There’s been talk of Facebook falling on its face as it were and being ‘so last week’ with the cool kids, but in actual fact it claims to have grown at a rate of 3% per week for the past two years.
Or at least that’s what Blake Chandlee the commercial director of Facebook told us.
Chandlee
Chandlee popped into TBWA\Manchester this week to talk about what’s been happening in the weird and wonderful world of super poking and how it’s opening up to advertisers.
I confess I was a Facebook sceptic. I thought it was a huge geeky chat room where people you don’t like can track you down and stalk you. Somewhere to show off, be embarrassed by other people posting ugly photos of you, waste time with ridiculous applications and incriminate yourself in front of your boss. But I grew curious, so my friend signed me up and I discovered that Facebook is whatever you make it. Share as much or as little as you want, be a nerd if you want or just keep in touch with people.
Chandlee's folksy American delivery eroded my scepticism further, as he explained Facebook is not somewhere to hang out or a substitute for real human contact, but ‘relationship cement’. Facebook makes it easier to share photos, music and videos with your real friends, not go looking for new ones. It’s also great if you lose your mobile with all your numbers so you don’t lose contact.
Courtesy: weblogcartoons.com
Facebook was started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg then 19, now a very rich 23 year old. It started as Harvard’s online yearbook and grew, and grew, and grew. Now over 50 million people worldwide are members and we Brits also love it.
It is claimed that 26 million people in the UK now visit some kind of social networking site - that’s 80% of the internet population and almost 50% of the total UK population.
No wonder brands want to flood into Facebook and be everybody’s best friend. But how easy is it? Will Facebookers resent brands who invade their turf, or worse create potentially damaging groups like ‘I hate HSBC’? But as Blake said ‘conversations regarding your brand are happening whether you are there or not’. The question is do you want to be there?
In your more traditional marketing format Facebook has banner ads down the left hand side. Today mine said ‘Be skinny for spring’; obviously they’re trying to tell me something. Well actually they probably are, because on Facebook you can target people by location, country, state, city or town, age, gender, interest, activities, music, books, TV shows, education, high school or college. So if they know I’m a 24-year old female, they’re guessing I’d like to be a size zero….
Another more subtle place for ads is in the newsfeed, mingled in with friends’ news of who has added what application, posted photos or wrote on thingy’s wall - and the best bit of Facebook. The positioning of these ads means your consumers could mistake them as friend news, and view them as such.
Another way to advertise on Facebook is to create a page. But in order for your brand to make some friends and not be Billy no-mates you must make people like you and want to visit. Consumers need to enjoy your page and your applications. For this reason Facebook isn’t worried about being hijacked by advertising either, better applications spread further and make more money, rubbish ones die out and so the applications police themselves. Brands must give a reason to share and ‘be the conversation’.
Applications are another way to engage consumers. Tripadvisor is doing it successfully at the moment: their application is a map you can post on your homepage and mark which cities you’ve visited in the world. This apparently goes down a storm with traveller types keen to boast which exotic places they’ve visited and partly as a consequence, 12% of Tripadvisor’s members have come from Facebook. Note to self: the key is to create an application people actually want to use.
Facebook could be a useful market research tool too, because you can create your own poll and ask any question, to any demographic. The answers come back in minutes rather than weeks, much quicker than research groups and much cheaper.
But the main thing I took away from Blake Chandlee is that Facebook is constantly changing, they’re not entirely sure where it’s going as it just follows consumer demand adapting like a chameleon.
In the world of consumer driven content nothing is stable. Facebook changes and so does the advertising it contains, it’s an unknown quantity.
Chandlee also believes social networks can change the role of internet advertising by actually generating demand for a product, this remains to be seen. But if singers like as bad as Lily Allen can launch themselves on Myspace why not brands?
Editor’s note. Chandlee also told the audience that Facebook is currently valued at circa $15bn which equates to an applied value per Facebook user of almost $300 – heady in anyone’s books. And Chandlee did concede that in the oft fickle world of the internet, the ‘next big thing’ could well be just around the corner. Anybody remember Friends Reunited?
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