Apparently people in a social network like Facebook don’t mind the ads but they  would not join a branded group according to this article Social network users reluctant to join branded groups

Less than one third of social network users would be willing to join a brand’s group even with the offer of exclusive or free content, according to new research from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

This jives with evidence we heard from colleagues regarding some well-known cases of pharmaceutical companies sponsoring content for treating cardiology problems in online forums on medical Web sites.   When it became known that the content was sponsored – doctors protested and fled the site en-masse. In other words – power to the people and not branding to the people. Now – if we could only get IT and IT security professionals to be as critical as doctors.