What Cambridge Analytica means for content strategists
The last nine days have been tough on Facebook. The New York Times wrote a piece entitled "How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions." Zuck gave an apology. Facebook stock took a dive. And even Elon Musk deleted his companies’ Facebook pages. ("Gives me the willies," were Musk’s exact words.)
If you’re still wrapping your head around the story, here’s the abridged gist, from Zuck’s perspective:
In 2013, a professor (Aleksandr Kogan) launched a popular personality quiz app on Facebook
That app collected data from users’ profiles—and their friends’ profiles. This meant Kogan had access to 30 million Facebook users’ likes, interests, and demographic information.
The prof shared that data with UK startup Cambridge Analytica without the quiz-takers’ consent, which was in violation of Facebook’s terms. (There’s an investigation to see if Cambridge bankrolled Kogan’s project to begin with.)
Cambridge Analytica worked on the Trump and (previously) Cruz campaigns in the 2016 US election.
Now, it’s not like Cambridge Analytica uses data to change audience behavior.
Facebook is not blowing this off. Zuckerberg told CNN that by the end of the year, Facebook will have 20,000 people
dedicated to security and content review. Which is good, considering just how much Facebook can know about you.
Three things content strategists should brace for because of this:
Expect some updates to Facebook’s ad platform. I am already seeing rumors that Facebook’s going to limit the number of Custom Audiences advertisers can build. (I’m trying to track down the truth on this specific one.)
Expect more skepticism from Facebook users in your lead ads campaigns. Even if your efforts are above-board, there’s going to be a lot more suspicion about what the data you provide will be used for. People don’t want their Star Wars personality quiz results to influence legislation about colonizing Mars thirty years later.
Expect panic from nonmarketers at work. Are your coworkers forwarding articles to each other and musing about pulling Facebook campaigns altogether yet? If so, be the smartest marketer in the room: explain the situation simply, offer to meet to answer more questions in depth, and rescue your team from
panic.
That means some people are Googling certain queries and, instead of a list of links to choose from, they get a single SERP feature. Like this:
This is on the heels of Dr. Peter Meyer’s excellent post on how Google is building "walled gardens" in the search world. Rather than just supplying content from other publishers, Google is giving their own content preferred results.
It’s kind of an awkward situation.
On one hand, Google is the one putting on this show. They can show the results they want—and it’s their right to do so. And often times, the rich result features give me a quicker search experience.
On the other hand, it presents some new challenges for content strategists. We’ve known about "position zero" (showing up in featured snippets) for years now. But are we prepared for a future in which there is no other position?
