Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The recent flight from Facebook by a number of large companies underscored the problem advertising on social networking sites involves.

In somewhat of an odd statement to me, the site said it had been caught off guard when the companies fled the site and the story swept across the media landscape.

Owen Van Natta, Facebook chief operating officer said, "We weren't entirely prepared for it or we would have taken action to try to resolve it before it even got to the press."

Why I say that's odd, it's because concerns about putting content next to user-generated and social networking content has been being discussed for the last couple years. To be surprised by it shows the focus of the company needs to change.

At the same time, companies and governments shouldn't be surprised either for the same reason. They took the risk because pricing on these types of sites are lower than the web portals charge.

In response to the actions by the companies, Facebook says it will work on giving advertisers more control over their ads and what they will appear next to on the site.

Van Natta added that they'll build technology which will empower companies to target ads, along with other controls. There was no word on how long that will take.

The problem for ad companies could end up being similar to uploaded copyrighted video, where it has become impossible to monitor uploads because as soon as its taken down someone else puts it back up.

Facebook has other sites that would be considered risky and undesirable as well. If numerous sites like these are allowed to proliferate, the challenge of monitoring it could become cost and time prohibitive.
 
This would probably cause companies to migrate back to web portals and other safer sites where there are better controls in place.