*sigh*
How might you compensate management for a year in which profits plunged, you spent $550 million of shareholder money to settle a fraud investigation and your stock ended up more or less exactly where it started?
You might be tempted to nix raises or withhold bonuses to send a responsible message about linking pay to performance. But if so, you wouldn’t be Goldman Sachs.
It just had the year described above – and responded by tripling everyone’s base salary while boosting bonuses by 40%. Is this a great country or what?
full article at Fortune’s Street Sweep blog>>
Facebook, you’re killing yourself.
Facebook Turns the ‘Like’ Into Its Newest Ad
via AdAge >>
SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — The ubiquitous “like” is currency for brands, and Facebook is giving them a new way to collect: an ad unit that shows up on the right-hand side of the screen it calls “sponsored stories.”
The unit will give brand-related action such as a “like” or a check-in a lot more visibility on Facebook by adding them to an ad unit in addition to users’ news feeds.
For example, if Starbucks buys a “sponsored story” ad, the status of a user’s friends who check into or “like” Starbucks will run twice: once in the user’s news feed, and again as a paid ad for Starbucks. Though clearly marked with the words “sponsored story,” the ad — which will includes a user’s name, just like the news feed — is not optional for Facebook users.
Great comments are below the article, too:
I see a lot of brute force in all of these advertising “experiments” from Facebook lately, and not much finesse. And I think the user experience is suffering. I find it harder and harder to know where anything is in FB, and that should be a cause for concern for them. Facebook WAS the clean, safe alternative to MySpace. The more convoluted and cluttered it gets, the more room opens up for someone to come in and supplant them with a better UI.
- Jeff Greenhouse
and this:
Facebook – WAKE UP!!!
Monetizing the “Like” feature for Facebook enhances advertisers’ paid messages but it also pisses off Facebook users and diminishes the experience….
The more Facebook gets plastered with conventional ads, taking advantage of it’s users engagement, the more it will look like a NASCAR sponsored vehicle driving away active engagement and participation.
Rodney Mason, CMO www.moosylvania.com
and this:
Facebook has brought upon the downfall of the advertising effectiveness of social media.
Bill Starr, CEO mylifelist.org
and also:
Let’s see how long it takes for one of these advertisers to get sued by someone who figures they should be paid a TALENT fee. If they publish an ad with your photo (not to mention your name and your words), seems like you should be paid — unless you signed a release form saying you work for free!
bbbbird
..to the thoughtful:
It’s very interesting to see that in a peer-to-peer medium where brands have no natural place, brands still very much pursue a brand approach.
Call me crazy, but why not focus on value between peer-to-peer rather than interceding that relationship with in attempts for a brand-to-peer or peer-to-brand-to-peer relationship. After all, being human does seem to work.
Best regards,
@josippetrusa
and:
The time really is ripe for a Facebook alternative now isn’t it?
FB has made risky moves before (news feeds for one) and proved it was the right thing to do, but I’d fear that this blatantly tells their members that they’re tracking their actions for demographic business needs. Not that people aren’t aware of this to some extent, but a company should be careful in how obvious they’re monitoring their members. No one likes to feel like they’re being spied on, or that every move and action is being recorded and watched.
- pancakes
