FLIRTing with the Crowds

Just stumbled upon this great example of how to do marketing in social networks like Facebook: Visual Bookshelf lets you collect a virtual collection of books, dvds, games and other bookshelf items you have accrued over the years and display them on your Facebook profile.

The application has all the functionalities you would expect from such a goodie, such as separate lists for “currently reading”, “already read” and “want to read”, the possibility to check out books read by other people that are reading the same books as you are, and, naturally to very smoothly transcend from wanting to read a book to actually ordering it from one of amazon’s various local outlets. Should you find someone with reading habits similar to your own, you can easily ask them to add you as a friend in order to start conversations around a subject in a more intimate space. There’s also a ‘leaderboard’ and you can comment on other people’s reading tastes (contrary to common saying, tastes and opinions are among the ONLY things you can have a good argument on) and naturally send recommendations to people.This is a mode of marketing that I’ve been raving about in my own pitches to marketers: on social networks  you need to create something that enriches the conversation between people, provides useful value and consequently drives people to your services. Trying to intrude yet another personal space with ads that your targets find irrelevant and useless is a wasted effort.

The Visual Bookshelf is also one more example of how Facebook (along with Google) knows your present interests better than your mom. Kinda scary. But so far fun.

—

p.s. I already found a new must-have book through the service; I stated having read Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Survivor‘ and found that the same book has been read by almost six thousand other people. Browsing through their readings I came across a book titled ‘Controlling Others for Love and Profit‘. While this might be just another self-help work for North Americans, for me as a Finn the title strikes as very absurd. I’m waiting with excitement the reactions from others after I leave that on my coffee table ‘by accident’…