just another blog pressed for words

Posting messages into the Facebook news feed of your most loyal consumers seems like a useful thing, right? It’s one of the reasons social media teams have put so much focus on creating and promoting Facebook pages. Now, with Facebook approaching 500M users, and with the privacy distractions fading away, this seems more important than ever. So why isn’t anybody using one of the most powerful aspects of the Open Graph protocol – the ability to send messages into the news feeds of people who have Liked something on your website?

For many brands, especially online brands, building a separate online presence on Facebook is an awkward process. Everyone wants access to the engagement and viral plumbing that Facebook perfected, and everyone wants to engage with consumers “where they are,” but the price of that is creating a less efficient path to the place you want your consumers to take action. If awareness or consideration are your main goals, then this is fine, but if trial or sales are your main goal, then having the activity take place on a site besides your own is a drag on efficiency.

So, when Facebook announced The Next Evolution of the Facebook Platform in April, it seemed like the best of both worlds had just arrived. As Mark Zuckerberg announced in his keynote, the Open Graph protocol makes it possible to extend Facebook activities to any website.  Most of the initial conversation that followed concerned the power of the social plug-ins, especially the Like button, to spread content. Lost in that conversation was another, more powerful use of the Like button. As the Facebook team describes in the quote below, the Like button can create a persistent connection between you and your consumers. 

When a user establishes this connection by clicking Like on one of your Open Graph-enabled pages, you gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook Pages: a link from the user’s profile, ability to publish to the user’s News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics through our revamped Insights product.

The key phrase here is, “the lasting capabilities of Facebook pages.” Now, if you have a website, you can get people to Like you on your own website, and still be able to post items into their news feed. Done properly, there may be no reason to create and maintain a separate presence on Facebook. We’ve built a prototype of such a page here at Modernista! and confirmed that it works as described above. Sure, there are some bugs and documentation is scarce, but that’s always been the case with the Facebook platform.

Some websites are using most of the Open Graph capabilities. For example, on IMDB, you can Like a movie, and all kinds of nice things happen for IMDB.  Your friends see that you Liked a movie on IMDB.com, a link to that IMDB page goes into your Facebook profile page, and IMDB movie pages start turning up in Facebook search.  Those are all nice things, but why isn’t IMDB posting information to my news feed now? That’s what happens with regular Facebook pages, and it’s technically possible, so why hasn’t IMDB or anyone else started doing this? We have some theories, but let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

I’ll say it. The internet is a negative space.

It’s a place where, under cover of anonymity, AssMaster6969 can freely speak words like “gay”, “retarded”, “douchebag” and a myriad of others that cannot so easily be woven into the polite face-to-face conversation which dominates his day as Assistant Co-Manager of WalMart. And he is not alone.

We’re all, as a global society, similarly repressed. And we are, as a species, in the process of letting it all out online.

Online there is little incentive to be positive when it is so much fun to be negative. Why say, “yes” when it is so easy to say, “no”?

Heaven help the one who makes herself vulnerable online. She will be set upon like hungry dogs on a fresh cooked ham.

Even now there is a legion of internet zealots setting their torches alight to come after me simply for speaking this heresy, unaware that they would only be crystalizing my point.

Yes there are pockets of positivity on the internet where everything is puppy dogs and rainbows, but these tend to be homogeneous spaces, “social networks” where everybody has already agreed on having something in common in the first place.

The more tightly knit the community, the more positive the dialog, generally. And all this feel good conversation takes place, essentially, behind closed doors. Username. Password. Play nice.

A fine example is to be found on my mother and sister’s scrapbooking site, Scrapbook.com. Indeed, the most uplifting and encouraging repository of artistic critique I have been exposed to for quite a while.

Reading the comments and encouragement there contained, I found myself wishing that less specialized parts of the internet, like the general advertising and marketing community for example, spoke to each other so sweetly. How different would things be?

Outside of such safe harbors, the internet is a storming sea of put-downs, trash talk and soul sucking.

The internet is going through puberty. It’s a teenager. And all of its high-school angst will eventually run out. When it does, a desire for truly meaningful connection will follow and the internet will undergo the same social revolution that marks the high water line of the 1960’s.

I believe that the internet is soon going to experience its first significant love bomb. A global, cultural shift in dialog where mean people are ferreted out of the general public discourse as a polar shift in attitude takes place. One which so drowns out people who want to leave snarky comments, general discouragement and nay saying so as to regulate them to doing so in specialized social networks, behind closed doors, separate from the main salon of the internet. Username. Password. Vent.

In their own safe harbors of negativity, they will clear the way for the rest of us to sail smoothly on the main internet, in spaces that do not require a username and password, on a calm sea of positivity, encouragement and meaningful engagement.

This shift in energy will be felt in op-ed and critique columns as well as main editorial and its accompanying two-way dialog. Perhaps even in the main stream media as a public hunger for inspiration, encouragement, hope and faith in our own ability takes hold.

When this happens, the human species will experience a truly profound evolutionary leap which has the potential to dwarf any renaissance previously known. And the world really will become a very different place.

but not all media is worth sharing.

What makes media social? Do you talk to it? Or does it talk to you?

This is the hardest question for any brand to answer: What do they have that is really, honestly worth talking about?

@eyecube has a really interesting post about the topic of shared vs. social. The crux of it:

Shared Media fits nicely between earned and paid. Yes, your paid media can be shareable, but you have to earn the share by having quality content and by sharing it with the right people in the right way.