$1 Tag To Reach Your Facebook Inbox – What About Permission Marketing?

Facebook recently announced a new ad experiment where strangers can reach your inbox for $1. Till now, messages from people you may not have known would have ended up in the ‘Other’ aka Spam folder on Facebook. It’s going to cost a one-time fee of $1 to reach a user’s inbox. The user retains the option to mark the message as spam, meaning that future messages would not be seen in the main inbox folder.

Does this idea cross the boundary of showing right column and newsfeed ads on Facebook? Maybe…Why?

It’s true that every time Facebook introduces a change, users voice their opinion against it till they get accustomed to it. In reality, it’s safe to say that the only reason Facebook is free is because people are obtaining something valuable to them in exchange for personal information. The data is the product.

Permission Marketing – the term popularized by Seth Godin is respecting the privilege of reaching customers. In his own words, “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” – Seth Godin

For brands, it’s important to understand that liking a page may not be the same as loving the brand…A user could like a page, but choose to remove the brand’s message from Newsfeed…there are multiple ways in which fans can exhibit “contradictory” behaviour. For a marketer to assume that it’s OK to reach a user’s inbox without the explicit permission is a bit dangerous.

Facebook Messages have evolved significantly and now includes several elements of what you would expect from Email. It’s also the one place on Facebook where you can keep conversations private.  With this, the expectations from Facebook Messages would be similar to that from Email.

A good email subscription involves:

• Subscription by a user (opt-in)
• Confirmation of subscription (double opt-in)
• “Add to Safe List” (further proof of relevance to the user)

Looking at this process, it seems that the new Facebook feature breaks all these levels of permission marketing. Bear in mind that Facebook has said that will be experimenting the new feature in the coming weeks so we are still in the early stages of it.

As a user, what do you think about this new feature? Do you treat your Facebook Inbox as a supplementary email and would be OK with receiving marketing messages from people/brands?

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