Archive for December, 2010
Facebook’s fatal flaw
Dec 4th
“I want the Internet economy to prosper, but it can’t unless the people’s right to privacy means more than a right only to hear excuses after the damage is done.” – Joe L. Barton, ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and possible leader of a new committee on Internet Privacy.
I recently wrote a post stating that Facebook is not likely to be open to strong competition any time soon because the emotional switching costs for consumers are so high. The only thing that would bring them down, I opined, was scandal or the malaise that comes from a lack of competition.
Unfortunately I witnessed this prediction come true when my Facebook account was hacked just hours after I ran this post. All conspiracy theories are welcome.
I had the bizarre experience of watching somebody posing as me, trying to sell services to my friends through the Facebook instant chat function. I felt violated and angry because the perpetrator was using my image and reputation to scam my relatives and close friends. I also learned that two other people I know had the same experience on the same day, suggesting this was probably a widespread attack.
Luckily I caught it quickly but here’s the part that really got me. I went to Facebook “help” to learn how to report the incident. Here are the instructions they provided:
1) Change your password
2) Run a virus scan on your computer
3) Don’t fall for phishing scams again
Glaringly absent is any option to let Facebook know it happened.
Call me old fashioned, but if my company’s product was used to pose as my customer and rob my customer’s friends, I would want to know about it. In fact I would pursue the scammer with all available force. Facebook’s policy sends a message that they don’t give a damn about security and customer privacy, which more or less confirms what we already knew any way.
If you are a marketing professional thinking about a Facebook strategy, this cavalier delinquency would certainly make me think twice.
Note: shortly after I wrote this post I read an article in the New York Times about the impact of cyber-bullying through Facebook. In one case, Facebook would not respond to threats against children and the parents had to go through the legal system to get it stopped. Facebook is just asking to be legislated, it seems.
Google and Bing reveal that social influence bumps search engine results
Dec 2nd
Last week I authored a post suggesting that social scoring – determining your influence based on numbers of followers and other criteria — may have a growing impact on your personal effectiveness, your career, and how companies treat you as a customer in the future. It seems that this development may now also be an emerging element in search engine results.
In a blog post at SEOmoz, both Bing and Google confirmed that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on search rankings — and that the social influence of those tweeting the links impacts the organic search results.
The blog posted excerpts an interview Danny Sullivan conducted with representatives of Google and Bing:
Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-followed links that may naturally result from it?
Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.
Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.
Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?
Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are.
Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life 
Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?
Bing: Yes.
Google:Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.
This is a substantive revelation and another indication that marketing professionals must take Klout and these other social scoring systems seriously — no matter what your personal bias may be.
This new information is going to create a ripple through all content marketing strategies. It is no longer enough to create targeted content rich in keywords to attract the attention of search bots. The information’s presence on the social web — and the influence of those who notice it — is going to be a factor in your web traffic.
Do you think it is fair and/or wise to have people with large numbers of followers acting as a de facto filter to what you read?
Doesn’t this just invite more abuse and corruption? Let’s say a group of of individuals with high social scores get together and decide to monetize their power. They could offer a paid service to “tweet” out product information and news in a way that could conceivably influence search engine results. The implications of this are vast.
In our free society, where corruption can occur, corruption will occur. These developments make me nervous. How about you?
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