Facebook is the new Google. For marketers, it’s time to forget about the logo and think about your OGO. OGO? Open Graph Optimization.
There’s been lots of chatter about Facebook’s announcements at f8 regarding the Social Graph. I’m still not sure that everyone appreciates the power that this is going to give Facebook.
A quick recap of some of the features that I think are going to rock the web:
- You can now ‘Like’ anything on the web (so long as the site owner has enabled this feature)
- These ‘Likes’ can be set-up to convey structured data about precisely what they are: a restaurant, a band, a celebrity or a 16GB WiFi iPad?
- Facebook is making it super-easy to register and log-in to other websites using your Facebook login details
- They will share your structured ‘Likes’ (along with pretty much everything else in your Facebook profile) with these other sites, to allow those sites to tailor what they show to you.
Meaning Facebook becomes the new Google:
- Facebook is already the biggest source of traffic to the most popular web sites.
- Everyone interested in getting more traffic (so, err, make that everyone) is going to start adding Like buttons. 50,000 did it in just the first week. It’s dead easy. I managed it in no time, and the last thing I coded was a robot to follow a white line in 1993 using Pascal.
- Likes are the new links. There’s going to be far, far more liking going on than there is linking from sites. Most everyone has a Facebook account these days. Virtually no-one has a website. The information from all these ‘Likes’ will give Facebook a huge advantage over Google in scoring relevance and authority. Especially so because of their structured (semantic) nature, Facebook knows what you’re liking, not that it’s just another web page.
- PageRank becomes PersonRank: how important are your ‘Likes’ vs. other peoples? That depends: it depends on how well I know you, on how liberal (or frugal) you are with your liking, and on how much you, in turn are Liked. Soon, we’ll all know our PersonRank score, and be trying to increase it. Oprah PR = 10, Richard & Judy PR = 4, your PR =?
We don’t see all this yet, because Facebook has, in essence, only just begun ‘crawling’ the web. But expect them to move very forcefully into discovery. It won’t be search as we currently know it, but soon you’ll find yourself finding everything else via Facebook.
So time to start thinking about your Open Graph Optimization (OGO) strategy. I’ll share some thoughts in my next post about where to start.
(And yes - OGO - I agree, it’s a terrible acronym. Come up with a better alternative and you get to be mayor of NigelWhiteoak.com for the day. Gamification of naming FTW.)
