My Site Title My Site Tagline

In all the discussion about whether Facebook’s new “Open Graph” is “a good thing” for anyone but Facebook, it’s possible that what’s important to digital media and marketing pros is getting lost.

Marketers in particular are surprisingly consistent in all our State of the Industry Surveys: they say they want engagement, but they measure ROI through clicks to their own sites, or to activity in which they wish the user to participate.

So, while initially it would appear that Open Graph creates a kind of distributed Facebook where users can participate in sharing activity without leaving a contextually ad-supported publisher’s destination site, when it comes to the users themselves and their profile information, the site that derives the greatest benefit is Facebook itself. Meanwhile, one of the Web's most popular sharing services reveals that some two dozen social sites are better than or on par with Facebook for sending traffic back to originating publishers. All of which should make them wonder, if I 'like' Facebook, will it love me back?