Profiling Facebook: The Google of Social networking (Part I)

I intended a study on Facebook to be a one blog post initially. However, the literature, reserach and comments on the subject is staggering and hence i feel compelled to give more than one post. Here is the firt one on the phenomemon of social networking and profiling Facebook, the one company which has revolutionalized the power of social networking.

Facebook is accorded a status of being the second wunderkid of the web world. The first web wunderkid is Google!



Consider this:

• Barack Hussein Obama, used Facebook as a cornerstone for his path breaking presidential election last year.
  
• Dell is recruiting new hires from Facebook audience.
  
• Windows 7 "borrows" networking features from it.
  
• It is a 175 million users community..
  
• ...adding 5 million new users everyweek.
  
• If Facebook, were a country, it would be greater than the population of the whole of Brazil
  
• It edges out USs greatest sporting event Superbowl XLIII with a record 152 million eye balls
  
• One of the most addictive sites, users spend an average of 169 minutes per month (compare it with 13 minutes in Google news and 10 minutes in New York Times)
  
• The Maine democratic party uses it to organize regular meetings
  
• Ernst and Young uses this site to recruit new hires
  
• Sometime in October November 2008, Facebook edged past Myspace to become the largest networking site in US.
• In a 2006 survey conducted by student monitor, a New Jersey based company specializing in college student market, Facebook tied with Beer as the second most popular thing among undergraduates, ranked lower than iPod.

At the heart of the Facebook phenomenon is what is now being termed as Conversational marketing (Word of mouth marketing). The underlying insight is that consumers are more liley to trust a pitch from friends rather than paid commercials and other promotions from the company! Thus
Users become product promoters...

1. ..and are encouraged tp spread the word about things they buy and use --> thereby endorsing the product.
   

What Facebook has been successful in doing is blending E - Commerce with WOrd of mouth marketing for results which at this stage are more promising than anyother in the Web 2.0 space. While advertising online as we know it today may be a good profit engine for social networking companies, the FaceBook avatar of e-commerce selling is looked upon with some hope in terms of bringing results.

While a Amazon or a e-Bay uses a rating system to throw up results on relevant products basis current purchases, Face Book ratifies products by adding rating and recommendations from friends. They call this Social Graphs. Thus when a user buys something online through Facebook, Facebook will seek a permission for sharing the purchase with the user's social network, with a product endorsement by the current user. For instance is a user browses through New York Times editorial section using a Facebook application, Facebook prompts the user when he is leaving to rate his experience. Depending upon the users feedback, Facebook flashes a status update to the users social network saying "... has read the editorial in NYT and thinks it rocks! Check it out."

In terms of Online marketing, Facebook thus shifts the focus from ads to consumers to promte purchase (and earning revenues by the clicks on the ad widget) to making people endorse the products they buy and tell it to their friends (Facebook earns from the users endorsement of the company product).

To that effect this strategy has been voted to be one of the boldest moves on the internet!.

Apart from user endorsements, Facebook has three other sources of revenue:

1. Business pages: Where they host the company and its offerings for consumer/users of a particular profile. Thus it creates a platform for companies to talk to their ideal profile consumers and promote its product. A 100,000 of such hosted company profiles are found in Facebook at this point.

2. Social Ads: Ads targeted by user profile data! This source also hosts the Beacon which uses personal information of users (which they would like to share only with their network) for targeting marketing campaigns. There have been privacy concerns around the Beacon, which mined implicit data (which the consumer doesnot want to share with other outside his network). Google and others used Explicit data, which the user has voluntarily disclosed about himself to be used for marketing campaigns. Amidst outrages on privacy, Beacon was made an "opt in" service for users instead of being an "auto enrollment".

3. Insight: Facebook also has a data of usage metrics for advertisers (trends etc) and also sells data on targeting/focussing and clicks.

According to Facebook's own books of account, they value themselves at $3.7 Billion (June 23rd, 2008). However Microsoft, in 2007 bought 1.6% of Facebook stake at $240 million, thus giving Facebook a valuation of $15 Billion. It made $280 million in revenues in 2009 and is yet to break even.

Touch Phones: To be or not to be!

A mobile phone user survey by Reevoo, the online product comparison site, has "almost " damned the touch screen bally-hoo. In a survey that happened across 19000 respondents , they featured 226 handsets and the result that they have come out with defies the accepted standards, trends and beliefs in the devices market today. 5 out of the top 10 least popular phones are touch phones with big marquee names such as HTC Diamond, Samsung Armani, Blackberry Storm, Samsung Omnia being least in terms of popularity. Many of the phones have been drubbed on the basis of poor battery life, "nightmare" touch-screen interface, and virtual buttons that "aren't big enough for male fingers". A hit to Convergence as a upcoming principle, Web Browsing and E mail functionality are not that highly favoured by consumers!

On the other hand Nokia devices with its traditional 12 key pad gets a thumbs up by most users as Nokia swamps the most popular phones list! Style was the most important factor when choosing a phone (15.3 per cent), while size (14.1 per cent), a good camera (10.4 per cent) and decent music capabilities (7.7 per cent) make the 4 most important factors that influence the purchase!

The way it sees, there are a few vital take outs from here:

1. Many of the manufacturers have been inspired by the iPhone. But it is not all the hardware, for UI forms the bedrock for consumer experience which in this case has dulled out the sheen off a few marquees.

2. Users do take refuge in the tried and tested and that is why you will find all Nokias out there. They are not necessarily the best phones but the most reliable ones that consumers seem to prefer.

3. Convergence is still a mile away as people havent really gone infavour of the swanky, technology edge. So tech marketers have some work to do to make convergence mainstream!

4. Price of the handset is an important factor when people think of its utility and usefulness and value. That is probably why mid ranged handsets occur with regularity in the most popular list.

5. People also would probably like to have a reliable handset rather than a flashy one. Nothing otherwise puts in context, why Nokia scores so heavily while a few of the Big names failed so miserably.

Top 25 Social Networks: US

Compete.com put up the top honours for social networking sites in US sometime back. No one expected the result to to be anywhere different than featuring Facebook and MySpace at No.1 and No.2 ranks. Tweeter completes the top honours at No.3! A massive 1.1 Billion hits at Facebook with 68 million unique visitors does justice to the massiveness that Facebook is achieving. It has edged past myspace.com, last years no1.

The statistic doesnot just stop there, Facebook has also reported an exponential increase in sessions per monthly unique visitor!

Twitter, may be the one to watch next year, as it has galloped through to No 3 rank from a no.22 last year. The number on Twitter can be significantly higher especially because often it is browsed through third party applications where as the study is based on browser data.

Interestingly Orkut which was buzzing loud till some time back and is still the no 1 networking site in India doesnot feature in the top 20. This is probably because in terms of innovative applications, Orkut has not kept pace with the social networking scene. Do we see Google beginning to loose steam here as well?