What Facebook’s f8 Changes Mean for Sports

In case you didn’t already know by now, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his Director of Products, Brett Taylor (former Co-Founder and CEO of Friendfeed) introduced the next iteration of the Facebook Platform called the Open Graph to the web developer community, and it was generally well received by the public at large—at least on the content provider side.

Despite this announcement coming a mere two weeks ago on April 21, 2010 at the company’s third annual f8 conference, the Facebook Like Button is already implemented on over 50,000 websites and has been seen tens of billions of times globally. In fact, the Like Button instantly exceeded 1 billion impressions in less than 24 hours with only 75 major websites using it at launch.

As Zuckerberg put it in his company blog post, the “next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the web. It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. “  For the most part, we believe this statement is true at Activ8Social, and we also believe the shift toward a more open, social web is a good change for both the sports brand/team/athlete and the consumer/fan.

Why? Because Facebook now carries the personal identity of over 450 million people around the world enabling sports media outlets and brands that implement Facebook’s Social Plugins to more effectively build relationships with fans and consumers that are mutually desired.   It also gives third-party websites the ability to directly provide relevant and extremely targeted information to your Facebook news feed (of course this opens the door spam and privacy concerns).

But what exactly does this mean for sports marketers and websites?

The first thing it means is that sports content providers can expand their reach by providing niche information to people directly on Facebook, where many now spend their time on the web.   Every time you “Like” a web page outside of Facebook, you become part of a behind-the-scenes Facebook Page that enables the content provider to send you updates to your personal news feed.

For example, let’s say that you click the “Like” button on the New Orleans Saints team page on ESPN.com.   When you click that bottom as seen below, you trigger two different valuable social interactions that potentially increase the loyalty between you and ESPN while providing an opportunity for ESPN to acquire new Saints fans along the way.

One result of clicking the “Like” button is that the New Orleans Saints page on ESPN.com is placed under your Likes and Interests section of your Info tab.  The other result is that your endorsement of the page shows up in the news feed of all your friends on Facebook.

This is great for websites that you frequently visit, but what’s in it for you Joe sports fan?

For one, the new “Like” button increases the chance that you may discover new sports websites that provide you fresh content and engaged fan communities.  Facebook provides a few other plug-ins like the Activity Feed, Facepile, Live Stream, and Recommendations that make your favorite website immediately more social if implemented.

Using the Recommendations feature on NHL.com for example, the NHL helps make their website more relevant to you, if logged into Facebook, by displaying the articles, game summaries, and recaps hockey fans are liking and sharing in real time.  The NHL could also choose to implement the Activity Feed widget which displays stories including all liking, recommending, and sharing of content on the website.

Thus far, I’ve talked about major websites like ESPN.com and NHL.com, but Facebook’s Social Plugins could also impact the way that you interact with newly discovered websites which is vital to increasing the quality of sports content provided across the web.

Let’s say that you either see a story about Tiger Woods that a friend “Liked” in your news feed that leads to a new blog or you just stumble across a new golf equipment website.  Many people are adverse to giving something new a try, but if that new golf blog happens to have the Facepile social plugin and five of your friends have joined the website, you’re probably much more inclined to want to check it out.

There has to be drawbacks to all this new “social web” right?

Some sports fans would argue yes.  There’s no doubt that many people will feel as though information they deem “personal” will be at risk now that Facebook has expanded publicly available data to include a user’s current city, education, hometown, work, likes, interests, and friends. 

Consumer Reports recently highlighted in its June 2010 State of the Net survey the fact that two out of three households use social networks like Facebook yet in one of four households with a Facebook account weren’t aware of or didn’t choose to use the service’s privacy controls.

Facebook’s shift in privacy policy and release of easy-to-use Social Plugins has already attracted government attention from four Democratic US Senators — Al Franken, Charles Schumer, Mark Begich, and Michael Bennet — who are urging Mark Zuckerberg to reconsider the new direction.

In defense of the new Open Graph Platform, Facebook recently stated “It’s important to note that none of your personal data is shared with a site when you view these new features, and they will only be visible to you when you’re logged in to Facebook. Also, none of these features impact or change Facebook’s advertising programs or policies.”

Privacy and security on the internet have to take center stage, but I don’t necessarily think that Facebook is legally wrong in sharing the information.  Either way, one point that should be reiterated is that any brand, team, league, or athlete that abuses the information provided by the Open Graph to their website will 100% lose the loyalty of their consumers and fans.  While this won’t stop everybody from abuse, as nothing will, breaking people’s trust on an already sensitive subject will create a public relations nightmare.

From a sports fan and sports marketer perspective, what do you think about all of the recent changes to the Facebook Platform?