Friend Ranking and profiling

So I read a few articles about Friend Ranking, and I got to thinking, is this so very different from traditional database profiling? Well of course it is, but its useful to set out the differences, or as the teachers used to say, “compare and contrast”.

In a traditional database, you would go about profiling like this: (skip this bit if you’re an old hand)

1) Extract your data and send it off to an agency for wealth screening. Load the new profile codes back in. American services offer more detail than in shy old England, but even here a lot of information can be gained

2) You have been creating links between all you contacts as you go – employees/ directors/trustees/board members/ family members and so on. (One major art institution I have worked with for a number of years monitors over 100 of these relationship types.) Then look for patterns where people have more than two or three – very often they will overlap with each other because they come from similar backgrounds.

3) Combine step 1 and step 2 and find out who is wealthy and is giving and who is wealthy and is not giving and who knows who.

4) Create an action plan for each of the prospects unearthed through this process. Apply Henry Drucker’s Seven Heavenly Steps, and off you go.

FriendRanking is a new tool offered by SocialMedia that will measure people’s influence by their interactions on social networking sites. The original purpose of this was to try to maximise response to advertisements by including references to your most influential friends.

Step 1 You create a presence on Facebook and other similar social networking sites.

Step 2 The ranking system scans your ‘friends’ and their interactions with each other to find out who influences who.

Step 3 You create an ad which relates to you, but which references the influencers of the people on whose pages it pops up.

Step 4 You turn these ads into appeals for your cause, and you have a sort of peer to peer fundraising network going on, with the profiling, such as it is, all done automatically done for you.

So what’s wrong with that? I have some problems with this approach:

1) The key to success on the Internet is permission – people always initiate their own actions on the net and anything that comes unasked for will not be popular

2) Social networks are supposed to be just that – Social. People do not want to have a financial proposition put to them when they are just trying to make friends. Maybe it could work on the professional networks like LinkedIn, but I have a (totally unproven) theory that LinkedIn subscribers use that network for self promotion, not philanthropy.

3) The whole point about traditional profiling is that you build a list of your best donors and prospects. While ultimately a successful Friendranking campaign might just generate some funds, if you have no direct relationship with either the influencer or the donor, how are you going to maximise the value of that relationship?

Will it just go away? No because Facebook already tried this with Facebook Beacon, and it did not take off – the fact that someone else is trying suggests that the developers are convinced that it can be made to work, its just the approach that needs to be perfected. I think we are going to have to take Friend ranking seriously whether we like it or not!