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So I was thinking about advertising on social networks yesterday. As one does. Obviously there’s a lot of interest in this space at the moment, what with the astronomical figures that are thrown around whenever a Facebook buyout comes up in conversation. Most of these figures are connected to the ridiculously huge number of ‘eyeballs’ social networking sites lay claim to and the length for which those eyeballs are fixed on one particular place. In the age of multitasking this sort of concentrated attention delights advertisers and the potential for advertising on social networks seems to be limited only by one’s imagination. All good so far but as some have asked, how successful is this kind of advertising anyway?

The logic behind the success of advertising to people using a search engine is relatively straightforward. You go to Google for one reason: you’re looking for something. If it’s something someone else can provide to you then they’re interested in getting your attention and (and really this is the crucial part) you’re interested in clicking their link. But if you go to Facebook or MySpace how interested are you in what someone is pushing on you? Regardless of how-well-targeted it is?

Advertising in social networks reminds me of when a friend recommends you go and see a movie. How successful is that ever? I can count the number of times on one hand I think someone’s said I ‘must see’ a film and I’ve actually done it. Certainly, I can think of plenty of times I’ve all but begged my friends to see a film and found that seemingly the more I’m interested in the movie the less they are. This goes for TV shows, music, podcasts and just about any other content you can think of. So difficult is it, in fact, that I’ve developed a tactic for suggesting things without suggesting thing; having them ‘come up’ in conversation and gently steering the person into thinking that they’re coming up with the idea of going.

Because isn’t that what it’s really about? We want to believe we made the choice. We don’t want to think that we do whatever someone else tells us to. And as soon as we start feeling they are our resistance levels increase dramatically.

I want to be clear to contrast this from asking for help from our friends. Here the recommendations are almost always acted upon but that’s because we’re choosing to elicit them them. Recommendations aren’t being pushed in this instance, they’re being pulled. When people talk about the huge influence our friends have on us, I tend to think they’re talking about their influence when we’ve decided it’s time to make a decision and we start looking for advice. Not when we’re trying to watch something on TV.

Which brings us back to the success of social networking advertising. Because how do you monetise pulled recommendations? If we jump onto the Flixster Facebook application, for instance, to see what our friends think we’re interested in what our friends think, not on ads being served up to us because of what our friends think. I guess if someone serves us up some cinema locations it’d be relevant, but that seems a much, much, much smaller potential pool of advertisers. And a correspondingly much, much, much smaller pool of money.