Should You Trust Facebook and Google?

There are a couple of online giants that are taking over more and more of your online world. Facebook and Google have become more and more powerful and I wonder how healthy it is to us personally and also business wise.

Last month it was announced that Facebook wants major news content providers to publish on Facebook instead of their own online entities.  Currently when the New York Times or Washington Post shares an article online, that story is posted and hosted on the newspapers own websites and then they share a link on Facebook and other social media channels.

Now Facebook wants the story to be posted and hosted on Facebook, not just linked to from Facebook.

Facebook has grown from a way for Mark Zuckerberg to meet girls in 2004 to one of the worlds most powerful data machines.  Facebook knows more about you and me than the NSA.  It serves ads to each of us based on who we are and what they know about us.  Facebook is offering sweet deals to news content providers to entice them to become part of the Facebook family but several folks are concerned that Facebook is becoming too powerful.

Facebook likes to changes the rules for what it allows and how it distributes content. A couple years ago when I was working fulltime in social media, I saw how one of those changes adversely affected our businesses ability to communicate with our customers.

We had to pay to be seen.  Facebook was flexing their marketing muscle and businesses needed to cough up the cash to stay in the game.  This practice continues and they will continue to make it more expensive for businesses to use Facebook as a marketing platform.

It was also pointed out to me awhile ago that Facebook seems to be emulating the old AOL business model.  That was one where you don’t need the whole internet, you just need to go to AOL and AOL will tell/show/feed you what they think is important.  Except Facebook is making money and AOL is best remembered for the discs they used to send us so we could connect with a dial up connection.

Now Google, that’s a harmless little company that you can trust too right? Remember their mantra, Do No Evil or something like that?

Google began as a search engine, added an email service and then started buying up all the other internet start ups.  They can reach your email, ready the content on the web pages you visit, maybe even read your thoughts?!  They supposedly know every search you have conducted and clearing your history or cookies or anything else won’t stop them.

Sounds scary, but we continue to use them.  Like Facebook, they know more about us than anyone, even our parents.

But there is an upside to this.  Imagine having a customized web experience.  The 5% of the time we are online and searching for something, or the other 95% when we are reading stuff, all of that is tailored to you and me.  Not as a group, but individuals.  The search engine results, the banner ads, the content itself is more often than not being delivered to each of us based on, well, each of us.

This is heaven for a business that takes advantage of this technology. I offer these digital solutions, contact me at Scott@WOWO.com .  And it actually offers a richer web experience for us as consumers too.