How I approached it as a User & as a Social Marketer.

I had missed F8 this year and was bummed that I wasn’t there for the announcement of Open Graph Protocol (OGP). My friend Matt Singley gave me the run down on what this meant for me as a user and me as a marketer. The subject definitely caught my interest once he told me, but it wasn’t until I went to Pandora and Yelp that I started to get freaked out as a User and intrigued as a Marketer.

As soon as I typed the url for Pandora into my browser a message prompted asking to connect to my Facebook profile and suggest radio stations based on my likes and interests I had put on my profile. I had to say No because I’m pretty sure I haven’t updated that portion of my bio since 2007. As a User, “UHHHHH” was running through my head. As a Social Marketer “OOOh cool behavioral targeting!”

Yelp was the next site I was hit with by OGP. My sister was in town and harassing me to find a good restaurant for the family to eat at. Trusty Yelp to the rescue but, wait a minute! I think Yelp just pulled in all of my friends who are on Facebook that are on Yelp onto my homepage. Distracted by the feed that was generated, again as a User I thought “Great it’s pulling it my friends reviews because I trust their taste!” As a Social Marketer I thought “Hmm..this could cause privacy issues later on.”

Of course people are upset about this but will this stop a remarkable strategy and business model? Doubt it.