Everyone's heard the ranting about Facebook's latest changes to privacy settings. But most users aren't complaining, and the changes are bound to create a major marketing boon for small and midsized businesses.
Facebook's "Open Graph" will allow companies to interconnect their branding efforts on their own Websites with Facebook and collect some demographic information from customers in the process. It's all tied to Facebook's efforts to become the go-to site for “tastemaking” -- helping consumers find information on their friends' preferences, as well as opinions on products and services from across the entire Web.
“Pretty soon, Facebook is going to be a very large arbiter of social tastes,” says Evan Bailyn, founder of First Page Sage, a search engine optimization and social media company. “I think it's a good thing on the whole what they've done, because I want to know what my friends like. If I'm about to sign up for a service, I feel a lot more assured knowing four of my friends like it already.”
This swing is going to require your company to adjust its Web and social media strategies, Bailyn says, noting that businesses "need to get more people to 'like' their product or service. You want to cast the widest net that you can in terms of your number of followers, because there's a higher likelihood that if someone is thinking about trying out something or purchasing it, they have a friend that really likes it, and they can be very influential at the time they're making the purchase.”
Extending Facebook reach is going to require, not just acquiring more “likes,” but “likes” from the right people. “I think it's also going to put a larger emphasis on tastemakers -- people who have a lot of friends and make a lot of recommendations,” Bailyn says. “It's a lot more valuable for someone to like your service who has 1,000 Friends than someone who has 100 Friends, because there's a higher probability that someone will visit your page.”
So in addition to doing search engine optimization, you'll now have to start to think about social networking optimization -- finding ways to draw people close to the center of large social network groups into an engagement with your brand in that social network. Tastemakers within social networks like Facebook and Twitter have as much reach as many high-profile bloggers, and their posts can have an even larger viral effect.
Drawing the right people to associate with your brand is important. But you should be aware that the “Open” in “Open Graph” goes both ways: Everyone who “likes” your product and subscribes to your brand's page is visible to your competitors as well. Competitors can identify your most effective brand fans and systematically go after them to convert them to their brand -- picking up their social network in the process. That's precisely the sort of thing that Bailyn does for some of his clients.
How do you defend against that sort of thing? You can't. “There's just nothing you can do about it,” he says. “The reality is, you can see all of a brand's friends, get their names, and use that in a marketing effort.”
There are some levels of protection within Facebook against wholesale list harvesting: You can't bulk email everyone who's a member of a page, for example. There's a limit on how much you can message individuals. “You have to be pretty systematic, and you have to work every day on it,” says Bailyn.
But having those names -- and often other public contact information -- can be pretty effective in itself, especially if you're a regional company with a fairly geographically limited, high-value clientele. The only bright side there is that you can do exactly the same thing to your competitors and target their high-value customers and tastemakers.
Of course, the problem with this sort of marketing arms race is that blatant brand-building efforts could result in a major backlash. Much of social marketing can come off as crass hucksterism, as “astro-turfing” or worse. The organic nature of social networking makes any “optimization” strategy risky, unless you're genuinely engaging your customers.
— Sean Gallagher is an award-winning IT journalist and the former head of InformationWeek Labs. Gallagher is now an independent journalist and technology consultant based in Baltimore. He can be reached at:gallagher.sean.m@gmail.com.
As JC Cameron says, companies getting kudos (or getting bopped on the head) by happy (or disappointed) customers is a neat Darwinian approach to weeding out the slackers and rewarding those who deliver on product, customer service, and other categories.
I do pay attention when Friends (and friends, for that matter) point out a product they like or a service they dislike. Whenever I need a dentist or carpet cleaner or dishwasher-repair gal, where do you think I look first? I seek friends' and even acquaintances' input on my active local listserv. So the ability to collect thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs on companies and products I want on FB appeals to me very much.
But how long before those who are getting dinged find ways to game the system in their favor, eg removing critical comments or some such? I am guessing the credibility of such feedback would be pure and untainted for a fixed amount of time before marketing folks found a way to spin it, delete it, etc.
Can FB really serve as a kind of cyber Better Business Bureau? At this point, in terms of reach, there is nothing else comparable to it, so I would have to say yes.
I would be more willing to have my opinion sent to marketers if I was being compensated. Companies pay a lot of more for consumer panels and marketing survey. If you are a participant in one of these panels you get some form of compensation. If facebook would offer this to its users they would be more willing to participate.
Indeed...they can walk. And in reference to some earlier comments, FB members are not leaving in droves. The new privacy controls are now simpler and it's up to people to 'read' it, make choices and stop whining. FB is and will remain a significant part of our society - around the world.
"'Why shouldn't a business be permitted to collect data for the purpose of 'doing business' and making money?'
"I don't see this as a moral or legal question. There's no "should" about it. It's a question of whether or not the users are going to put up with the way the data is collected and used."
You hit on the key point here. That is the real crux of the issue. If users do not want their data collected and used in a particular way, they can walk and so leave a significant dent in the business plan to make money on them.
It is a shme that people are not taking things into perspective. How on earth do we expect social networks like FB to even pay their staff when we dno't pay for using the services ther are offering us and at the same time making needless rants when they make genuine efforts to monetize their large user base?
" Why shouldn't a business be permitted to collect data for the purpose of 'doing business' and making money?'
I hope someone here at IE will give us a clear cut answer to that question. I still can't figure out why a minute section of the prerss is making a big story out of this to the extentd that Congress is even starting to talk about the isue whene there are more pressing issues they could attend to.
They want to make people believe that they are always working on improving the way users information is handled and accessed. "We are in control?" I want to believe that, but I can't.
Do you know if Facebook will allow company's FB pages to change their profile design? maybe have their colors in the mix? Or having the actual FB page on their website (integrated into their own).?
Even while this conversation has been happening, Facebook has been publicly announcing a new privacy policy. Some details on Zuckerberg's Facebook blog.
That one NYT article is just one of the most prominent examples. Take, for another example that took me ten seconds to find, "Facebook's Culture Problem May Be Fatal" from the Harvard Business Review.
"...people want to connect with friends and people all over the world and they want it for free on FB."
I agree that they want to connect, and I agree that they want it free. But people don't actually care whether it's on Facebook. There just aren't any other serious contenders right now.
"Why shouldn't a business be permitted to collect data for the purpose of 'doing business' and making money?"
I don't see this as a moral or legal question. There's no "should" about it. It's a question of whether or not the users are going to put up with the way the data is collected and used.
We all want free services, and all businesses want to make money, but that doesn't mean that everything's just going to automatically work out.
One NY Times article is going to do nothing to dent FB's success. The backlash is overstated!
Lets get something into perspective here, people want to connect with friends and people all over the world and they want it for free on FB. Why shouldn't a business be permitted to collect data for the purpose of 'doing business' and making money?
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The Internet in all its forms has become a core part of how we communicate, socialize, and handle very personal business every day. But protection of individual privacy is spotty at best, and it seems to be getting worse every day. As we become an increasingly digital nation, do access to, and privacy on, the Internet become civil rights?
In July, American Eagle Outfitters -- which has a market capitalization of $2.52 billion -- had the sort of apocalyptic outage that many companies fear. Its e-commerce site was down for eight days. Both a primary and a secondary storage system failed, backups wouldn’t restore properly, and a disaster recovery site wasn’t provisioned properly.
Richard Whitt, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)’s Washington telecom and media counsel, issued a “Myths vs. Facts” talking points post on the company’s public policy blog today, on the heels of outcry over Google’s agreement in principle with Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) on ground rules for the net neutrality debate.
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