Do Brands ‘Like’ Your Loyalty?

When Facebook got rid of its ‘fan’ functionality and replaced it with ‘like’ buttons, frankly, I thought it was stupid. Fanship was a perfect way to talk about a group of people who advocated your brand. ‘Liking’ a brand seemed more fleeting, more random, less committal, less quantifiable, and…it just sounded much smaller. But since it launched with Open Graph in April, I’ve started to see that the ‘smaller’ impression I had is exactly what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s had in mind.

As a consumer, you only engage with so many brands, and would then become a fan of a limited amount of times. But when you think about how many products you might like from each of those brands, well, it could be in the thousands. And there it is. Instead of becoming a fan of, say, the NBA store, I could now ‘Like’ 1238 things within that store. Or instead of my sister or fiancé becoming a fan of Coach, they could now ‘Like’ 5 kazillion Coach purses.

Why is this important? To start, it creates more data points for Facebook to capture, which creates a more detailed picture of who you are, and gets them closer to taking over the world. It also gives brands the opportunity to tap into this data and learn what makes you tick so they can offer you better and more ‘likable’ stuff. This is a good thing. With further integration, it’ll help brands strengthen their loyalty to you in more relevant ways, and in turn give you a reason to be more loyal.

“Facebook is becoming the loyalty card of the internet, just like your key chain,” said Tom Wentworth, VP-web solutions for technology company, Ektron, which is busy developing products for corporate websites to tailor visits based on the user's social graph. Mr. Wentworth says Home Depot is considering Ektron's technology to better send its consumers down the paths that suit their interests, whether they be gardening or contracting. (via AdAge)

As I said in a recent post about Facebook and Augmented Reality, it won’t be long, in my opinion, before this online functionality is introduced off-line. It’s not unrealistic to think that you could walk into Banana Republic and ‘Like’ a pair of pants on the rack through an app on your iPhone in the near future. ~ p