Marc here… a personal rant on Facebook. Let me first put my cards on the table. I’m a Facebook junkie… I check Facebook several times per day on desktop and mobile. I check it for work (what are brands, bands and small businesses doing and how does that matter to me as an interactive marketer), I check it for personal reasons (did Marty write something else that makes me have to comment some oppositional viewpoint), I check it for my clients and I check it for prospective clients. It’s far more addictive than email, texting and my old smoking habit. I guess that makes me a little bit of a tool (in the urban dictionary sense), but hey… it’s me. To the point. More than ever, I’m reading complaints and negative personal feelings that are expressed about Facebook. Yes, it starts with privacy, but it goes way deeper, almost as if these people are writing personal notes to Facebook to take to it in 5th period math class. So many of these comments are so so first person that it’s like people have assigned human characteristics to Facebook. That got me thinking… is Facebook a person? No… of course not. Like your humble narrator, Facebook is also a tool (in this case I don’t mean in the urban dictionary sense). Some of the things it is include:
- A real time journal
- A tracking system of places you’ve been and are going
- A contact database
- A marketing and advertising engine
- A research engine (this should get better in the future)
- A storage tool (how many photos do you have?)
- A socio political sounding board
- A virtual bridge, connecting great distances
Yes… Facebook is more than just these things and that is directly to my point. It’s an inanimate object, a lifeless network of servers storing and serving countless terabytes of data per day. Facebook is a tool. So I feel like maybe we should start thinking of it more in that way. You don’t give human characteristics to your old phone book, a computer, a cell or a car. Perhaps Facebook wants this because it’s part of their brand strategy, but we don’t necessarily need to get huff about how you “feel” about Facebook. It’s just a tool. This post has nothing to do with interactive marketing, but I needed to express it. If you want your time back that it took to read it, then please give me a call and let me know. I’m a human and you can treat me as such.