How severely is a 24 year old man's ego warped by an imaginary $20 billion wind fall?  Ask Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, who yesterday launched Social Ads, a marketing tactic capitalizing on the demographic data his site generates.  In theory, the idea is a good one.  Putting it into action will likely provide his downfall.

As if to help prove our point, Organic CEO Mark Kingdon called the plan a "brilliant Trojan Horse" and "a natural evolution, both advertiser-friendly and user-friendly."  At what point did people begin to consider deceit and fraud to be "user-friendly?"  Aren't they the primary tools of a trojan horse?

This is exactly what Brand Jury boils down to:  transparency.  Facebook became popular because people could trust it.  Zuckerberg created it to connect with his Harvard classmates, and in its early years was accessably only by people with a college or university email address.  Unlike the unrestricted registration at MySpace, Facebook's closed registration ensured that scammers, spammers and trolls couldn't tap into the network.  

There are literally thousands of approaches to monetizing Facebook that Zuckerberg likely considered, but in the end he chose to betray the trust that laid his golden egg.  Facebook clothes itself as a social netowrking tool, yet it's fairly obvious that it is nothing more than a crafty marketing ruse designed to lower guards by inspiring confidence.  His judgment has been clouded by his newfound wealth and celebrity status, and he's arrogant enough to think that his customers are too stupid to realize what he's up to.

At what point will advertisers recognize that honey attracts much better than vinegar?  Regardless of how hard Facebook tries to make this look like a pot of honey, the soured faces of unsuspecting and unhappy users will hopefully tip him off to this reality: we don't like to be fooled.   

Popularity: 49% [?]