Facebook IS going to get KILLED!

[Ghent12]

Re: Facebook IS going to get KILLED!

Maybe so. It seems like a dangerous/idiotic strategy to try to maintain dominance as a social network by purposefully offering sub par mobile experience as a way of forcing people to use their PC.

Indeed, it seems only a matter of time before Facebook either gets with the program or loses massive market share by someone who provides a better product.

[c1ue]

Re: Facebook IS going to get KILLED!

Maybe so. It seems like a dangerous/idiotic strategy to try to maintain dominance as a social network by purposefully offering sub par mobile experience as a way of forcing people to use their PC.

Perhaps, but is it a safer/smarter strategy to accommodate migration of your customers to a platform which intrinsically is less advertising remunerative?

As a public company which is under fire for not living up to its high revenue expectations?

Indeed, it seems only a matter of time before Facebook either gets with the program or loses massive market share by someone who provides a better product.

Facebook's competitors have the same problem. Unless one of them comes up with a fundamentally better revenue strategy - and furthermore one which Facebook can't co-opt - I don't really see this as the primary danger Facebook management faces.

[reggie]

Re: Facebook IS going to get KILLED!

Indeed, it seems only a matter of time before Facebook either gets with the program or loses massive market share by someone who provides a better product.

From my vantage point, Facebook's demise was preplanned quite some time ago. It's now quite obvious that traditional corporate sponsors have been moving to migrate social networking capabilities withn the enterprise, changing the model from (1) Advertising on a Social Network, to (2) Advertising IS the social network, where brands use the power of social networking to "hopefully" develop closer and more meaningful relationships with prospsects. This change in strategy didn't just happen, or happen since the IPO. Again, from where I sit, the IPO was obiously a part of the plan, getting as much "out" as they could before they dumped it, at least dumped it publicy. Tradition online advertising in now a thing of the past.

[c1ue]

Re: Facebook IS going to get KILLED!

My view is that there is a big gap between 'social networking' and 'social business'.

Social networking is the use of software to promote network effects. In a certain sense, advertising is one beneficiary of such a dynamic.

However, advertising - except for those actually working at it - isn't business.

My suspicion is that Facebook had bought into the notion that advertising is business, when in fact advertising is merely a tool of business.

The concept of social business, however, is to me different. Social business is the idea that you get something in return for giving up some information about yourself.

For example: if you are a patron of an auto parts store, you buy a price for some part for your hobby car for $x. This might be case business as usual.

If, however, the auto parts store knew you had a Dodge Dart as your hobby car, and had a surplus of Dodge Dart parts, said store could offer you a discount for buying $100 of Dodge Dart parts in order to both get your business and reduce its Dart part surplus. Thus you as a customer are trading your Dodge Dart hobby information to the auto parts store in order to get something beneficial to yourself as well as the store.

This could be termed the theoretical ideal of social business.

There is, of course, the opposite ideal: said store knows there are a lot of Dodge Dart hobbyists around it, and instead raises prices but advertises more and uses you as a customer to bring in other Dodge Dart hobbyists.