• by Ryan DeShazer , December 9, 2011

I’ve been observing an interesting trend in our industry over the past two years: paid search marketers, abandoning their posts to conquer the Web’s next advertising frontier -- Facebook Ads.  Just this past summer at SMX Advanced in Seattle, as I excitedly welcomed the “Summer of Search,” I was reminded of this changing climate among PPC marketers.

I traveled to Seattle with a friend and colleague; he was going to attend the PPC-focused sessions, while I stuck to the SEO and business-related ones. We’d swap notes afterwards. Prior to the show’s open, we pored over the full agenda to determine which sessions looked promising. I mentioned to my friend that he absolutely must go see  Addie Conner, VP of advertising at  Social Code, speak. “The stuff she’s doing in paid search will blow your mind,” I told him.

The next day I discovered that Addie too had gone the way of Facebook; like many others, she had chosen to turn her advertising focus to the promise of the social graph. There would be no mind-blowing speech on paid search.

Then two months ago I read an intriguing column on NYTimes.com, “The Big Business of ‘Big Data.’” In that piece, writer Quentin Hardy introduces the pitfalls that result when we place too much value on “data.” The belief is that due to the “ubiquity of big data,” organizations can create an advantage over their nearest competitors through a careful examination of its hidden gems. Essentially, he who wields the data wields the advantage.

But Hardy warns of the overuse and over-reliance on big data: “Often people won’t know exactly what hidden pattern they are looking for, or what the value they extract may be, and therefore it will be impossible to know how much to invest in the technology. Odds are that the initial benefits, as it was with Google’s Adwords algorithm, will lead to a frenzy of investments and marketing pitches, until we find the logical limits of the technology. It will be the place just before everybody lost their shirts.”

This leads to an incredibly important question: Do we yet know the value of the social graph (now open graph)?

Facebook is certainly exciting, and I’ve already gone on record with my belief that its platform is disruptive, but are we confident in our appraisal of its foundational data? This is a question that both advertisers and soon investors need to answer. With Facebook heading to IPO with a $100 billion valuation, the answer to the question of whether that’s a fair amount or not depends on the value of that “big data.”

As PPC marketers, it may be that we’re buying a bit too much into the hype, and overvaluing the social graph as we walk away from the proven realm of paid search. Gord Hotchkiss’ column last week, “The Challenge of Social,” gave me pause to reconsider a bit of my own bullishness toward Facebook. His points are well taken; it is true that intent is lacking in the social graph. Without the presence of intent, it may be a bit premature for us as an industry to make wholesale career changes and run headlong into the glow of Facebook advertising. Consider what would happen to that space if it’s later proven that we’ve grossly overvalued social graph data.  Investors would lose their shirts, and marketers would lose their jobs.

Listen, I’m not a hater. I love Facebook. I think it’s one of the most profound evolutions in the digital space we’ve ever seen. But in the rush to be marketing pioneers and first movers, are we playing a part in pushing the Web to its next big bubble burst?