As the investment world watches Facebook’s historic IPO today, marketers are beginning to wonder if advertising on the 900-million-member social network is going to yield anything close to the bonanza of its initial stock offering.
Just this week, General Motors confirmed it was cancelling $10 million worth of ads on the site because, said the Wall Street Journal, it found they “had little impact on consumers.”
The article arrived like a bombshell, coming just days before the IPO. It set off all sorts of debate in the marketing community — and beyond, of course — as experts weighed in on both sides. Rival carmaker Ford even jumped in, firing a shot on Twitter saying, “It’s all about the execution. Our Facebook ads are effective when strategically combined with engaging content & innovation.” Remember that part about “engaging content & innovation.”
For recruiters, this is more than just an interesting sidebar to the stock sale story; which, is opening (but won’t stay) at $38 a share, giving Facebook a market value of $108 billion. Rather, the General Motors withdrawal raises anew the whole issue of the effectiveness of social media recruiting, and Facebook specifically. keep reading…



















