Review of SES New York 2011

Facebook “Like” buttons are the new Links! The theme of the conference wasn’t about mobile or Twitter this year, but instead it was about Facebook “Like” buttons. The highlight of day 2′s afternoon session was the Killer Facebook Targeting Tactics session which featured 3 great presentations.

Speakers:
Marty Weintraub, President, aimClear
Harry J. Gold, CEO, Overdrive Interactive
Lisa Buyer, President & CEO, The Buyer Group

To summarize things, Facebook is going to become a strong force in the search industry and will compete with Google within the next 6 months. How will they do it? The “Like” button. An example used during Harry Gold’s presentation was on Levis.com where each individual pair of jeans offered the reader the ability to “like” them. Once the reader clicked the “like” button, they would be prompted to login to facebook (if they weren’t already logged in) and it would share it with their friends via their facebook wall. i.e. “Jenny likes Levis Skinny Jeans” with a photo of the jeans would automatically show up on Jenny’s facebook wall for all of her friends to see. If any of those friends clicked on the link, they would be taken to that page at levis.com where they too could “like” them. It could go viral very quickly.

The concept is this: if you google the word “Skinny Jeans” now, the results that you will get are what Google thinks the best results are for Skinny Jeans. If you search on facebook for that same term, “Skinny Jeans,” each individual person will get a different set of results. If Jenny was my friend, I would probably see levis.com as a result or other websites that some of my friends have “liked.” (with a few Bing.com results mixed in). Would you rather trust google or your friends?

Within the next few weeks, I expect to see a lot of promotion from facebook where they start advertising the fact that you can search facebook instead of google or yahoo.