Facebook Radio: Should Offer Sponsored Stories on an Opt-in Basis [Op-Ed]

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Facebook Radio: Should Offer Sponsored Stories on an Opt-in Basis

Facebook’s latest advertising offering, Sponsored Stories, is characteristic of the company: bold, clever and lacking empathy.

While the move is unlikely to encounter a revolt by users, it may make some queasy. The reason?

Consider these two questions:

• Would you be okay with Facebook advertisers using your status updates in their ads without your consent?




• When you publicly interact with your favorite companies on Facebook, is it okay for those companies to feature your posts in a way that only your friends can see them?

If you’re fine with the first scenario, then Facebook can do no wrong by you. If you’re against the second, you’re so ardently against commercial activity that you won’t interact with brands anyway. While comments on Mashable’s post describing Sponsored Stories reveal polarized opinions, most people will find themselves in the murky middle ground.

The critical opinions of Sponsored Stories stem from a problem endemic to Facebook. There’s a lack of empathy at the company that is often reminiscent of the patient case studies filling the books of Dr. Oliver Sacks. Even as Aaron Sorkin goes to great lengths to call his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network a work of fiction, every so often Facebook reminds us why the movie feels all too real. Is the company run by someone who can relate to other people?

There’s a perfect example of this in the video Facebook posted to announce Sponsored Stories. At 1 minute and 8 seconds into the video, the camera closes in on Kent, a goateed product manager who, perhaps in his late 30s, looks like Facebook’s oldest employee by a good five or 10 years. Kent looks you in the eye and says, “Anything that one of your friends is seeing as a Sponsored Story which features some of your content is actually something they would have already seen in their News Feed.”

It’s a classic Facebook moment that left me yelling at my laptop. Kent probably couldn’t hear me, but I was trying to tell him, “No! You don’t get it!” When my friends first saw my check-ins, updates, and application interactions, it was organic. It was because at that precise moment, I wanted them to see it. I felt like sharing it. It came from my heart.

Yet when it later appears as a Sponsored Story, it has nothing to do with me. It’s a brand paying to promote something I said or did, outside of the moment and context in which I did it. It doesn’t matter if my friends already saw it or could have seen it. What matters is when and why and how I originally shared it. Kent, please tell me Aaron Sorkin was wrong about your company. Please, please tell me you can understand my concern.

Facebook has backtracked from controversy before. This most famously happened with Beacon, but it happens just about every time Facebook launches a product or significantly changes its site. With Sponsored Stories, the change it needs to make is more than cosmetic, but it’s also straightforward.

What Facebook needs to do, if it wants to speak to its users in a way that shows it really understands them, is to offer Sponsored Stories on an opt-in basis. On the most basic level, it could offer a blanket opt-in or opt-out option to participate in Sponsored Stories, housed under Privacy Settings and linked to any Sponsored Story that runs. Facebook could also give users more granular control. Here’s how it could work:

• Marketers will say they want to start running Sponsored Stories.




• Facebook, using the same homepage real estate where it encourages you to find more of your friends, would tell you a marketer would like to feature your posts in Sponsored Stories. While marketers can’t select specific posts to feature, Facebook would provide users with the name of the marketer and examples of the kinds of actions from that user it would like to feature, along with a clear description on Sponsored Stories.

Most users would likely select “yes” or “no,” just as they do in simple polling boxes, while a minority would dig deeper and learn more. Users would be told it’s a way for a favorite brand to share related posts with more of the user’s friends.

In the process, users would learn that they have control over their content, and that they come first. When users lose control, they will speak up, as I had to back in December 2007 when Facebook used my endorsement in ads without my consent.

There have been other suggestions for improvements to Sponsored Stories that are less realistic. For instance, some people who commented would like to get paid when brands promote their interactions. That would only cheapen the value of those interactions. Whether it’s a nickel or a dollar or five dollars, whatever price brands would pay would fall far short of the value of unsolicited brand advocacy.

We don’t know Facebook’s next move. While many marketers will test Sponsored Stories, as well they should, users will only trust Facebook marketers to the extent they trust Facebook. With each new ad product, there’s more at stake. Showing more empathy with users will ensure its ads are even more successful. Remember, Facebook, advertisers are users too.

Content Author: David Berkowitz, Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation for digital marketing agency 360i, where he develops social media and mobile programs for marketers spanning the media & entertainment, retail, travel, and CPG industries.