Last week Paul posted a blog entry “Your Facebook friend is the advertiser” in which he talks about peer-to-peer advertising. Paul accurately notes,

“After all, do you really care that your friend likes a certain toothpaste brand or drinks Seven-Up? Also, what would motivate someone to announce this to the world? While the News Feed is a phenomenal way of keeping updated, clogging it up with advertising would make it much less useful.”

Equally sceptical of advertising on Facebook I was inclined to agree with Paul’s position, that is until I recently discovered the power of iLike. With over 15 million registered users and 700,000 “daily active users” on Facebook, iLike is a prime example of a peer-to-peer N-Fluence network. It’s so effective in fact, that it barely feels like advertising. The paper, “N-Gen Strategic Investigation: N-Fluence Networks” describes this concept:

“Emerging technologies such as blogs, instant messaging, and social networking sites comprise the new tools the Net Generation use to communicate with and influence one another. We call these potent networks of relationships and communications patterns N-Fluence networks. These networks put the customer in control, rejecting passive consumption of marketing material in favor of a new model in which consumers create and/or distribute messages themselves.”

For me, it all started with a visit to Ticketmaster to buy concert tickets, like I have so many times before. Only this time, upon confirming my purchase, I was presented with an intriguing proposition, the option of finding out who among my Facebook friends were also going to the concert.

Interested to see where this was going I clicked on the link and was taken to a page where I had to sign up for the iLike application. I declined to add the Windows toolbar, which among other things promised to let me share my music library and playlists on my Facebook profile. Next, I was invited to compare music tastes with my friends. Note; iLike gave me the option of comparing against all of my friends, not just iLike users. This is a sneaky way of getting me to advocate the service on their behalf.

I decided to spare my friends the Facebook spam and was finally taken to the page I wanted to see in the first place. It turns out none of my friends are going to see Mos Def this week (well, none that have confirmed on Facebook anyways).

But, there’s more. From the Facebook page, I can also listen to Mos Def songs for free, add them to my profile, or post them to a friend’s wall. Similarly, friends can post music on my wall. If anyone likes a song and wants it independent of Facebook, they can also buy it from iTunes.

What iLike has done is genius. By allowing free access to songs they are getting users to advocate the music for them. Users are more than willing to do this because they now have a platform for easily sharing music with friends and accessing new artists and songs. This is advertising I can get used to.