Lessons to be learned from over-agressive advertising

There is a very important lesson to be learned in the Facebook debacle.

Opt-in, not opt-out.

The AP put it perfectly: “The backlash against Beacon illustrated the delicate balancing act that Facebook must negotiate as the company tries to cash in on its popularity without alienating the users fueling its success.”

As much as I want to rail against the stupidity of whomever came up with the idea of “opt-out” instead of “opt-in” for this program, many others have. There’s no more to give there. The horse is dead.

But I will talk about the fact that we’re going to see more and more experiments as these social networking and Web 2.0 companies keep trying to make money in different ways, leveraging their most valuable asset – the data that they have of users and their preferences.

The amount of data people are strewing all over the internet about themselves is staggering – and also the surprise when a prospective employer looks you up and finds what they think is a racy MySpace page.

This data can be pulled together in various ways to hyper-target advertising, making it very valuable.

It will be interesting what the next experiment is. I have the feeling we’re going to have a rough year as far as privacy as these highly-valued companies try to justify those valuations with actual revenue, using the data that users have handed over to them.

If a company can walk that line of privacy vs. revenue, then it will be very, very successful.

Maybe even offer premium accounts that share no data with advertisers, so the real value proposition is up front. Free, but your data is shared; or paid, and the data stays locked up.

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Facebook, Opt-in, not opt-out, Beacon, Monetization Strategy, Lessons to be learned