This is so true.
Facebook in 2011 – Flatline
It’s been interesting watching all this hoopla around Facebook and its insane valuation – which is based on nothing more than all the data we blindly give them everyday.
Facebook is undoubtedly the current golden boy of social media, or rather social marketing, and Zuckerberg deserves all the kudos he is getting for convincing us all that we “need” Facebook in our lives, managing our social presence on the Web.
The question is – just how long can Facebook maintain this forward growth?
Of course everyone is talking up the recent investment from Goldman Sachs, to the tune of $1.5B, and how this is obviously leading to an IPO for Facebook; not to mention the probable internal pressure from employees looking to become the newest web millionaires. Douglas Rushkoff in a post at CNN had some interesting things to say about this investment and how it is an indicator that Facebook is turning from a rising star to a fading one.
Now, it’s Facebook’s turn. This week’s news that Goldman Sachs has chosen to invest in Facebook while entreating others to do the same should inspire about as much confidence as their investment in mortgage securities did in 2008. For those who weren’t watching, that’s when Goldman got rich betting against the investments it was selling.
This time, Goldman is putting up some millions of its own — as if this skin in the game means they couldn’t be up to their old tricks. But the commissions and underwriting fees Goldman is earning for selling that other $1.5 billion of private Facebook shares could be enough to offset the cost of their own investment. And bets against Facebook could be leveraged any number of times.
Either way Goldman Sachs comes away the ultimate winner.
Well I’m a lot less eloquent than Rushkoff so I’ll say this this nice and simply.
At some point in 2011 we will begin to see Facebook begin to flatline. Growth will stagnate and if a newer cooler social media hub comes along it could actually begin to decline; but it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon – it is too big for that.
2011 will be the peak year of Facebook.
Time to pull the fangs from blood-sucking social media guru wannabes
I am late getting to this but a week or so ago my good friend Jason from webomatica sent me a link to this post at The Telegraph by Milo Yiannapoulos.
For any one who has honest doubts about the whole social media prank being pulled on us all this post is a must read. After all how can you not want to just grab a coffee and settle back to read a great post when you read words like blood-sucking, the poisonous cult of the social media guru, or hoodwinked.
You know from the opening paragraphs that this is not going to end well but damn it’s a good read, not to mention a sanity check.
On the outskirts of a regional city in Britain – Bristol, perhaps – two hundred people gather to discuss “radical engagement strategies”. They are oddballs: a mixture of chippy girls with unruly fringes and sweaty, overweight blokes with bits of burger stuck in their beards. They fire cheap jibes at the Microsoft event they’re sharing a building with, and from which they’ve nicked a few chairs – a fact they crow about on Twitter as if it were some sort of victory over the “evil” corporation.
These are the social media gurus, a rag-tag crew of blood-sucking hucksters who are infesting companies of all sizes, on both sides of the Atlantic, blagging their way into consultancy roles and siphoning off valuable recession-era marketing spend to feed their comic book addictions. They claim to be able to improve your relationships with your customers by “executing 360 degree reignition programs”. But who are these people? Where did they come from? And how on earth have they managed to hoodwink so many big companies so quickly and so comprehensively?
Take the time and read the whole post – it’s worth it.
A Facebook Bill of Rights?
And here I thought I had read my quota of arsine ideas for the month. Talk about a bunch of pretentious crap (emphasis is mine).
While Facebook has a somewhat neglected governance page, its own abandoned Bill Of Rights and even something called “Principles,” users still do not yet have an inalienable say in the company’s machinations. So, pulling from many of the complaint emails sent to TechCrunch as well as heeding to the recommendations put forth by organizations such as the EFF
and the ACLU
It is idiocy like this that inspires me to ….
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