Facebook: The Implication and Effectiveness of Invasive Advertising through Internet Media - Research Proposal Example

Facebook: The Implication and Effectiveness of Invasive Advertising through Internet Media Introduction Internet advertising is now applicable and essential in these modern days because of millions of users accessing to the internet. With the internet, there is a fast access to information from around the world nowadays. News, journals, and other information we want are now easily accessed in the internet. We can also access friends through the internet, chat with them, and so many essential things we can do with the help of the internet. In addition to this, many companies are now considering internet as one of the strategy advertising other than using the traditional media like television commercials, billboards, newspaper advertising, radio commercial and others. Facebook is one of the effective advertisement spaces for it has more than sixty four (64) million active users worldwide according to statistics (Wikipedia).1 Users can easily view the social advertisements on the webpage as they access Facebook and since there are many users on this site, information from the advertisements could be easily acquired or grasped by the users and other people accessing it. With this, this paper aims to examine the Facebook website as an effective site for advertisement, advertising product(s) and/or service(s). Through the literature that will be researched and analyzed, this paper will formulate research questions regarding Facebook and its social advertisements that could be proposed and done in the future. Literature Review A social networking website, Facebook was introduced to the public through the Internet on February 4, 2004. It is owned by Facebook, Inc. It is the most important site for folks in college and the most successful privately held, social network site.2 It is a free-access website that lets its users to be a member of one or more networks through various categories like school, geographic region, place of employment, and others to easily relate and interact with other members/people. The name Facebook refers to the paper facebook depicting members of a campus community. Facebooks are provided to incoming students, faculty and staff by some American universities, colleges and preparatory schools. This is done as a means of knowing the people on school. Mark Zuckerberg, himself a Harvard University student, founded the Facebook while he was still in school. The website membership was initially limited to Harvard students only but later expanded and includes any university, high school student, and to anyone aged thirteen (13) and over. Facebook is now trying to alter the business ways on marketing and advertise their products and services to potential (targeted) consumers. Facebook is making an advertisement from mass media to personal connections. This website is trying to enhance the delivery of the advertisement as revolutionized by Google Adwords. Like the latter, Facebook is selling advertisements in a live auction style and by publishing the advertisements to individuals who are searching for relevant information, solutions and products. Facebook improves this by delivering more targeted advertisements to users of their social network.3 Many major companies are now attracted to advertise their products and services on Facebook. This resulted through the efforts of Facebook of offering the most targeted consumers. To date, it is one of the most powerful advertising platforms. It is developing a one-to-one marketing. Since Facebook generates a wide array of information from its users, advertisements can be shown to a specific type of user based on sex, age, education, relationship status, keywords that appear in their profile, or even political views.4 Facebook Beacon is a tool in Facebook. This alerts others as to what their friends have been buying online. The user’s friend can see the user’s profile and anything else that is included. The friends of the user are also alerted to their friend’s actions through newsfeeds.5 With this kind of network, actions will be seen by many of people connected to that user, including the latest ads the user viewed or the latest product the user bought online.6 Zuckerberg stated on the launching of Facebook Beacon that “People influence people”. He continued on to say that “nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend since a trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message, a trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising,” (quoted from Davis).7 With this, Beacon has a powerful referral level because if someone buys a product online, it is then placed to the news feeds of their friends and to the user; along with the story is a picture of the friend who purchased the movie and an advertisement for Blockbuster. The user also became a brand ambassador through those Social Advertisements Feeds given to their friends.8 Users are continually promoting the products they have just purchased or reviewed to their friends online and to the other close people/user in their network accessing to Facebook. In addition, the users or the fans have the option of “opt-in” or “opt-out” for the advertisements from the company. Opt-in means sharing or informing the user’s friends 9 in the network on the things the user purchased or fan of while opt-out is the other way around. Facebook has developed a means for companies to create a profile for free where users can view related media, review products or services, add items they like to their personal pages, and become friends, or "fans," of the brand—and even make purchases. Facebook Pages allows business to interact to their costumers by gaining “fans” of their services and products. It is like the business profile has many “friends” (costumers) online but the business/company cannot view the profile of the costumer/user. Once a user became a fan of the business, the fan can kept in contact with the business through Facebook and the business’ updates can be known by messaging the fan. Due to the popularity of Facebook, on the other hand, it has been involved in some controversies.10 There were many issues on Facebook due to its open nature. Several countries have banned the access to Facebook due to the fear on political movements (e.g. Iran), public criticism on government (e.g. public criticism of the Syrian government which is punishable), promotes attack to authorities (e.g. Syria), and many other more including online dating which the United Arab Emirates restrict from accessing.11 In addition to this, Facebook is also criticized regarding on its privacy, user’s privacy. Due to the feeds sent to the user’s friends, many users complain on invasive privacy done in Facebook. The problem on the difficulty of deleting user accounts on Facebook is just a minor problem/controversy faced by Facebook. Proposed Research Questions: Based from the discussion and analysis from the Review of Literature, some questions were formulated: 1) How effective Facebook is in terms of media advertising through internet? 2) With the controversies Facebook is facing, will it still be a good website for a business to advertise its products and services? Significance of the study With the questions above, the paper will be able to give information to the business sector regarding the effectiveness of using Facebook as a place/site for advertising products and services. This will also help support the idea that internet has the most effective and easy way of advertising products and services, helping costumers to easily accessed to their products and new updates. The study could also become a basis for further studies relevant to the topic. Methodology In order to assess the Facebook’s effectiveness in internet media advertisements, this study will adopt a cross-sectional survey of one hundred users of the internet media. The interviewees will be the participants from the population profile of Facebook ages thirteen (13) and above, the major target markets for the Facebook. This method is recommended in order to establish a balanced population sample of the target group.12 The survey technique used in this study will be a qualitative discrete data-gathering method. Questions in the survey will be used as variables to assess the degree of the media’s impact on the effectiveness on the internet media advertisement. The survey will be divided into three sections of questions. The first section of survey questions will establish the survey participant’s age, occupation, and knowledge about the internet service, Facebook. The second section will establish their consumption of the media used in the marketing advertisements especially on Facebook. This should provide an illustration of how effective the media was in reaching the advertisement’s target market by the use of Facebook. The third and final section of the survey will involve questions relating to whether the survey participants is affected in the controversy and issues about the privacy and some reactions on the policies that the Facebook make about the protection on the privacy of the users. The use of these types of variables should provide a set of data that can be thoroughly analyzed to determine the effectiveness of media in the marketing by advertisements at internet media like on the Facebook. The survey will be distributed as evenly as possible between users of Facebook like students of different universities, employees and other users. This should provide a good sample of the target population. References Baloun, Karel. Inside Facebook: Life, Work and Visions of Greatness. US: Trafford Publishing, 2007. Bertrand, I. and Hughes, P. Media research methods: audiences, institutions, texts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Davis, Jon. Facebook: November 2007. Capture Commerce: Exploit Online Demand. 5 April 2008. http://www.capturecommerce.com/facebookadvertising.html “Facebook,” Wikipedia: 5 April 2008. 5 April 2008. Fort, Calib. CIRT blocks access to Facebook.com. 10 Dec. 2005. New Mexico: Daily Lobo. 5 April 2008. http://media.www.dailylobo.com/media/storage/paper344/news/2005/10/12/News/Cirt-Blocks.Access.To.Facebook.com-1017983.shtml Holahan, Catherine. Facebook: Marketers Are Your 'Friends'. 7 Nov. 2007. BusinessWeek. 5 April 2008. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc2007116_289111.htm Vander Veer, E. A. and E. Moore. Facebook: The Missing Manual. US: O'Reilly, 2008. Read More