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June 15th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Last year, Facebook launched a new initiative built around, of all things, verbs. The company’s Open Graph sought to do something interesting with the way we communicate with each other: Any action expressed on Facebook could become a branding opportunity.
Perhaps the best example of Open Graph at work is Spotify. If you listen to Green Day’s “Dookie” on Spotify, then all your Facebook friends will see that you’re enjoying the album and perhaps they’ll even mark their approval with a Like or comment. Meanwhile, you don’t have to do anything to initiate the action except listen to the album (and don’t initiate the app’s “private listening mode“). Meanwhile, Spotify gets lots of free exposure simply by having users run its service.
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Though the appeal for app-makers like Spotify is obvious, Open Graph has represents a challenge of sorts for marketers. If you sell soft drinks, for instance, how are you supposed to get people to do anything but “Like” your brand? But beyond that obstacle is another, perhaps more daunting one: Marketers are wary of handing over their data to Facebook.
“Ultimately, that is the challenge,” says Matt Eastwood, the chief creative officer of ad agency DDB New York. “If [marketers] are using [Open Graph] as a way to build Facebook’s data, then they’re not really gaining that proprietary data for themselves.”
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Apparently, many marketers are still mulling over the issue; Open Graph has now been available for almost nine months and there are just a handful of case studies of brands using it successfully. However, there are a couple of high-profile examples of marketers using it well, including Ford‘s Customizer app and USA Today‘s Ad Meter.
Ford’s Customizer
Ford enjoys a tight relationship with Facebook and was able to start working on an Open Graph app well before the competition. Customizer went live in October, when most marketers were still assessing the Open Graph’s capabilities.
The app enables users to customize his or her dream Mustang and then battle others’ models. Unlike similar apps, though, Customizer receives visibility in the news feed. Whenever you customize your Mustang, your friends see an update stating that you “customized.” (Such actions are only triggered if a consumer agrees to it, however.)
The result? Brian McClary, social and emerging media analyst at Ford, says Customizer has netted more than 5 million engagements and more than 17,000 referrals. “Our goal was 2 million,” he says, referring to the engagement figure. “We crushed that.” A mobile version has also been downloaded more than 300,000 times.
USA Today‘s Ad Meter
For this year’s Super Bowl, USA Today updated its 23-year-old Ad Meter with a social media twist: Facebook integration. In doing so, USAT and social media management firm Involver took advantage of the Open Graph to drive incremental visits.
To the uninitiated, Ad Meter is a panel of consumer judges that rate that year’s Super Bowl ads. Traditionally, the panel was made up of a relatively small number of such consumers. But in 2012, USAT opened up Ad Meter to the public via Facebook. Using a combination of advertising across the publication itself and leaderboards that showed which ads were getting the best responses, USAT got an impressive 6 million people to sign up for the app. However, Open Graph extended that reach: Every time a consumer rated or viewed an ad with the app, friends would see that the person had “rated” or “viewed” it.
The upshot? Thanks to Open Graph, the app got an additional 200,000 views, according to Facebook and USAT. In addition, for every 100 pieces of content shared through the app, 120 users checked out the app.
Roland Smart, the VP of marketing for Involver, says that USAT had the advantage of a highly engaging event — the Super Bowl — at its disposal. The brand is also a publisher, which means it’s in the habit of providing content to consumers. For other brands, though, the Open Graph is still a bit of an enigma.
“It’s a no-brainer for Spotify, but brands are asking themselves, ‘How do I get value out of this?'” says Smart. “They’re going to have to get creative.”
Dissenting Vote: DDB’s “I Care” Button
Then there’s the case of an app that seemed perfect for Open Graph, but the creator of the app declined to use it.
In this case, the creator was DDB, a New York shop that counts Hertz and the New York Lottery among its clients. The project: An “I Care” button, which the agency wound up launching in April. The idea: A button similar to Facebook’s Like button that lives on charity websites. When you click on the button, your “I Care” goes into the news feed. Among the first to employ the “I Care” button was MTV Voices. Since then, some 25,000 websites have picked it up, says Eastwood.
“I Care” seems like the perfect app for Open Graph, but Eastwood says he decided not to use Open Graph for privacy reasons. “It required people to hand over data,” Eastwood explains. “We made the decision not to use it.” Part of the issue, Eastwood says, is the nature of the charities that might be using the button — if they’re at all controversial, users might not be thrilled to know Facebook is keeping track.
Such trepidation may well delay further adoption of Open Graph, but perhaps not. For his part, Eastwood says he’s open to Facebook’s Open Graph. “It’s still a great idea for the right marketer,” says Eastwood. “With the right marketer, it could be incredible.”
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Sodafish
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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