Recently a good friend of mine, we’ll call her Jill, broke up with her boyfriend of 3 years, we’ll call him Joe. The split was a mutual decision and it was amicable, the complete opposite of any break up I have ever been through. Jill handled the situation really well and then late one night, I got a phone call from her crying. I was ready to run out the door, with my emergency hagan daz stash and head over to her apartment. Then I realized Jill was not crying about the breakup she was crying about the announcement of the breakup. The announcement she was referring to was the broken heart icon that Facebook displays on your friend’s newsfeeds when you remove your relationship status.
When Jill finally did change her status to “single” from “In a relationship with Joe” she was immediately seeing advertisements. Jill attended Harvard for her undergraduate degree, therefore, the singles’ ads she was served were for “Intelligent Singles.”
Whereas her newly single ex-boyfriend was served ads to suite his interests. However, the only thing Joe had on his profile to work with was his age. Therefore, this is what Joe saw:
Is there any other place on the Internet that you can target people right down to their marital status, occupation, language and/or birth date? Has there ever been another website that causes anxiety when a person needs to revise their profile?
The power of Facebook is truly fascinating. Recently, I placed an ad for a client on Facebook that wants to reach a more international audience, so I targeted people who live in one of the countries: Ireland, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, China, France or Germany and who speak 中文(简体), 中文(香港), 中文(台灣), Français (Canada), Deutsch, English (US) or Français (France). This client said that she would like to have the problem of hiring a translator – well as of yesterday; she has that problem because of Facebook.
