The Adaptive Marketer

My Ridiculously Premature Conclusion On Facebook’s New Platform – ‘Meh’

Posted on 22. Apr, 2010 by Robert Rose in Online Marketing, Social Media

So, Yesterday Facebook announced a “new evolution of the Facebook platform”.  Depending on your point of view – this was as big as the completion of the cross-continental railroad (thanks Robert Scoble) or a… well… okay, I couldn’t find anybody who didn’t think that it was all that – and a bag of chips.  The words, “ambitious”, “audacious”, “important” and “sweeping” were used quite a bit.

But what does it mean for marketers right now?

Facebook’s New Social Box Of Chocolates

So, just to quickly summarize – Facebook announced three things yesterday:

1. Social Plugins
2. The “Open Graph Protocol”
3. The Graph API

Yes, I know blah blah blah… clearly focused on technical developers.  So, what are these things really?   Do we really know what we’re gonna get?

At its core what these represent are a way to extend Facebook’s social connection and interaction out to other web sites.  The Social Plugins are existing widgets you can put into your site.  And the Protocol and the API are the geek-speak for how third-party developers will create other types of plugins and apps.

So, for example, just as you currently are able on Facebook to “Like” a comment, a picture or “become a fan” of a page (they’ve now combined these concepts), now you can “Like” or “Recommend” something on any Web site that chooses to deploy the Facebook technology – and that web site is ostensibly now a “Facebook Fan Page”.

Users who visit that page can see who in their network (if anyone) has “Liked” that page before them.     As you might expect, this can be extended into interaction (e.g. comments, and other bits of content).   To see an example, go check out CNN and you can see a widget in the lower right.   If you’re currently logged into Facebook, you’ll see if your friends have shared any news stories or pictures.

Another example is Yelp.  I search for one of my favorite restaurants (Malo in Los Angeles).  There’s a “Like” button there.  My friends can see that I’ve “liked” Malo.  And, over time, I can see new restaurants that my Friends have “Liked” and can use that as another data point in making a decision about a restaurant I’d like to visit.

But here’s the rub – and something that marketer Ed Dale got quite excited about.  The “Like” I just gave to Malo and every one subsequent becomes part of my permanent profile.   Just like Fan Pages before, every “Like” I give now becomes part of my “likes and interests” in my Facebook profile.   As Ed asks in his blog post:

“When was the last time you updated your Facebook Profile.”

And then….

“So when you click the new “Like” Facebook button, being very helpful and all, Facebook will update your permanent profile with your new like”.

This means that for advertisers on the Facebook platform (Facebook Ads) you should be working with an exponentially greater number of attributes to target your market

So What Does All This Mean For Marketers Now?

For Now.  For Me.  I give it a: “Meh”…

From a marketing perspective, I’m not nearly as excited as others.  Here’s why.

So, first of all, it clearly depends on your focus as a marketer.  If you’re trying to drive traffic to web properties – and the Facebook platform is important to you – this is a really effective way for you to make your site more “personal”.  For example, visiting the Pandora Web Site just got exponentially more interesting as I can now browse all my Friends’ music collections (that’s cool).

Or, if I’m working on the social platform for Levis shopping online – I now have a way to display all my customers’ friends “Likes” to them.  Quick note – I guess none of my 100+ friends on Facebook shop at Levis or it’s too new – because I got exactly 0 results when I tried this out.

So, that’s interesting to me as a marketer or manager of a Web site, and trying to drive more traffic to that Web site. But how about as a media/demand gen person – using Facebook Ads as a way to target an audience for advertising?

More data, more easily obtained does not better marketing make.

So, one of the common themes in extolling the virtues of this new platform is that because you’ll remove the “friction” of users expressing their “likes” that you’ll be able to target your ads so much more “effectively”.  ”It will be current”.  ”There will be more to target”.

Now, I’m no behavioral psychologist but this doesn’t feel right to me.   To me, while making it easier to express that you “like” something creates a better user experience, it also means that we’ll get a much more varying degree of what “like” really means.   It could mean I LOVE this.  But it could also mean – I want to simply “bookmark” this so I can show somebody later.   Some thoughts:

1. Putting a bit of a barrier on expressing favor for something – whether it’s something semantic like the words “like” vs “become a fan” or something larger like making people actually “sign up” or type it out – means that there’s much more likelihood that it’s true.  I think there’s a distinct chance that consumers will splatter “likes” all over everything – and that this is just as likely to muddy the demographic waters as it is to make marketing more effective.  In short, how MUCH you “like” something will be flattened.
2. The “un-like” will rarely if ever be used.  Let’s be honest – consumers aren’t going to keep their profiles immaculate.  If six months from now, I go to a restaurant and have a horrible meal – am I really going to go back and “unlike” the restaurant.  Will I even remember that I used to “like” it?  Or, consider the 14 year old who likes “Justin Bieber” and “Gabby Applegate”.  How will the system target her when she turns 20.  Let’s say she decreases her “likes” of things when she heads off to college.   Will I still be displaying ads to her because she “matches” the 14 year old’s profile.  Think she’s going to go in and delete her childhood brand affiliations?       Think again.
3. It’s all fun and games until somebody gets an eye poked.   If there is significant adoption on this (and I think that’s still a question) something will almost assuredly go catastrophically wrong.  It could be something on the privacy side (as is already being argued) or what if Facebook has a security breach, or what if Facebook just simply goes down.

All three of these things (and others) lead me back to the Web site marketer above.  You know – the one running a web site.    Any one of these three challenges on the media side start to make the huge benefits (especially for retailers like Levis) much less useful.

In short, what happens when the Nestle Vs. Greenpeace conversation starts to erupt not just on facebook – but all over my branded Web sites?

But Let’s Be Clear….

I think this is an extraordinarily exciting thing that Facebook is doing here.  I’m encouraged that they’re innovating so rapidly – and that they seem to be really hungry to figure out how to become a serious contender to compete with Google.  And, I think I’ll really enjoy incorporating more community and social widgets into my publishing platforms.

But from a marketers perspective, I’m not jumping onto the hype cycle just yet.

How about you?

Photo Credit: libraryman

Tags: Facebook