Future of Work: Your Facebook Friends are Worth More Than $145,000

Posted on | June 2, 2009 | No Comments

I know you like your Facebook friends, but a new marketing trend may make you love (or hate) them.  Marketing and advertising firms, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM and Facebook are all trying to put a value on your relationships.  Suits and geeks from Madison Avenue to Silicon Valley are trying to figure out how much influence you wield over each of your Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections, so they can figure out how much and what kinds of goods and services you can convince your friends and connections to buy.

If they can figure it out, they can sell it to their clients as a way to finally bore through our collective “anti-advertising” shields.  Since we are ignoring Facebook, mobile and search ads, TV commercials and pretty much everything we don’t want to see, marketers are excited at the prospect of slipping their messaging and pitches into our Facebook updates, tweets and texts.  They are hoping to leverage the trust and access we share with our friends, family members and colleagues to sell their wares.  In exchange for using our relationships, marketers may offer referral fees, free products and services and even jobs.

Already, companies have created Social Media Strategist, Information Dynamics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Research and Friendship Analyst jobs to mine the data we create by updating our profiles, texting, emailing, poking, friending, tweeting and sending virtual gifts.  Up next, expect companies to hire “Mavens” and “Connectors”, folks who establish and actively nurture close relationships 1000′s of online friends, family and colleagues.  The salary or commissions paid will depend on the valuation assigned to a maven or connector’s network.  For particularly outgoing and enterprising folks, if you can call app-jockeys outgoing, this could mean full-time, six-figure jobs.

For the less outgoing but equally enterprising, there will be jobs as digital anthropologists, sociologists and microeconomists.  In fact, Hewlett Packard, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM and scores of marketing and advertising firms are already at war over the small pool of social science and statistics grads at MIT, Harvard and Berkeley.  Entry and mid-level jobs are paying as much as $145,000 and an average of $85,000.

The field of “friendship analysis” is still in its infancy, so it’s not too late to jump in!

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