Coca Cola’s recent social media campaign Green Eyed World is rightfully attracting a lot of attention from the marketing community. The campaign uses the Facebook Connect facility to port user data to YouTube. Fans can interact with the show singer star Katie Vogel as well as with each other leaving comments and votes using their real identity.
Porting the social functionality of FB provides a powerful connectivity layer which YouTube has so far lacked. The Fan base can be grown through the personal newsfeed, while privacy can be controlled and propagates through to YouTube or any other platform.
The thing I find really interesting is the idea of using your social connections and behaviour to validate who you really are.
Google recently introduced a feature which enables users who are logged into a Google account to leave comments. This looks very much like a move towards at least the possibility of social search. By analysing the search and browsing behaviour as well as your email/talk network, it shouldn’t be too difficult to identify a real user from a auto-generated fake account.
The SEO community have argued that social search (i.e. taking social signals to influence organic search results) is unlikely to happen until you can trust those signals.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Coke’s Green Eyed World benefits from the authenticity provided by FB connect.
If you want to understand a bit more about traditional login based identity compared to what it may look like in a network, I’d recommend reading Adriana’s post ‘Bringing identity home a VRM view.
