedback in person and providing information from your network of people who will likely have similar opinions to yours. In terms of product ratings, this is something that is an area of potential growth for Facebook. People often use the question facet for political questions already. As Facebook benefits from incorporating the best practices of all other online social sites, like blogs, Twitter, and others, this could be a valuable tool for companies marketing products online. However, Facebook has made it clear in the past that they will remain ardently loyal to their human users, keeping commercial intrusion to a minimum.

Web-based feedback tools like these have sped up the time in which it takes to value the defaults of a product and to spread information about the merits of products and services. But has it changed the fundamental ways in which individuals collect information about potential purchases, or just sped up that process? Do people get the majority of the information about products and services they buy from friends in a format like Facebook or rather from aggregated data of all users of certain products from sites like Amazon.com? This distinction may not have changed in our emerging age of technology.