|
Facebook adds unnecessary marketing techniques |
|
|
|
Tuesday, 13 November 2007 |
What do 20,565 Appalachian students and graduates have in common?
I’ll give you a hint: it allows you to tag and poke your friends.
Facebook.
Not only are there over 20,000 people in the Appalachian network, 85 percent of all college students have a Facebook account, according to Techcrunch.com.
Facebook, a social networking Web site, began in 2004 exclusively for
Harvard students, but quickly grew to support any student with an
official university e-mail address.
As of 2006, the site allows anyone with an e-mail address that belongs
to one of the social networks, including colleges, high schools, places
of employment or geographic regions, to join.
As if we didn’t spend enough time viewing photo albums and posting on
our friends’ walls, Facebook keeps adding applications that allow users
to pick out top friends, challenge them to online games, rate their
personality or even provide them with their very own stripper name.
Now why would you want to pass up that opportunity?
Although, for many, Facebook may seem like a necessity that a college
student can’t live without, it actually only exists for the same reason
as minesweeper or solitaire: to help students procrastinate even more
from doing their homework – the story of my life.
Now, if you thought Facebook couldn’t become more overloaded and distracting, it has officially topped the charts.
As of Nov. 6, the site has adopted a new advertising technique. The idea is based on word-of-mouth marketing.
For instance, if your friend buys a great new pair of jeans, she
doesn’t have to call you up to tell you about them, it will
automatically appear in your News Feed for you and all of her friends
to see.
So now, not only will you spend your time viewing pictures to find out
what all of your friends did last weekend and taking their personality
quizzes to see if you truly are BFFs, but you can also see what
everyone at Appalachian has purchased recently and what they think
about it.
Although college students tend to be easily persuaded by those late
night infomercials and entertaining commercials, it’s not like we need
another reason to spend that extra money that we don’t have.
So next time you buy that awesome pair of Pumas, you can not only join
one of the Puma groups (“Everyone loves the Puma,” “Don’t smudge my
Pumas” or “Pumas are the best shoes ever”) but also go ahead and become
a “fan” of the product.
If people won’t accept your friend requests, I’m sure the marketing companies will.
More advertising available at the click of the mouse is potentially the worst thing for low-budget college students.
After we all installed the flawless security programs that will block
all pop up ads from invading our laptops, Facebook, our best online
friend, has to go and throw unnecessary products into our face.
So as Facebook continues to add more unnecessary aspects to the already
unnecessary $15 billion Web site, our grades will not only continue to
drop due to excessive procrastination, but our bank accounts will also
slowly decrease in size.
Kelsey Ohleger, a freshman journalism major from Marshall, is an intern lifestyles reporter.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Show/Hide comments