{"id":4947,"date":"2013-01-17T08:28:42","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T14:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4947"},"modified":"2013-01-17T08:28:42","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T14:28:42","slug":"graph-searchs-dirty-promise-and-the-con-of-the-facebook-like","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=4947","title":{"rendered":"Graph Search&#8217;s Dirty Promise and the Con of the Facebook &#8220;Like&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/stevecheney.posterous.com\/graph-searchs-false-promise-and-the-con-of-th\">Steve Cheney<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>The numbers are shocking in magnitude: e.g. over the past several years AmEx actually spent about half of its ad spend on buying likes\u2014tens of millions of dollars. Your friends didn\u2019t just go to the American Express fan page and \u201clike\u201d the company for no apparent reason. They did so because they got something. <\/p>\n<p>Across the board big advertisers were told to spend 50% of their ad buy solely on fan acquisition. This is a dirty little secret in ad agency land. Trust me. I\u2019ve seen it firsthand from the marketer, advertiser and agency side. <\/p>\n<p>One direct effect of all this passive liking is an ugly messy data set with a bunch of implicit signals\u2026 that are wrong. What happens when your girlfriend types in \u201crestaurants in San Francisco\u201d into graph search and P.F. Chang\u2019s gets spit out because it\u2019s the most-liked restaurant.  Was a bad Chinese chain the kind of serendipity you were looking for on your date? Didn\u2019t think so. <\/p>\n<p>Sure FB places check-in feature is another signal (beyond the like) I get it&#8230; but this isolated piece of structured metadata means almost nothing without massive scale and structure. So&#8230; someone in your social graph went to a restaurant and checked in. Wow! Stop the presses. Thank you FB for saving my night, I could not have eaten without you&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>And basic math backs up how weak FB\u2019s structured data is in spades. At launch yesterday FB claimed that one trillion connections have been made on the network to date. Great, that\u2019s a lot of restaurant recs, right? Uhm, not really\u2026 <\/p>\n<p>FB has 1 billion users. 1,000 signals x 1 billion is 1 trillion. So each user has logged on average 1,000 events\/photos\/places\/things etc. IN TOTAL. And that\u2019s gonna somehow predict where I want to eat? Most of that 1,000 pieces of data are your actual photos and friends. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Steve Cheney: The numbers are shocking in magnitude: e.g. over the past several years AmEx actually spent about half of its ad spend on buying likes\u2014tens of millions of dollars. Your friends didn\u2019t just go to the American Express fan page and \u201clike\u201d the company for no apparent reason. They did so because they got [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}