Few corporate events have gained as much popular attention as Facebook’s recent initial public offering. Part of the fascination stemmed from the widespread speculation about the price the stock would garner. But the underlying question now is how Facebook’s new public company status will change its corporate culture and its influence on society.
There is no need to dwell on how Facebook has changed the way people interact and acquire information. If you’re not tied into your peers and professional colleagues via Facebook, you’re probably not up to date on their latest news, likes, and dislikes. Even world news is distributed quicker via Facebook (and Twitter) than by traditional news outlets.
As a consequence, Facebook has become not only a critical source of information, but also a major commercial platform displacing newspapers and other advertising venues. Even Google has been challenged by Facebook’s closed world of online commerce, because the search company can’t track information and activity effectively within the Facebook environment. Yahoo, which once flourished with its Web portal, has become nearly irrelevant as a result of Facebook’s success.
Anyone who has teenagers knows they start the day by looking at their Facebook homepage, and they seldom respond to emails or phone calls, unless they are simple text messages and/or somehow tied into their Facebook communications. And a growing number of companies like Jive, Yammer, and Salesforce.com are trying to adopt Facebook-like social networking tools to encourage communication and collaboration among their employees, customers, and partners.
Ironically, Facebook’s IPO was nearly derailed in part by a series of technical glitches encountered by the Nasdaq, which failed to anticipate the volume of transactions the offering would generate. This issue may have tempered the initial market response to Facebook’s shares, but the public disclosures that accompanied the IPO have revealed some cracks in the company’s persona.
Though Facebook has monetized a sizable portion of its social networking activity, it has only scratched the surface of the ultimate value of the data it is generating on a day-by-day basis. According to a friend who recently joined the company to help it develop a more robust analytics engine, Facebook is surprisingly early in its efforts to capture, analyze, and capitalize on user data and activity records. Collating and utilizing this vital information is pivotal to understanding the preferences and buyer behavior associated with Facebook members, which is ultimately what makes it so appealing to corporate advertisers.
The limited data on the value of advertising spurred General Motors Co. to stop advertising on Facebook. A GM official said paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers' car purchases. (That story continues to grow. The latest revelation
is that GM wanted more than Facebook was willing to deliver.) The timing of the decision -- just before Facebook’s IPO -- certainly added more questions about the value of the stock.
Joel Ewanick, GM's vice president of US marketing, was cited in recent reports about the automaker's decision to stop advertising on Facebook. (Source: General Motors)
What can’t be questioned is that more and more companies are seeking information and insight about customer behavior, and they are demanding more tangible proof of the ROI of their marketing investments. Facebook and other Internet companies will have to offer better analytics to meet these escalating expectations.
Still... no one's been able to crack the problem of "I know half of my marketing budget is being wasted, but I just don't know which half."
There is definitely value in Facebook ads, but quantifying it is a problem that is unlikely to be solved exactly. (And if it *was* solved exactly, it would probbaly hurt Facebook more than help.)
Trouble behind, and you know that notion, just crossed my mind.
Web Pro News-June 1 . . It appears that Facebook is having some problems this morning, only a few hours after straightening everything out following an outage that lasted for more than two hours on Thursday night. That outage affected a good number of users across the world, and people took to Twitter to complain (and crack IPO jokes, as would be expected).
"Facebook is currently down. The world's productivity just increased by 1200%."
"Yes, folks, it's true, #facebook is down. You'll have to go somewhere else to find out who went to Red Lobster after work today."
No offensse, jabailo, but there have been other sites that allowed friending long before Facebook. The now defunct Yahoo 360 comes to mind. Lesser known social sites like Multiply allowed friending also existed before Facebook. Facebook just took concepts that already existed expanded then built on them.
I had never heard that except in the movies. But then since I don't have a Facebook account, I guess I'd still be unlisted nonpublished...or would there be another way of refering to non-Facebook people? It's amazing to me how many people assume that EVERYONE has Facebook.
Mary, that might hold true as long as Facebook remains Zuck's personal fiefdom. If shareholders actually had any power, they might seek changes which would affect the user experience.
As it is, Zuck can vote down anything he doesn't like. Public, but kind of not public, if you see what I mean.
"If Facebook can't continue to monetize what it does, how will that affect end users? And when?
@Mary: I think Facebook will always find ways to monetize what it does. Even if they may not be able to generate money through ads, I'm sure they'll be able to find other ways of making money via Facebook.
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Anyone involved in web presence knows it is imperative to engage customers in order to gain their attention and win their business. Yet, most companies grapple with many moving parts in order to execute on this business imperative.
The concept of cloud computing is changing the role and responsibilities of IT in many ways. They include how the cloud requires network operations and application development teams within organizations to work more closely together to meet the needs of their mutual customers -- executives and end users.
For years, vendors have been painting a tantalizing vision of the business and even personal benefits that can be gained by tying together various objects using powerful networking devices.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling of customer behavior to convert more site visitors into leads, says Brian Baron, director of business analytics, in an interview at the Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
A growing number of HR managers are suspicious of individuals who do not take part in social media and view them as anti-social in real life as well as online.
Twitter's changes are clearly aimed at being more Facebook-like, and this is because both companies are vying to serve the mobile social network market. But can that market work for anybody, given how difficult it is to push ads to social-update readers?
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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