MarketingVOX: On Doing the Facebook Thing

Today MarketingVOX officially joined Facebook.

As a business, particularly one that disseminates marketing news (a totally hype-oriented industry), I don't generally like doing the bandwagon thing ("Friend me on MySpace, guys! And I will love you to DEATH if you stick me on TOP 8").

Unless there's good reason. And -- work with me here -- I think there are good reasons to cultivate an industry news presence on Facebook.

Consider the existing benefits of logging into Facebook:

• Finger-on-pulse access to a large, mostly university-educated demographic (Stalker Feed, anyone?)
  
• The cultivated inclusion of products in the Facebook business model. It's possible to maintain a general sense of what people are into (including their feelings about your brand) by observing what brands they connect with -- and finding out why.
  
• An insider's glance on stories and memes circling professional and university spheres. (It's always interesting to see where they intersect.)
  

As a college student I wasted a lot of time on Facebook. As a professional, I still waste a lot of time on Facebook. Cognizant of its creepy magnetism, I watched with sadistic glee when Facebook expanded its network to the common man. Marketers and ad executives poured in from the furthest reaches of the universe, eager to get a ground-floor clue on the coveted co-ed demo.

What actually happened? They friended every person they've ever met, uploaded a zillion photos of themselves sipping wine and walking their dogs, and update their status 20 times a day.

But this is good. We now have a one-stop professional diaspora of people actively sharing information, promoting their podcasts and bitin' chumps.

The part of me that likes to rationalize time-wasting has convinced me Facebook is useful, and will only become more useful as the userbase grows and people share more information. John Battelle once said Google contains the database of our intentions. In a way, Facebook does too.

We put MarketingVOX on Facebook because we think it will give marketing professionals one more positive incentive to log in and connect with each other. In addition to marketing news, industry stats and that thing called "marketing culture" (stories about how marketing affects real people), we'll update the site with useful charts and spiffy apps (some of which we're now developing, most of which we're still thinking up).

I look forward to seeing what headlines catch the viral bug.

If any of this is useful to you, check out the page and become a fan. Questions? Comments? Input? I'm listening (obsessively).