Get Over Facebook Privacy; Start Liking Facebook ‘Like’

May 27, 2010 - PRLog -- By Charles Nicholls, Founder and CSO of SeeWhy, Inc.

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been in the firing line all this week over Facebook’s privacy controls, and today the company has responded by simplifying their privacy controls and launching a new ‘Like’ feature.

Vocal Facebook users have been arguing that the Facebook privacy controls are too complicated, and that Facebook’s ‘Like’ button shares too much data about individuals. The privacy advocates have also created a ‘boycott Facebook day’ on May 31st. So far, some 11,000 have signed up out of the 400 million Facebook users. Mark Zuckerberg, unrelenting, says, “We’re going to serve one billion ‘like’ buttons on the Web in the first 24 hours.”

What these privacy advocates don’t get is that Facebook, like Google, isn’t free. It’s a massive service that needs to be paid for, and that service is going to be funded by a multi-billion dollar advertising business, just as Google is. This is the price you pay for using a ‘free’ service. Facebook ‘Like’ is central to this strategy and equally important for ecommerce.

When it comes to privacy, what did you expect? Very few things in life are truly free, and when you use a service like Facebook, someone has to pay if the service is to have any longevity.

Unless you are happy to pay a fee for a social networking service like Facebook, you need to get over any misunderstanding about your privacy on Facebook. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg reiterated this week that Facebook will always be a free service, so you have to understand Facebook will fund its service by advertising to you.

Facebook ‘Like’ is at the core of this strategy.

At today’s launch, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled social plug-in features which make it easy for ecommerce teams to integrate their websites content with Facebook. In particular, Facebook’s ‘Like’ button enables other website users to share and comment on content back on their Facebook profile pages. The significance of this for ecommerce should not be underestimated. Facebook has said that it won’t pass these websites any personal data about users and denies that it will use individual ‘likes’ to target relevant advertisements to users. We’ve noted before the enormous potential to be gained from connecting Facebook with ecommerce sites. Facebook ‘Like’ takes this to a new level and replaces the ‘Become a Fan’ button.

This is how it works:

When a visitor clicks a ‘Like’ button similar to this one:



….they can then put in a comment, and it will appear on their wall and in their news feed, like this:



The primary benefit here is simple: it gets visitors on your website to engage and share what they like with their network.

This provides back-links to your website’s content from Facebook, and those links are visible to all of your visitors’ networks.

In fact, you can try it out yourself by clicking the ‘Like’ button at the top or bottom of this article.

Moreover, it’s a doddle to do. Without the comment capability, you simply need to copy a single line of HTML onto your content page. With the comment, it’s a simple piece of JavaScript you drop onto the page.

From an ecommerce point of view, what’s not to like here? It’s now really easy for your visitors to share what they like on your website with their friends, without so much as a login. The ease of use and simplicity of the ‘Like’ button makes it a sure-fire hit, as long as users can get comfortable with privacy.

As these links to content build up, Facebook is gathering not only an index of the most ‘Liked’ content on the web, but also a profile of what individual Facebook visitors like. This data could, in the future, be used to serve more relevant ads, though a Facebook spokesman was at pains to point out this is not part of today’s announcement.

This kind of behavioral targeting is very effective and comes with its own set of privacy critics. In the future, if you are on a travel site and ‘Like’ an article on Hawaii, ads in your Facebook account will start showing up advertising vacations in Hawaii.

It’s also possible that Facebook could use aggregated ‘Like’ data to provide search capabilities to rival Google, but based on users’ ‘Likes’ as opposed to arbitrary SEO criteria.

This is the price that Facebook users have to pay for using a free service. Let’s see how the new privacy controls fare in the hands of the privacy advocates, but once this issue gets sorted, expect to see the ‘Like’ button everywhere.

Footnote:

At an individual personal level, you are not in control of your privacy—Facebook is. If you are in any way unsure about that, just go and read the Facebook terms and conditions: you are giving Facebook a ‘non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.’ Basically that means that they can do what they like with your content, and if it is distributed by one of your friends, then you can’t pull it.

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About SeeWhy: Web analytics visionary Charles Nicholls is founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy and author of “In Search of Insight” which has established a new agenda for the analytics industry. As a veteran of the analytics space, he has worked on strategy and projects for some of the world’s leading ecommerce companies, including Amazon, eBay and many other organizations around the globe. Incorporated in 2003, SeeWhy helps companies improve website conversion rates by bringing back up to 50 percent of visitors that abandon sites prematurely. Learn more at http://www.seewhy.com and the SeeWhy blog at http://www.seewhy.com/blog. Contact Charles at charles.nicholls@seewhy.com, and follow the company on Twitter at @seewhyinc and Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/SeeWhyInc.

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