I had the opportunity to attend Facebook’s 2010 f8 conference this week. During the keynote presentation by Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg, a major change was announced that will significantly improve how advertisers can target customers on Facebook: the much-discussed “Like” button. While the changes raise a lot of privacy concern questions, marketers will love this, assuming people use the Facebook “Like” button. But with 400+ million users, it’s worth betting that many will.
Mark talked (watch the full keynote) about Facebook’s Open Graph API, as well as several new social plugins for websites to increase engagement through Facebook services. The Like button is the simplest social plugin, as no login is required. Even if you’ve never visited NY Times before, you’ll get social context when you visit the site.
When users show up to websites (Mark said there are currently 30 partners such as Yelp.com) that leverage Facebook’s new social plugins, you can see which of your Facebook friends “like” the site, or have connected with it recently, without the site knowing anything about you. And when users “like” anything, it automatically gets added to the list of things they like on their profile. To clarify, that is on your Facebook profile, not the account on the Web site you like!
So this is where it gets interesting. I don’t know about you, but the last time I made any changes to my interests within my Facebook profile was the day I first created my Facebook account a few years ago – so my data is getting old. I realized that Facebook does little to recommend I update my profile very often (if at all).
Facebook ads are well known for being highly targeted but there are times when ads show up that are not always relevant. This may be due to the fact that your profile interests are somewhat outdated. With this announcement at f8, if Facebook’s plans are to make changes to your profile automatically (coming very soon), then your profile interests will be updated as you navigate the web, sharing with Facebook your interests or “likes.” Since Facebook ads are based on your profile interests, advertisers will have an opportunity to precisely target customers with greater accuracy.You can take this a step further and think about the semantic web outside of Facebook.com. This concept was discussed by Sitewire’s president Greg Chapman at our 2009 Expert Series event. Per Wikipedia, humans are capable of using the web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for “directory,” reserving a library book, and searching for a low priced DVD; however, one computer cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understood by computers, so computers (or websites) can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.
As an example, let’s say you were logged onto Facebook and decided to visit Pandora.com. Pandora is one of the partners of Facebook’s new social plugin tools and will automatically log you into Pandora and pull in your interests from your Facebook profile. Unfortunately, I demonstrated this at our weekly company wide meeting and was quite embarrassed by the lovely song that came on, so be careful when you show this during team discussions. Anyway, the idea behind this is genius because it allows you to have a personalized experience on these websites. With this example, Pandora can now recommend music that your Facebook profile shows you are interested in.
You can leverage Facebook social plugin tools to personalize your visitors’ experience and take advantage of this soon-to-become-reality semantic web. Now that you understand this change from “become a fan” to “like,” will it impact how you “like” content online? What are your thoughts about Facebook automatically updating your Facebook profile? Any concerns regarding privacy? Please share your thoughts below.
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I think these are some exciting changes! I do have some reservations, however. I think the move from “Become a Fan” to “Like” is couched in semantics – Facebook even said, “like” is clicked exponentially more than “become a fan”…so they basically are trying to trick people into becoming fans of pages. People are used to a surface level of engagement when “liking” something – a post, a picture, etc. Now, “liking” also means engaging on a deeper level as a fan – allowing fan pages to appear on my News Feed, etc.
I do like the social plugin tools – I myself have already “liked” several movies on IMDb. My question is this – what if you already have something on your profile, then you “like” it from a third party site – does it appear twice? For instance – I already have “Star Wars” in my list of favorite movies – but if I “like” “Star Wars” via IMDb, does it add it again? And if Facebook recognizes it as the same, what if I wrote the title a bit differently (“Romeo + Juliet” vs. “Romeo and Juliet,” etc.)?
Just some random thoughts…lots of stuff to think about and some cool stuff coming up!
Great post!
Great post, Jay!
While I’m still not sure I’m a fan of– sorry, not sure I “like” the change Facebook made, from “fans” to “likes,” (fan just seemed like so much more of a commitment, “like” seems almost too trivial…) the new ability to leverage other Web sites into my Facebook profile (and by extension, my friends and their profiles) is pretty awesome. I think Yelp has integrated this same FB sharing/liking ability as well. As many times as I’ve asked my friends “What’d you think of ______ restaurant?” Now I can just go on and look. Very neat!
Keep it up! I like where this is going!
(Wait… do I “like” it… or do I LIKE it, like it? Why do I feel like I’m back in fifth grade and talking about a girl?)
I think that is a nice innovation for marketers and I am looking for the day that online display media buying is powered by the Facebook targeting options.
For example, if I am listening to country music on Pandora I would see an ad that is targeted to a steak restaurant locally. If I am looking at restaurant reviews on Yelp and my Facebook profile sees that within the last few days I have ‘liked’ an italian restuarant, then I would see an ad for a lcoal italian restaurant that has good reviews.
Once we get to this point, I can see the semantic web serving me ads that are targeted, relevant and wanted. I think this is the first step top that and as marketer, we need to be prepared for what this means.
I know that some of these changes will be heralded by a few as the coming of Orwell’s 1984, but personally, I’m excited for the partnerships with sites like Pandora and the ability to make the ads I see even more relevant. these changes from Facebook are integrating the web in a way that’s not only inevitable, but necessary for a truly personal experience. This will help advertisers really get to know their consumer, and focus their generation activities on people and places where it makes the most sense, and will be the most effective. Kudos.
Aside from privacy issues, potential confusion and some growing pains, one major advantage for marketers that I can see is targeting Facebook users who “like” competing brands. As it stood before this change, a Facebook advertiser could only target a person by the pages they had admin control over. For example, they could advertise directly to people who were already fans of their brand’s Fan Page (or not a fan yet) and the fan’s friends. By this method, the advertiser was not able to target “fans” of competing brands. Now with the pages automatically populating a person’s Likes and Interests sections, an advertiser can now target people who “like” Best Buy, Macaroni Grill, South Coast Plaza, Quickbooks, Archstone Apartments and so on. Lots of opportunity there!
I think these changes are very exciting and open up so many opportunities.
As a user, the implications of liking a page are definitely different – I had Grey’s Anatomy listed under shows, and with the changes I now follow the Grey’s page. I don’t really care to see those updates, so I just hid it. (important note: I did not hide White Collar because we all know how much I love Neal Caffrey’s face). The other way around, I was a Fan of a friend’s band to be supportive, but I don’t actually think the music defines the type of music I like, so I don’t like how it automatically appears under my music now. I will be “liking” things a bit differently now.
The aspect of privacy I personally care about the most is what is published into the news feed. If I am on Pandora, and the connection is automatically made, it sounds like nothing is posted to the feed. I would actually have to take an action (such as “like”). I think the fact that the experience becomes so much better across the web as a result of these changes outweighs my privacy concerns. Besides, I keep anything too private off of Facebook.
Great article Jay! I can see how this will lead to continual changes. When Facebook uses the like button to update profiles, will the updates be publically viewable? Or perhaps they will allow this to be a setting that one can control. If one would loose control of their profile through how they use the Like button I can see how the regular use of it might be affected.
Hi Steve, Great points! Facebook will be announcing today changes to the privacy settings to address a lot of these concerns. Look out for an email (unless already) received from Facebook that should make setting the global privacy / Like button settings easier to manage.
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