We’ve asked our team to comment on the changes to Facebook announced at the F8 summit last week from the perspective of different disciplines. In this first installment, Leif Fescenmeyer (from our Insight & Planning group) looks at the implications for branded interactions and Scot Wheeler (from Marketing Science) discusses what, if any, changes to expect from Facebook insights.
Leif: Overall, I think the new Facebook interface has a lot going for it and at the same time, may have some hurdles besides the general distaste for change from users.
Brand Implications
It will be interesting to see how the new Newsfeed and realtime content Ticker will impact impressions and engagement on branded content from Pages. Already, we’ve noticed that impressions are no longer published on brand posts. How will “Top Posts” integrate branded content or will it at all? Will brands, in the future, be able to buy “Top Posts?” If branded content is not published as frequently or is secondary to Top Posts, will consumers and fans interact with brands as much as they did before? If so, how will brands prepare for decreased engagement?
News Feed and Ticker
The revamped Newsfeed and Ticker went over like a lead balloon with users, due perhaps to its unceremonious introduction. I’ve heard the Ticker called “a Facebook within a Facebook”–Inception style. It is and it isn’t. It offers the most up-to-date, low impact information for the user without congesting the Newsfeed. I’m all for it. The more ways a website or application can organize and publish information, the better. They say it’s all about the information, when actually it’s all about the organization and analysis of the information.
Well done Facebook. I don’t know if it was your tactic to change over Newsfeed and Ticker before the keynote, to get the “Facebook Change Hate” out of everyone’s system, then present the “pretty-change” that everyone loves and can’t wait to get their hands on. If it was, ingenious. If it wasn’t, well, it worked to your benefit.
Scot: From a measurement standpoint, the Facebook changes announced at F8 – while very welcome from my perspective as a user – have so far amounted to no change at all in my role as a data analyst.
The new design and sharing elements are undeniably cool, but despite the changes, Facebook remains the only party with full insight into any users’ integrated history, and the exchanges across the social graph created by its users.
Implications of Open Graph
Facebook’s business is still built on targeted marketing and its expansion of interest signaling from “liking” to any verb will certainly improve its ability to target based on unique and shared interests. Every business on Facebook would benefit from an understanding of their consumers’ shared interests and key influences across their social graph, but Facebook retains a tight hold on their sole position as market-maker.
With their changes in user experience and interactive capabilities, Facebook is seeking to solidify a place as the one true personal portal. In this context, marketers need to immediately begin a shift from thinking of Facebook as a forum for messages from brands that users have liked, and/or a system for serving targeted ads. What Facebook ultimately wants to to with its data is drive highly targeted and personalized apps serving every sort of commerce, and I’m sure they have a plan to extract some value for their role in each exchange.
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights offers a very shallow level of insight into users and their engagement in the social graph. The Facebook API and Facebook Query Language (FQL) have historically offered some opportunity to access more depth in users’ interests and interactions, but access to the true depth of insight into preferences, influences/influencers and social interactions available to Facebook itself has always been stifled by API limits and awkward FQL indexing schemas.
Ultimately, marketers have no right to the data that Facebook has collected, so there is no real basis for protest from this standpoint – we data-driven marketers must take whatever Facebook is willing to offer.
The exchange for the new and fun ways to express your “true self” and interact with “friends” is that this can only happen in Facebook. While it’s true that all of the information you enter into your profile can be exported (in Facebook’s token nod to calls for data portability), none of your history of activity on Facebook – your likes (and now other verbs), the comments you’ve made on other posts – none of that stuff that is the true core of your Facebook use and history, that is of true value for marketing insight, none of that can actually be exported. That history is not yours, unless you stay in Facebook. (To paraphrase the Eagles, you can check-in any time you like, but your data can never leave).
In a truly open semantic web, each individual could access and share any part of their prior history of digital interaction as well as current interests and preferences within and across that web with any party or site, and for any purpose, be it social exchange, play, commerce, etc. Facebook is becoming a really compelling place to hang out online. Unfortunately, Facebook’s current model seems aimed at becoming the only place to hang out online, at least if you want a web that understands your preferences and networks. (Read a longer post from Scot on Intelitecht.)
*In our next post on this topic, CM’s team of Community Moderators will discuss the changes from a branded user’s perspective.
