Facebook new ad: is it shouting or talking?
It’s not a secret that relationship between customers and companies during recent years shifted significantly from companies’ dictatorship to customer control power. “Groundswell” the book made by Forrester Research describes a bunch of new methods, which are supposed to involve the company in qualitative relationship with customer. Talking is one of them. According to it, companies, instead of advertising, should use creative ways to approach the clients and to involve them into the communication. One of the popular approaches can be posting to blogs, creating videos or participation in social networks. But what if the social network itself needs to talk to the users? What method of communication should it use? And is it possible nowadays to convert a simple advertasing message into the instrument of two-sides communication? Through this post I want to show a bit different approach to Talking as one of the tactics of “new communication”.
Recently Facebook started the advertising campaign to approach the target market in 13 countries (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines etc), where it is not popular because of the technology gap or existence of local powerful social networks (for example, “Vkontakte” in Russia). Facebook released the video ad, aimed to show the things connecting people throughout the world. What can it be?
Chairs…Strange choice, isn’t it? But it actually works. Just a week passed, but Facebook already got feedbacks of different kinds, starting from the Are Chairs Like Facebook? web-page till the parody reply ad of the following content:
One could say that the original ad is just a shouting, unpopular technics of the past, which is aimed to deliver the message to as many people as possible. Nevertheless, though it is just an advertising video, it seems to be talking method, because talking creates conversation. And these re-posting, web-page response creations, video parodies are the conversation. Is it the good one – this is a question. But people talk about, people exchange the information and express opinion, though for now mostly negative.
Next step should be made by Facebook. It is interesting to see how it will respond to continue this conversation or to turn it to another, more favorable way.
