It’s no secret that Facebook has played fast and loose with your personal information; however, their latest maneuver is aimed at forcing advertisers to stop the barrage of poorly targeted advertising.

While some users don’t care for the omnipresent stream of ads on Facebook, others actually appreciate them–when they are relevant. It’s the intrusive ones like “Get A Free Laptop!” that have finally moved Facebook to action. Their ad business helped the social media company generate more than $1 billion in revenue last year, but now they are rolling out some new rules. In “Facebook cracks down on irrelevant ad targeting techniques,” Meghan Keanee observes that poorly targeted ads don’t just draw the ire of its users, they are just plain bad for business. To straighten aggressive marketers out, Facebook now has an evaluation program “to seek out and discard ads that utilize user data that is not relevant to the product or offer.” How effective this system will be at weeding out ads that play fast and loose with your demographic data, remains to be seen.

The SSN Take: If Facebook’s new ad policy wards off aggressive marketers, users may begin to welcome your company’s message instead of seeing it as an intrusion on their conversation.

David Hardt, March 30, 2010

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