The value proposition for marketers was simple to understand; social connections were trusted; and the user experience was simple to navigate.
Since then, Facebook has been evolving quickly so it can become a marketing platform. Mark Zuckerberg himself has spoken rather grandly of Facebook as being at the center of the transformation affecting everything from news and movies to music and gaming. "Our view is that we should play a role in helping to reform all those industries, and we'll get value proportional to what we put in". His most recent interview on "60 Minutes" reaffirmed his claim of Facebook having transformed the internet itself.
Ever the practitioner, I could see that Facebook was morphing into social/communication/entertainment hub. I could also see that the transformation was not without some bumps. It was getting more complicated for marketers and users alike. We see how hard it is for marketers to assign value to a Facebook fan as we saw two vastly different answers from two very credible tech companies. A confusing state for marketers to be sure.
- Four NYU kids blew away their funding goal to "build the anti-Facebook".
- Facebook endured harsh backlash resulting from its handling of the privacy firestorm
- Most untimely, the movie "The Social Network" gave more people more ammunition to "... not feel good about using Facebook".
- A pastor was counseling his congregation to give up Facebook as a way to save marriages.
- The granddaddy of the internet, believes that Facebook "threatens" web future because of the data portability issue
As the vision of Facebook to become our online hub and displace Google along the way. Facebook is doing a full-frontal attack on Google; Gmail vs. Facebook Messaging, Google Search vs. Facebook Search, Google Voice vs. Facebook (+ Skype) and even Google Docs vs. Facebook (+ Microsoft). The scope leaves even the most ardent Facebook fan doing an "intellectual double-take" to imagine Facebook so broadly.
For my part, I had to start asking myself, Can it be that Facebook was stretching users' expectations too far too fast and adding too much complexity in the process? Did they wander too far from their "simple" roots of enabling trusted social connections? Can it be Facebook had jumped the shark?
The common thread here is the a priori assumption that being bigger (stimulated by lots of features), in and of itself, is the main value to marketers. Sure, it will be enriched with targetable data, but scalable size is the end game.
