TOC after thoughts: marketing to the next generation

After becoming excited about the data Facebook offers as far as ad marketing goes (while wearing my work hat -- while wearing my home hat I don't like it), I was then disappointed at how the data is summed. The data is amazingly better than what you have for print advertising and you can still learn a lot about your marketing effectiveness, but it could go further. I was working with a friend on it and basically it was his ideas that were really making me see the potential and dream big. Then I read this at on ThePublishingTrendsBlog about the TOC conference:

Any niche site can become a social hub--teens aren't just using Facebook for social networking. One subject in the study, "David," spent most of his time on the "Silverfish Longboarding" discussion boards. (A longboard is a type of skateboard.) These microcommunities give teens, who tend to define themselves through 2 or 3 major interests when creating online personas, a sense of belonging.

If that's the case then marketers will absolutely need standards in reported user data. If everyone's on Facebook I can just do some test ads and find out who my market is and what they respond to. If everyone's on a hundred little boards, then I need to put ads on all those boards. A good business model would be to become the company who offered marketing for all those little boards and then aggregated data for marketers. Google AdWords comes to mind of course, though they would need to implement some of what Facebook ads currently offer.