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Facebook’s recent unveiling of its Open Graph Initiative has set the blogosphere afire: privacy advocates have already sounded the alarm and distributed instructions about how to disable the new features, while technology experts have been trying to sort out the implications for the web generally. But what will the impact be for business owners? One potential benefit is the increase in “actionable” information associated with their website visitors. When someone who is logged into Facebook visits a participating website, their preferences and other non-identifying information will be made available to that site. This data can potentially be used to tailor the experience accordingly through such means as ad targeting, recommendations, etc. And those visitors can also “like” what they see and instantly and effortlessly share this preference with their Facebook friends. If it is successful, it will be one step toward the integration of facebook with a significant portion of the web. And this, in turn, might represent a real threat to Google. AdAge.com’s Ian Schafer offers the following analysis:
This is all a very big deal if it’s successful. Bigger than you think. And It makes Facebook a direct competitor to Google. Facebook has managed to succeed where Google has failed — turning your social behavior into actionable intelligence. Google’s major attempts at insights into web-wide consumer behavior (Orkut, FriendConnect, Checkout, Buzz) have not had anything close to the success that the Facebook platform has had. The intelligence collected from relationships with others, social micro-interactions (e.g., “likes,” “shares,” comments, updates), location (yup, Facebook’s working on that) and even transactions (see Facebook Credits) will be inherently more valuable to advertisers than click-through and search behavior (as advertisers get smarter themselves about what those kinds of behaviors mean to their bottom lines). [source]
All of this hinges, of course, on the willingness of site owners and surfers to participate. Will you open your small business site to Facebook?
More on the web:
Ian Schafer, “Facebook May Not Be Skynet, but It Is Getting Smarter, and That’s Bad for Google“, AdAge.com (4/22/2010).
Michael Calore, “Facebook Shows Off New Tools to Socialize the Entire Web“, Webmonkey.com (4/21/2010).
Ian Douglas, “HOWTO: protect yourself (as best you can) from Facebook’s F8 platform“, IanDouglas.com (4/21/2010).
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