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Anonymous in the Social Age

Jul 28, 2014 | advertising, broadcast media, distribution, Social, the future

Facebook Ads in our Posts

I posted a link to an article about Booking’com to Facebook. To be exact I posted it to buffer an automated service that schedules links out to several of my profiles including Facebook.

The post looked like this (see on right) – A snipet of the article and a HUGE Ad featuring Booking’com.  Now I did not POST that Ad, it was not even in the article I posted, so clearly it was Put in my post by Facebook…. Interesting!

Are our communication, post and shares now the new media for ads?

Maybe we should expect that because FB is a free service and they need to advertise client to support our community. But really, isn’t that a bit much?

Should we not have a say in who sponsors our posts? I think we should, what do you think?

I imagine this is done automatically within the ad system.  It is fully automated so I don’t have a person to contact and discuss how I might control this in the future.  That got me thinking just how social is social anyway. We are sharing and engaging with people many of which are using automatic tools even to answer comments on post, let alone post on many sites. I have not problem with automation to help get the job done – but are we paying too high a price for automation, is it making us all Anonymous to some extent.

In this case, I am unknown by Booking’com who have advertised on what I think is my Content. Lets not get into that argument, it’s not the point, it does not matter if it is my content or not.  They are advertising under my name, I am pretty sure I own that…. I think!

Does this get muddy or what? But lets not get sidetracked. The advertiser here is in a post I wrote, bold and Big with Images and Text far in excess of  my Post which is overwhelmed by their promotion.  They probably do not even know it!  They certainly don’t know who I am –  and that is my point.

Anonymous in the ANTI Social Age!

Automation has allowed us  to be everywhere, a million of us all at the same time, everywhere, all at the same time in the same place. Yet we are invisible in the noise and clatter of systems pushing text and images, ads and communications at us.  Social Media we thought was about point to point, person to person and persons to groups and the end of Broadcast Media and mass communications. But it is not. It is becoming another form of mass media where our content is infused with propaganda not of our choosing and delivered to many we do not know and, to our embarrassment, to some we do.

We are in the age of mass media where content is often created by both consumers, suppliers and media, merged and mingled by autonomous systems and delivered by systems, to where we are not sure.  Systems  deliver our communication based on rules, assumption and directive we agree to. They go to sites, pages and people who in turn share, comment and create the next cycle and the next cycle of content and comments is merged, mixed and propagated by the channels and systems we subscribe to.

We don’t control it,  and the worst is still to come.

For more information on Annonymous in the social age see my follow up post which expores the issue in more detail – new-social-media-in-post-ads-are-unfair-to-all-i