TO: High-Level Business Executives
FROM: The Executive Whisper
No company reading this can afford to ignore Facebook Connect. In fact, you should add it to your site. If not immediately, then very soon. And you should ask your internal marketing folks and your agencies how they can integrate Facebook Connect into your marketing programs. It will provide a competitive advantage. The following summaries this transformative service and why it will mean so much to your business.
What Is Facebook Connect?
Facebook Connect was announced on July 23, 2008, and made available to users on December 4. It allows visitors to login to your website using their Facebook accounts and share information about their activities on your site with their friends back at Facebook via their new feeds – the news feed is a list of short comments about what Facebook users are doing, thinking, feeling.
For example, a person might review a book at Amazon.com. Since he signed in to Amazon with Facebook Connect, his review appears on his FB profile and in the news feed of many of his FB friends. Thus Amazon and the book are highlighted in the news feed.
If the person comments on your blog or makes a purchase or takes a survey on your site, it can be broadcasted to his social network of friends on Facebook. And if his friends have done anything on the site, like reviewed a different book, he’ll see that activity as well. Therefore, it’s easy for him to see what his other friends have done and endorsed on the site, which is much more influential than endorsements from strangers.
To avoid previous privacy problems, Facebook lets users have control over how permissions to access content are granted, how identity is revealed and shared, and what information is to be shared with friends.
The Benefits of Facebook Connect
The benefit to users is the one-click or single sign-on convenience and seeing what their friends have done.
For marketers:
First, it facilitates getting mentioned in Facebook users’s news feeds, which has been the holy grail for marketers because it raises awareness of your business and delivers an implied endorsement.
Second, it provides a treasure trove of user data, allowing über-targeting. You can literally customize the content of your page based on the visitor’s Facebook data, such as his age, gender, location, likes, dislikes, relationship status, even networks, groups, and pages he’s joined – or “fanned.” As a simple example, if you know a visitor is a fan of the band U2, you can highlight your U2-theme stationery, T-shirts, dog bones.
Starbucks, for example, uses Facebook Connect on its Pledge5 site, which asks people to donate five hours of time to volunteer work. When a visitor signs in with his Facebook account, a new screen – a hybrid of Facebook and the Pledge5 home page – pops up with information on how to find local volunteer opportunities. A tab on the page asks him to “help spread the word.” Clicking on it produces his entire address book of Facebook friends, enabling him to evangelize Pledge5 with just a few keystrokes.
(BTW, Facebook will also use Connect and the data to deliver more personalized ads on other participating websites, in effect turning Facebook Connect into a social ad network. That’s coming. Not here yet.)
Facebook Connect Will Be Everywhere
Most of the major sites are or will soon be joining the program and the Facebook Connect icon will become ubiquitous throughout the internet.
Just last weekend Facebook revealed Facebook Connect for the iPhone, a new technology that lets iPhone application developers connect their apps to FB.
Practical examples of Facebook Connect iPhone apps are already in the wild. Urbanspoon, is one such example. A free restaurant review application, Urbanspoon has been updated with Facebook connectivity, enabling Urbanspoon users to post votes, reviews and photos on their Facebook news feeds.
Time to call an internal meeting. RE: Facebook Connect.
Important Links
Facebook Connect’s Developers Page
How to Add Facebook Connect to WordPress
Best Article Highlight Benefits of Facebook Connect for Marketers
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Tags: Facebook, FacebookConnect
This is a powerful tool. Many marketers will need a little outside techie help though to get it done.
Great intro to Facebook Connect but dont forget to consider the phishing or hacking attacks that haunt other ‘universal’ log-ins like OpenID. In these attacks Hackers illegally redirect Users to the Hacker’s website that looks like the website the User is trying to access and therefore provide their logon and password credential. The Hackers now have their passwords and can access all websites on Facebook Connect
This is a great comment and should be a huge concern. I think most people and businesses are unaware of all the consequences of Facebook Connect. Our point was concerning the potential. Today’s practical applications, however, should be troublesome to Facebook users. We can’t believe there wasn’t more uproar about it.