As the old saying goes, “if you love somebody, set them free”. Do this with social networks and you might just get more love in return.
Last May, Facebook announced Facebook Connect, an API that allowed “users to dynamically connect their identity information from Facebook, such as basic profile, friends, photos information and more, to third party websites, as well as desktop and mobile applications”. At the time, it was a little difficult to picture what exactly that meant for brand and site owners. It signaled a trend of social networks’ active decentralization of users and the ways they interact with content on the Web outside the social network’s garden walls.
Red Bull offers a compelling campaign that illustrates this. Red Bull Connect rolls up a wide variety of extreme sport content harvested from its event sponsorship and allows users to interact with, comment, and share in all the usual ways afforded by “chiclet” buttons. Those sharing tools feed content back to Facebook and other social networks and (we always hope) help to promote that content.
However, Red Bull uses Facebook Connect to both build awareness of its content within FB’s garden, but also let’s a user’s Facebook login be the credentialing system for the Red Bull site. The effect? A user’s comments are seen on both the Red Bull Site AND Facebook building traffic and awareness on both sites.
There are other brilliant interaction designs aptly described by Olivier Peyre. Definitely worth a quick read.
Michael Beavers
Comments
Connections
Great post Michael.
I love this idea of decentralization when it comes to social networks. I hope Open Social will accomplish this in a major way http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ as I find it rather cumbersome to think that I must go to one specific location to interact with my network. The FB connect model is very cool in that it utilizes your login credentials and has a two way connection with the publishers site and Facebook….but Im ready for the next evolution that doesnt rely on one “parent” network.
Nice post, Michael.
I think that Facebook Connect represents a look into the future of websites. The possibility of any site adding a social utility to it is extremely appealing – especially when you consider the content optimization that could occur.
Imagine if an eCommerce site implemented connect and customized content to a users interests, networks, location, etc. Not only to they have the ability to sell their products to a more-targeted group, but the user gets content that they are automatically interested in.
I’ve even added it to our blog (in less than 20 minutes) and we are already seeing the benefits of the ‘Facebook viral effects’.
On another note – I really enjoy the blog. Great posts. Keep it up!
Tyler
Thanks for your comments, gents. @Adam, you’re describing one holy grail of the semantic Web…stay tuned! It is coming.
@Tyler, yes! I saw that several of my FB friends had joined the new CNN app. You may have touched on an important success factor for Facebook Connect: timeliness. It will be really interesting to see if comments made on the new CNN product pop up from my friends in Facebook…and if that makes me want to sign on, too.