Harmonic Aftershock

Betty White on SNL: Disses Facebook

Earlier tonight, Betty White made her hugely anticipated debut as host of Saturday Night Live as a result of a campaign on Facebook resulting in over 500,000 people joining the Betty White to Host SNL (please?)! group.

And in her opening Monologue, what started out as a seemingly genuine thank you to her fans on Facebook quickly turned into a rant about how Facebook is a waste of time.

 “I have so many people to thank for being here. But I really have to thank Facebook. When I first heard about the campaign to get me to host Saturday Night Live, I didn’t know what Facebook was. And now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say that people on it are losers, but that’s just because I’m polite.”

Did her remarks offend people? It doesn’t seem so. The comments on Twitter all seem very positive and fans raved about her performance tonight. This, so far, is an opposite response to when William Shatner hosted SNL in 1986 and in a sketch about a Star Trek convention told a group of “trekkies” to “get a life.” And back then, there was no Twitter to create an instant groundswell.

The best line in her monologue? “Needless to say, we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had Phonebook but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon on it.”

And using Google Insights for Search to help predict interest over time, it's clear that at 88.5 years old, Betty White has blasted off once again.

 

Facebook’s Platform Enhancements: The Implications for Brands

Among the mantras we live and breathe everyday at Hill Holliday are “all media is social media” and “everything’s connected.” Facebook’s latest platform enhancement, announced at the F8 developer conference, represent a promise to make our online experiences a lot more personalized and social through our inherent connections. And, quite simply, it all boils down to one very fundamental thing: What we “like”.

The platform enhancement makes it possible for 3^rd party sites to extend and embed an advanced form of Facebook’s “like” feature through two different vantage points:

1. Your specific likes: Sites become more personalized based on your interests.
2. Your friends’ likes: Sites can highlight content that your friends recommended.

Your Specific Likes:

There’s a very good reason why Facebook recently changed “becoming a fan” of a brand to “liking” a brand and helped to link your profile interests to even more “liked” pages. It’s consolidating all of your individual tastes & preferences into a standard and portable set of “likes” that, in effect, travel with you as you surf the web.

And so when I visited Pandora earlier this evening, the site (using Facebook’s new open graph protocol), was able to see that on Facebook I “like” the band Empire of the Sun and recommended that I create a Pandora station because of it.

From Facebook’s perspective, the more I build up what I “like”, the more I am defining my preferences and, therefore, I will be met with very personalized web experiences as more 3^rd party websites take advantage of the open graph protocol.

This is huge for brands who own content-rich websites in that visitors are apt to consume more content because it’s, by default, resonating with their individual preferences (without them having to do a thing except be logged into Facebook).

Your Friends’ Likes:

In a world of “info flood” it’s very natural that we are apt to be much more receptive to content that our Friend’s recommend. So now when I visit sites using Facebook’s new “activity feed”, like CNN.com, I am quickly met with recent articles my friends “like”.

And the bonus is that each time me or a friend “likes” an article on the CNN site, it also gets published to our Facebook news feeds, exposing the recommendation to our friends on Facebook and, now, when they also visit CNN.com. 

[Facebook was brilliant to leverage a simple and, now, commonly used low-barrier form of participation]

The average user clicks "Like" on nine pieces of content each month on Facebook, according to the company. So why not take something that’s become second nature to more than 400,000,000 people and embed it into their 3^rd party site experiences? Done.

As I visit sites like IMDB.com to, let's say, check out info on my favorite TV show, I can “like” it directly from the IMDB page. It not only gets broadcast to my Facebook friends, but also becomes part of my ever-growing list of personal preferences and, thus, better defining who I am.

What does this mean for Brands?

There are a number of implications for brands and marketers as a result of Facebook’s platform enhancements. Here are four outcomes you could have:

1. You’ve increased your brand’s content consumption by making it more receptive and relatable through friends’ recommendations.
2. You increased awareness and consideration because you’ve enabled your hottest products on your website to be “liked” and hence be discovered by non-site visitors within Facebook.
3. You increased online sales conversions because you served up opportunistic personalized items that speak directly to a site visitor’s “likes.”
4. You gain a new dimension of insights and customer/prospect intelligence based on site visitors' collective and common “likes.”

As human beings, there are things that we like and things that we don’t. The aggregate collection of what we like helps to define who we are. Each time I “like” something, I’m electing to express and share a personal preference. And because these preferences are now available in Facebook’s open graph protocol, brands have one more tool in their arsenal that enable them to speak to people not in generic masses, but more intimately as unique individuals.

This was originally posted on Hill Holliday's blog.