One of the core tenets of Community Driven Marketing is that Permission is the “new blockade.”
You, we, as individuals, have more power than EVER before to determine what type of information gets through to us and what doesn’t.
Well, Facebook has validated that point with their new look.
A friend, Julia was just emailing me last week saying “do you know how I can block certain people from my news feed? IT seems like they update their statuses all the time and it gets annoying.”
Now you can. Next to each person’s name in your news page, if you hover over it with your mouse, you will see a big “X” that says “Hide {name]”
Once you click it, you get this note (Evonne-I undid it, this was just for demo purposes :-))
Now, you don’t have to “de-friend” someone like I had to with Diana. You can stay “friends” with them, but NEVER hear from them (at least in a status update).
I call this the "Facebook Line Item Veto."
This is even more power in your hands…and means that you (and every company) now has to make sure that they are not flooding the stream with status updates that people, like Julia, will find annoying.
Because, if she does, she will block you. And, odds are, once she does that, she isn’t going to spend a heck of a lot of time looking through the hidden friends.
Lesson: The pressure is on for corporate marketers and for individuals. Be relevant or be ignored.