The most common mistake that brands make is to just jump in.  Almost every brand we’ve worked has created a Facebook page without any sense of purpose or content plan for what they’re going to do with it.  In most cases the only goal is to get as many “Likes” as possible.

The problem with social networks, and most online media, is noise.  While it may be easy to start getting a lot of “Likes,” it’s hard to get people to engage with your brand unless they have a strong connection to it or there is a compelling call to action.  There are a lot of factors that facilitate this connection but visual identity is often the first.

When you’re putting your brand on a third party platform, you’re immediately compromising some of that visual identity to accomodate that brand, be it Facebook, Twitter or any other network.  Designing for that space can be challenging because, unlike your corporate home page where you control everything but the browser, you now have a very limited canvas.

Historically, social networks have experimented with loosening some of these restrictions but the results have been disastrous.  MySpace took the social network reigns from Friendster due, to some extent, to their policy of giving users unprecedented control over their pages.  This eventually inspired people to make sweeping HTML and CSS adjustments to their pages and, it many cases, made the pages a user experience nightmare.  When bad design attacks, it often kills.

We were presented with a great new challenge with a new client we were really excited to connect with.  Looxcie makes unbelievably small video recorders that you can wear on your ear like a bluetooth headset, leaving your hands free to keep doing what you were doing.  (ed. note: they’re incredibly cool and you can buy them right now on Amazon here).  Looxcie is a new brand with a completely new kind of product so first impressions and visual identity is hugely important.  The Looxcie cam is also an inherently social product so it’s natural for people to look for them on social networks.

With the holiday season looming, we created a new Facebook Welcome tab, a Twitter skin, and a skinned YouTube channel.  The result is a level of brand consistency that lets you know immediately that you’re dealing with the actual brand across each of these channels.  It’s immediately apparent that Looxice is a brand that enables video sharing of life as it’s happening.

We also recently did some similar work for Lego Games on Facebook.

When was the last time you looked at visual identity across all your social media channels?  We love helping brands stay nimble in this incredibly dynamic space so feel free to reach out to us on our contact page if you want to talk about how we can help you.

First of all, no one has a bigger incentive to protect your data than Facebook.  If Facebook wants to own your online identity, and it’s pretty clear that they do, they will face many of the same challenges that credit card companies face in regards to trust.  If users don’t trust their data with Facebook then their entire business model will be in ruins.  This is an important point because many are saying that Open Graph is just an attempt by Facebook to sell off your user data in the hopes of getting some residual traffic back to their site.  This just isn’t the case.

Another common response to any change in online security is this notion that privacy has always been a myth and these recent developments just make it more obvious to consumers.  I disagree with this though and believe quite the opposite.  Facebook actually gives its users some of the most advanced privacy tools of any site that features user profiles.  The problem is that people don’t know how to use them.  Many people are shocked when they what data is passed whenever they “Like” something through Open Graph but that information is already public.  If Open Graph does anything in this regard it reinforces the need for average consumer to get smart about what personal data they make public.  A case could be made for this being taught in school at a very young age.

Lastly, what does this mean to publishers and developers?  Facebook Connect already gave us access to single sign on and passing simple information between Facebook and the external world so what makes this different.  The difference is that the permissions barrier is gone.  Simply “liking” something, to use one example of Open Graph, now sends a much more detailed snapshot of the visitor to the site.  If you’re targeting 28-34 year olds and the people “liking” your content are significantly younger…or from the wrong country…or the wrong gender…you can now make adjustments.  It’s an instant survey of sorts.

While the introduction of Open Graph may have made the world a slightly more complicated place for Facebook users, smart consumers will see a long term benefit from technology like this that will far outweigh the steeper learning curve to manage their privacy.