Ben Elowitz contributed an article to The Huffington Post with the unfortunate title: “Facebook’s Like Button: A Force Powerful Enough to Save Media from Google Search.” The entire premise that media needs to be “saved” from Google search is a line that has been trotted out for years. However it’s one that makes no sense. The article also glowing looks to Facebook’s like feature as somehow being a saving grace for old media. That is extremely wishful thinking.
Let’s go through some of the article, as it gets quite a bit wrong:
Facebook is re-introducing serendipity. Top media brands are experts at creating compelling content and experiences. Consumers like to share high-quality content, and the easier that process is, the more that content is passed around and the authors benefit from viral distribution.
“Re-introducing serendipity?” Does he really mean serendipity? As in the term defined as: a propensity for making fortuitous discoveries while looking for something unrelated. I hope not. The web itself is serendipity in action from both a content creation and consumption perspective. Anyone who has ever opened a web browser or published digital content has experienced it. Serendipity is something the web has enabled since day 1 and is not new or unique to Facebook.
As far as the sharing content bit, it is straightforward to do this now. I don’t know that Facebook’s like feature changes anything from the standpoint of a media brand having their content shared. Users have been sharing content since the advent of the web and have been doing so in organized, networked settings for years. At least users at the top of the participation inequality pyramid. Whether Facebook will flip the pyramid on it’s head by attempting to make all users social is yet to be seen – it is premature to say this.
While media companies are effective at cross-promotion, such as the lead-ins in TV, many traditional media companies have failed to harness word-of-mouth marketing online to expand their audience. Rather than a TV / Preview guide of available content (Yahoo attempted this for the web in the 1990s until it became unmanageable) consumers will now get a personalized guide to online content, authored by their friends. Effectively, it’s Tivo Suggestions (based on your viewing behavior + ratings) with the added intelligence of your friends’ preferences. What remains to be seen is how aggressively Facebook will promote the passively recommended content within your news stream.
Don’t we have this already? My friends are all sharing content right now using a variety of tools, private and public. Many of them as part of social news communities (both niche specific and horizontal).
Also, just because Facebook will show me what my friends like doesn’t mean their content recommendations will be better than I’m getting from existing social communities. In fact: I would choose page 1 of a good social news site over my friends recommendations anyway – no matter how smart they are. Why? Simple: diversity, aggregation and incentives must exist for the best content to be found. Although that’s a question: does the average user desire the best, most compelling content – or merely what their friends are reading?
And will Facebook make use of aggregate data to share the best content at the category level? That would be interesting, but it’s not competition for Google, it’s competition for sites like Digg and StumbleUpon (maybe). I say maybe because those sites are equally about community as they are content.
Content sharing favors well-authored, branded experiences, which contrasts with the Google referral engine which favors “relevance” to a search phrase based on a mathematical algorithm. In a Google-dominated world, high-quality content can take back seat to keyword-heavy SEO-optimized pages, or simply newer content.
This paragraph is simply not accurate. Google certainly does look at “well-authored,” high quality publications that have gained authority via social channels when ranking content. Google’s algorithm takes into account many signals when ranking content. For trusted media this is an opportunity, not a threat, to gain additional traffic and exposure (also just FYI – “keyword-heavy SEO-optimized pages” for the sake of being keyword heavy are webspam, not SEO – and also ineffective as the engines know better than to index such content highly).
Media companies can spend more time focusing on creating outstanding experiences, and less time optimizing for Google results.
Optimized content creates an outstanding user experience because it’s simple for that content to be found by interested parties. Search is a core function of the web, and the proliferation of any new social technologies does not invalidate this. If media want to be found, they should create outstanding content and their writers should be creating appropriately titled pages. It barely takes any time to optimize content anyway, and media need to evolve to take advantage of the opportunities created by new technology, not hide from it.
Instead of relying solely on proactive recommendations, Facebook is now in a position with automatic login on many sites to passively collect consumption data, and pair that with friends’ behaviors to make suggestions. The better they utilize this data, the more Google needs to watch out, as Facebook can anticipate consumer desires faster than consumers can type “google” into their browsers.
I disagree that Google needs to “watch out” for this reason, at least in the context given. Google is so valuable because we search with intent – we are consciously seeking something right now – whether it is finding a solution for a problem or seeking out a piece of information for research. Facebook’s open graph solves a different problem and does not replace the web’s existing link-based graph.
Also it’s not as simple as Ben makes it out to be. Media companies need digital strategy to succeed, and new features by themselves on any network – powerful or otherwise – do not change this. In a world where every company is a media company, the game is not the same. As nice as it would be that Facebook’s social features or other innovations are going to save an entire industry, that is not a plan I would bank on. Newspapers need to experiment and each find a unique path that works in order to survive in an open information society.
I’ll end with a quote from my friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt. Ben is not a newspaper guy, but he misunderstands the situation just as they do, so this applies:
Once again, as these newspaper guys struggle to recognize what business they’re in, they seem to reach out and attack Google, without even recognizing what it is they’re attacking. They don’t want to take the time to understand their own business (hint: it’s never been “selling content”), so perhaps it’s not surprising that they don’t bother to understand the business of those they compete against either. And, if anything is causing the industry to falter it’s that simple fact. If they can’t understand the business they’re in (or how others are beating them) then they’re not going to do a very good job fixing themselves, will they?
Think about it: even if Facebook sends traffic and attention to media their problem is still far from solved as they don’t even know what to do with the current Google traffic (and that traffic is intent-based). I fail to understand why Facebook traffic – either from a Facebook-powered search, or Facebook likes – change this.