Well, then! Despite being only a week old, Facebook’s new social plugins (i.e. the “like” button which we covered in this week’s Potty Posting) have already been added to over 50,000 websites. Looks like we’ll have to continue boring George Parker with Facebook talk.
In the Potty Posting, we emphasized that the ultimate potential of Facebook’s new “like” button lies in the ability for marketers to get under Facebook’s hood and apply profile data in deep, enriching ways. (Pandora’s new features were the best example of this.) Of course, not every marketer wants to dive that deeply into the data, and frankly, Facebook probably doesn’t want everyone doing that either. In these instances, the new “like” button can still provide instant personalization features in small scale applications. This allows consumers to seamlessly interact with their Facebook networks on sites outside of Facebook, giving every site on the web the potential to be a social network.
While this sounds complicated, it’s intentionally easy. Enabling the like button can be done by adding just a tiny bit of code (feel free to shoot Upshot’s Interactive team an email if you’d like to know more), but the above video from Levi’s shows just how simple this is from the user’s perspective. On the Levi’s online store, users can now “like” their favorite pairs of jeans without heading back to Facebook. When visitors arrive at the online store, they can compare the total “likes” for each jean style, including any “likes” that came from people in their Facebook networks. The benefits of the latter point are obvious; we’d much rather know what our peers think of a given product than a total stranger, since at least we know whether our peers’ tastes tend to correspond with our own. Follow the tastes of total strangers and you’re likely to find yourself listening to Buckcherry, and no one wants to see that happen.
Additionally, there’s one component of the new “like” rollout that hasn’t received much attention. Similar to the decals we previously discussed as part of Google’s Favorite Places program, Facebook is now offering decals of their own to local businesses (see the image to the right for an example). However, there’s an unexpected twist to Facebook’s offering. Visitors to these brick-and-mortar stores can “like” these retailers via text message, by following the instructions on these decals. While we commended Google for their innovative use of QR Codes, we have to admit that Facebook’s text-based system is likely to have broader appeal for now, thanks to it’s sheer simplicity.
Of course, with all this talk about the new “like” button, we have admittedly avoided one not-so-small-element in the room. That is, of course, Facebook’s continuous problem with violating users’ privacy expectations. For a bunch of people who are incredibly smart about technology and the future of human interactions, Facebook continues to be inexplicably incompetent at explaining the benefits of these services to users (as evidenced by the fact US Senators are now jumping in to the fray). Man, do those guys need a marketing agency to help them craft their message!
In Facebook’s defense, they really aren’t doing anything as sinister as the Senators are claiming. It’s just that Facebook users often expect their personal information to remain private, and confusion over where these boundaries are can cause users to feel that their privacy has been violated. Because Facebook has done a poor job of explaining this service so far, marketers do need to be wary of consumers’ concerns, as they continue to learn about these services by trial and error. However, as brands and marketers continue to offer more valuable, personalized content via these new features, Facebook users will come to see the tradeoff between making their information more public and receiving highly personalized, relevant web experience.
For more information on these topics see Facebook’s basic introduction to liking (or more in-depth details, if you’re interested / concerned).
