Recently Facebook went down to the US Patent Office and got themselves a patent on a social marketing concept that allows advertisement delivery to guess at relevance by comparing social connections. Jackie Cohen over at All Facebook brings us up to speed on the patent by quoting Fenwick & West LLC, Facebook’s intellectual property attorneys (please excuse the legalese):

An inferential ad enables advertisers to reach members that do not meet targeting criteria for lack of information. A member’s connections in the social network that satisfy the targeting criteria are leveraged to infer a targeted interest. An inferential ad is selected from a candidate set to be presented to the member. Varying complexities of targeting criteria, secondary inferential targeting criteria, and scopes of inference provide flexibility for inferential ad targeting in a social network.

To break this down. If Facebook doesn’t know that a particular person has any interest in a product (using their publicly available information) it will attempt to infer their interest by looking at what their friends are interested in. Say, if I don’t say much—and I certainly never click Like on anything that comes past—the advertisers as a result don’t know what I like, instead they notice that I’m friends with Kim, Tommy, and Jake, all of whom have Liked The Crüxshadows (a Darkwave band). This marketing technology will therefore infer that there’s probably a good chance that I know who The Crüxshadows are and I might like them too, so they show me an ad about the band.

The article also goes into some discussion of recent Facebook privacy snafus and how this sort of marketing patent enables Facebook to target ads without using private or apparently-private data. Thus permitting the social network to alleviate the fears of users about their private information being bought and sold through showing how the technology works. Although, in a way the concept of “inferential ads” is intrusive, it uses the basic underpinning of the social model to make guesses about a person (something that all of us do, see Aesop’s fable about how we’re judged by the company we keep.)

Facebook has a lot of reasons to show to their users that they’re doing nothing nefarious while at the same time showing advertisers that they can deliver a superior product: a focused audience for their ads.