Sometimes the world seems fairly straightforward. Coke. Diet Coke. One has calories. One doesn’t. Simple. Easy to understand. So what about Coke Zero? Tastes like Coke. Has the calories of Diet Coke. So does that mean Coke is overly caloric; or does it mean that Diet Coke tastes like crap? It just seems like a complex way of getting more shelf space. Gatorade is the same. G? It took me long enough to no longer sing "Gatorade is thirst aid for that deep down body thirst." There is no chance that I will associate with Gatorade the letter G, let alone the notion that their lower calorie drink goes by G2. Gatorade. It’s a good name and a great brand. Why do you have to mess it up? That’s the problem with branding at times. It’s easy to miss the big picture. Perhaps Coke Zero really does exist solely to occupy more real estate and that by having more real estate, it means they sell more in total while crowding out the competitors. If that’s the case, they succeed with a product that at first glance creates a jarring impression.
That jarring first impression happened more recently online with one of the, if not the biggest, consumer digital brand, Facebook. In the midst of general privacy discussions and the founder’s unflattering chat logs being made public, the company unveiled a suite of new but related offerings. Facebook has always looked for ways to create a footprint that includes the open web. The first iteration of that was a button that allowed users to share aspects of the open web within Facebook. Want to share an article with your friends? You could click the little share on Facebook icon and have it appear in your news feed. Then came leveraging their closed web to enhance the interaction of sites on the open web by letting open web sites use Facebook as the user’s sign-in vehicle. With Facebook Connect, a person visiting a site on the open web (i.e. sites not controlled by Facebook directly) could choose to log-in with their Facebook credentials instead of going through the process of creating an account at that site. Call it a coup for Facebook, because they become the holder of the identity and not the site owner.
With their latest release, though, Facebook has taken things to a whole new and, at first immensely confusing, level. At its core, the new features revolve around the company’s decision to embrace "Like." Other sites and products have used this term quite successfully, but Facebook has made it their mission to own that term. And in many ways it is genius. Those who have Fan Pages no longer seek out people to become a fan. They want people to simply "Like" the page, which in this case is usually a brand. Opportunities to "Like" something appear throughout the site, not just with brands. It is the new "Poke" – a light touch option that allows users to express a proclivity without having to really commit. See a picture you like? Now you can just "Like" it without having to write something. It’s like texting versus calling. Don’t want to have to truly engage in conversation? Great. Just send a brief text. Who would have thought that writing a comment online would take too much effort, but the like button makes it easy to feel like you’ve participated without doing much.
Enter "Like" and the open web. Now, you will find Facebook making it possible to "Like" a site on the open web, which also allows you to see who, if any of your friends likes it too. Here, though, is where Like gets confusing. The simple version takes place when that site also has a Fan Page. In this scenario, the site owner simply integrates Like in an aesthetic they choose. Small like button? Large button that pulls in the news feed? Show the friends profiles or not. All up to the open web site owner who wants to both make their site feel more social by allowing people to both like it and see if any of their friends like it too. Have a site? You too can install the not quite MyBlogLog like Facebook social plugin to add instant community (sort of). Where things get Coke Zero-ish is with another feature called Instant Personalization.
Instant Personalization falls under the category of life’s not fair. It’s legitimately creepy. If you are logged into Facebook (even if you don’t have the site open), when you go to a partner site that has Instant Personalization, such as Yelp, you will see a note saying, "Hey X number of your friends have joined Yelp! Sign up and never miss their reviews." You see their pictures and everything. The integration with Pandora is even more transparent. With either, your friends activities and your own become exposed. It’s no longer just your on-Facebook activity but elsewhere. That it seems off to us, probably just shows our age, but we think it has less to do with our general curmudgeon-like attitude and more about the bigger ad picture. IP goes way beyond behavioral targeting. This is not being shown an ad because we visited that site before. It’s not being shown an ad based off other anonymous surfing behavior and having that behavior used to craft a relevant ad experience. This is like logging on to my computer without my permission.
It may have taken us a while, but we finally get the power of the Like, had the creep factor of personalization not caused us to get hung up. The true power of Like is, as most people guessed before us, targeting. With Like, we are categorizing the web for them. It’s the user generated version of keywords. What’s the best way to target ads in facebook besides demo? User interests. By clicking Like we are empowering Facebook’s advertisers to target us, and we are making it that much easier for Facebook to create its version of AdSense. Unlike AdSense, though, Facebook won’t have to worry about crawling pages to figure out meaning and show ads that are potentially relevant to the page but irrelevant to us. Facebook will show us ads based on what we told them was relevant to us. It’s a great sales pitch and it will catapult their revenues once they decide to leverage it for advertising purposes.
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