Marketing in the Facebook Age

To paraphrase a book review of Lord of the Rings, the English-speaking world is now divided into two – those who are part of Facebook and those who will be. If you’ve been wondering what the fuss is all about, Facebook is essentially social networking done right. The developers have cleverly isolated the key elements that people want from such a website – re-connecting with old friends, keeping in touch and interaction – and pioneered a unique approach to satisfying those needs in such a way that surpasses previous attempts from Friendster, LinkedIn or Myspace.

One may sniff at such an incremental improvement, but one should remember that Google “only” improved upon Yahoo’s search capabilities and look where it is today. Facebook’s global membership has grown exponentially since opening its doors and has reached a roster of 43 million active users after 3 years of operation. Locally, the statistics are also impressive: from virtually zero in the 1st half of the year, the ‘Malaysia’ network of Facebook has grown to 70,000-odd members, and is growing at the rate of roughly 30% every week.

Why Facebook is better

Virtually every Facebook joiner has the same experience – you are bugged by friends to register, you do so, you find a few friends, but soon you are inundated by other friends who have somehow found you and then you spend copious amounts of time “catching up” by reading other people’s profiles. Such is the genius of their profile layouts that a friend you have on Friendster suddenly seems more interesting when he’s on Facebook!

Secondly, Facebook is an uncluttered environment which emphasises what its membership base most wants to do – stay in touch. It consistently strikes a satisfying balance between privacy for oneself and curiosity about others. In Facebook, a member’s home page is a veritable news feed of all the important things happening to his community, and similarly every significant action or comment you make on Facebook is reported to your community. Are you getting engaged? Got a new job? Having a tough day? Or just simply going some place tonight? One brief update and *click* all of your friends will know.

Thirdly, Facebook structures interaction through the sharing of hobbies, games and interests. It has cleverly outsourced this to 3rd party developers who create applications on the Facebook platform that integrate well into the user’s profile page.. Whether its music, games, hobbies, religion or others, all have applications which automatically seek out those friends with the same interests. The combination of such applications, on top of Facebook’s already potent user-generated content, creates a compellingly “sticky” environment where half of all registered users log on daily or more just to see what is going on in their world of friends.

Marketing Implications

But what does this mean for marketers? Google rewrote the book on web advertising with its AdSense application and its promise of targeted advertising leveraging on its ubiquitous search engine. What about Facebook?

In its current embryonic stage, Facebook may best be understood as word-of-mouth writ large. Any campaign with a viral marketing component has to consider Facebook for efficiency reasons. Case in point: an expatriate’s leaving do was recently held at a Mexican restaurant on Jln Semantan. I know this because I was notified in my community news feed that a friend of mine attended it. The point is, its not just the invitees, but all the friends of the invitees that now know there’s a Mexican restaurant on Jln Semantan. Do they serve grilled fish tacos there? I don’t know, but I’m certainly going to find out.

Furthermore, Facebook aspires to bring some demographic order to web advertising. Although as a user it is possible to have a blank profile up, half the fun is actually sharing what your interests are and what you do. That translates on a massive scale to a potentially powerful meta-database for larger advertisers. Facebook is holding out the promise of targeted Internet advertising that does not rely on search for the targeting but rather location and demographics – a long-held dream for advertisers who want a more active campaign rather than a passive keyword-based one such as Google’s.

Finally, Facebook is being seen as a poster boy for Web 2.0 with its infrastructure for shared web applications, and is in fact being spoken in the same breath as Yahoo or Google when it comes to that coveted ‘portal’ status. With the 6th most trafficked website currently in the USA, it is no wonder, then, that the shareholders were offered US$1.6 billion for the company by Yahoo and still had the gall to turn it down. Its early days yet but the future of web advertising may again be turned on its head by the Internet’s newest kid on the block.

(reprinted from The Sun, 10th October 2007. e-Paper link here.)