As more forward-thinking advertisers dive into social marketing, the industry is seeing big players like Facebook and Google jockeying for positioning with respect to the future of social application-based marketing platforms. Facebook opened up such that developers can write applications for it, letting Facebook users find new and exciting ways to interact with one another and with brands. There's a good deal of excitement about this on Facebook itself, and I see a lot of my Facebook friends attending events and seminars for developers.
Mainstream online marketers, however, detest new marketing offerings that require unique development resources. It harkens back to the days before the IAB standardized ad sizes, when graphic designers spent too many weekends working around the clock resizing one creative concept to run on dozens of sites, each with its own idea of the proper size for a banner ad.
Standards are supposed to help marketers spend less time and effort on production, so that the price tag of an online marketing program can be more easily justified. Standards help save time, money and effort.
This is the kind of thinking that led to OpenSocial, a standard developed by Google that will let developers write an application that will run on dozens of social networks. When I first heard about OpenSocial, the media buyer in me was tempted to jump into comScore and do a quick run to see how many more unique people OpenSocial was capable of reaching than the audience Facebook is able to garner. There are two problems associated with that.
First, take a look at the list of partners supporting OpenSocial. It begs a couple questions: How are they supporting it? Moreover, which sites owned or represented by the companies listed are implementing the standard and which are supporting it in other ways?
Secondly, it's a loaded approach. Media buyers tend to equate reach potential with success potential, and we know where that has led us over the years. No siree, it doesn't even make sense to try to gauge potential reach at this point.
The technologist in me looked out to some of the more interesting viewpoints on OpenSocial in the blogosphere. I'm noticing that there's something of a semantic battle being waged behind the scenes. While we tend to think of standards (especially ones promoted by Google) that are supported by multiple sites as being "open," in reality it's the ability of the standard to resist the control of any one entity and morph over time according to the contributions of the developers using it that makes it open. In open standards, anyone can contribute and make his mark on the future of the standard itself.
OpenSocial doesn't appear to have those traits. Google says that OpenSocial "provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites." So, we're talking about openness in the sense of a common language, and not in the sense of an open standard. In reality, when you look at OpenSocial and Facebook's APIs, there's not a lot of difference between the two, at least nothing that could serve as a differentiator.
If OpenSocial is to be successful, my bet is that it will be successful because of inertia. That is, marketers will assume that standardization is good and will thus push for it to avoid the pitfalls of other interactive programs that weren't initially standardized.
What worries me about this is that marketers may lose sight of several important things along the way. Among them:
- Just because a social networking application can be written once and run in several places doesn't mean it should. The implication that something that is written for, say, LinkedIn can also run on MySpace might be dangerous. Marketers who abide by the "more reach is better" mantra might make some dumb decisions here.
- Unintended consequences: There are a lot of moving parts to social networks, and sometimes sharing data or audiences in new ways brings about consequences that were never envisioned at the outset. Do you think the students in the recent past envisioned that the party pictures they posted to their Facebook profile might be viewable by their parents or teachers one day when Facebook decides to open up its potential user base? What might happen when the lines between social networks begin to blur further? I'm already hearing about applications that may cause privacy problems for social networkers who had an expectation about how their interaction data gets used.
- Ad overflow: We're already fighting a battle to ensure marketers know that social networks are not the place to broadcast. By aggregating an audience of social networks, do we make the temptation to speak but not listen too overwhelming?
I like the idea behind OpenSocial, but I remain unconvinced that it will give Google's network a decided advantage over Facebook. I'm also unconvinced that this platform doesn't provide the means for a bunch of misguided but well-meaning marketers to flood social networks with the wrong kind of application.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.
