From Christina Brodie, Interactive Producer, Palio
You know you’ve done it at the office –– we all have! A quick glance here, a post there, even a photo or video upload every once in a while if there’s time. Facebook is taking over. The social community giant is, in fact, taking over a huge chunk of your workday and personal productivity. We’ve read the Twitter jokes:
- @OPB – BREAKING NEWS: Facebook is down. Worker productivity rises. U.S. climbs out of recession
- @mikeluna its true, Facebook is down. in other news: productivity around the globe is up 85%
- @crackberrykevin – This just in: workplace productivity at a 6 year all time high now that Facebook is down
In 2009, Nielsen Online reported that the average Facebook user spends approximately 4 hours, 39 minutes, and 33 seconds a month on the social network. How much of that time are you viewing your account at work?
It doesn’t matter whether you use your phone to view your friend’s status or the “two windows open at work” trick – in most work environments, this type of practice is frowned upon. If you are not doing productive work, well, you are not making money.
Luckily for me, it’s part of my job to know how people are interacting on the World Wide Web: what information they seek, where they seek it, and who they are listening to. This information allows me to provide key insights to my team, helping them create campaigns, messages, and advertisements that will catch your eye while surfing the Web and, yes, Facebook.
Just last month (September 2010), Nielsen released its new Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings tool that will, for the first time, provide online audience data comparable to their television ratings. This new tracking system, combined with the existing online metrics data, allows advertisers to know a user’s age range, gender, educational background, even salary range. With this detailed information, companies can hone their advertising efforts even more than they can with television and print. They can pinpoint what site you visited, how you got there, what you viewed, and how long you stayed. You may think this data collection is an invasion of privacy, maybe even a little creepy, but from this marketer’s mind, it is simply brilliant!
So the next time you read your friend’s post on Facebook or visit a Web site and notice the cool banner advertisement playing to your right, just think this ad was most likely developed using information gathered to catch the interest of a person with demographics and interests just like yours.
And, for some eye-opening Facebook facts, check out this post from Todd LaRoche.
Palio is a full-spectrum global pharmaceutical and consumer advertising, marketing, and communications agency that excels in brand creation and specializes in brand strategy, product launches, global marketing, and digital and integrated media.
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