Facebook: The Fix Goes Deeper than Plastic Surgery

With active users approaching a billion and over half of them mobile, Facebook reigns. It?s the 900-pound gorilla of social media. Despite recent and serious misgivings, this monolith remains an awesome opportunity.

First, Facebook needs to size up what?s called tactical diameter. The Navy uses this term to get at the radius needed to turn an aircraft carrier without washing a deck full of fighter planes into the brine. That radius may take miles if you?re over a thousand feet long and battered by high seas. The proposition?s a lot easier if you?re an armada instead of an aircraft carrier ????. . . and there?s a clue for Facebook.

Facebook is no sinking ship, but optimizing the brand long term will require more than a charm offensive. In my eyes, five priorities stand out:

• Divide yourself up . . . to serve together. Couple word-of-mouth research with that incredible data base to segment and target the business into meaningful components. One of the great corporate turnarounds in the last fifty years was what Lou Gerstner achieved at IBM in the 1990s. While he didn?t dismember the company, he reconstructed its focus. His team identified IBM?s most important customer constituencies. Management then calculated how IBM?s total wherewithal could serve each of these constituencies better.Can Facebook afford to allow data mining for advertisers to become its driving force and reason for being? Even more essentially, who are the customers? They have to remain the users, the primary consumers served by the brand. Users constitute the traffic and the path to the brand?s long-term validity.
• Rediscover the truth of the Facebook brand ? the birthright of putting a face on people. Each of us has an array of different communities ? work, family, school, social, and on and on ? but intelligent individuals segment and intersect these domains with great care. We also share in psychographic groups in the general population. These affinity nests are much less homogeneous than ever before.
• Putting it all together means taking it all apart with a scalpel. A carefully crafted niching of Facebook?s clientele may yield tens or even hundreds of meaningful passion communities.Also, you have to present a coherent, sequential strategy. If a business simply strings along a series of ad hoc successes, it loses cogency. Don?t create mini-empires jockeying for power.

  Gerstner didn?t bet the farm on one product. Nor does Apple today. Nor should the Facebook of the future. The trick is turning out a series of stand-on-their-own-feet successes. Develop them, however, so they naturally link to the highly respected common denominator of a heroic core brand.

• Improve the hospitality factor. While its breadth of connection and sharing are awesome, Facebook today draws inordinate energy from intramural and frankly adolescent competition between users. Bleakly seen, it?s like customers wrestling for plum merchandise after the doors swing open to a Black Friday free-for-all.
  
  Understanding and accepting Facebook?s own self-interest element is realistic. Being opportunistic about monetizing it is even sensible. But user privacy and other safeguards have to remain paramount. Nor is there much long-term potential in turning genuine brand evangelists into simple shills. And innovative ways must evolve so that personal ego gratification is less likely to be had at the expense of others.
• Harness technology for co-creativity.Great brands of the future will tick with a wiki-style heart.Facebook?s technology resources stretch far beyond structures like the Swedish server farms mentioned in my last blog. Facebook has amassed an imposing cadre of engineering talent.

  Commentators have long focused on strengthening Facebook?s search capabilities. An asset of even greater import would be harnessing Facebook?s users to co-develop the brand itself. That?s the best way for Facebook to find the next Facebook within today?s business itself.

  Facebook may regard itself in a wrestling match with Google, but that colors the contest. It predetermines where innovative energy will be invested. Don?t duel. Create fresh playing fields. Consider the billions of Apple App Store apps already downloaded, and the Store only opened for business in mid-2008. What totally new creative-sharing frontier can Facebook add to our Internet atlas?

  So much of the Web remains a word-driven landscape. In what exciting new ways can Facebook help craft virgin visual-image communities?

Image-driven networking . . . Co-creation . . . A softer yet stronger moral stance . . . There?s a great deal yet to till from Facebook?s fields, but it will take serious, sustainable farming to do it.

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