The Problem With The Facebook Culture May Be Fatal

Facebook's imbroglio over privacy reveals what may be a fatal business model. Some people live on Facebook and they are furious at it. This was the technology platform they were born into, built their friendships around, and expected to be with them as they grew up, got jobs, and had families. They just assumed Facebook would evolve as their lives shifted from adolescent to adult and their needs changed. Facebook's failure to recognize this culture change deeply threatens its future profits. At the moment, it has an audience that is at war with its advertisers. Not good.

Here's why. Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.

Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed. They started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers. The few, original, loose tools of network control on Facebook no longer proved sufficient. The Gen Yers wanted better, more precise privacy controls that allowed them to secure their existing private social lives and separate them from their new public working lives.

Facebook's business model, however, demands the opposite. It is trying to transform the private into a public arena it can offer advertisers. In doing this, the company is breaking three cardinal cultural norms:

1. It is taking back a free gift. In order to build profits, Facebook has been commercializing and monetizing friendship networks. What Facebook gave to Millenials, it is now trying to take away. Millennials are resisting the invasion to their privacy.

2. Facebook is ignoring the aging of the Millennials and the subsequent change in their culture. Older Gen Yers want less sociability and more privacy as actors outside their trusted cohort enter the Facebook space in search of information and connection. These older Millennials want more privacy tools for control of their information and networks.

3. Facebook is behaving as though it owned not only its proprietary technology platform but the friendship networks created on it. It doesn't. Millennials believe that ownership of their networks of friends belongs to them, not Facebook, and resist their commercialization.

Facebook, under intense pressure, is belatedly agreeing to streamline and strengthen its privacy tools. That will lower the anger of its audience but increase the anxiety of its advertisers. The brand value of Facebook has already taken a hit and competing social media platforms that promise privacy are beginning to appear.

What lessons can we draw from the Facebook flame-up? Lifecycle changes can trump generational change and cultural values perceived as crucial at the age of 13 can be very different at 20. A business founded on the values of a generation, such as Facebook, has to keep up with, and respect, evolving lives and needs.

Ownership in the social media world of networks is different from selling products and services in the traditional marketplace. Understanding the underlying cultural context of "free," "gift," and "creation" is important to businesses, including and perhaps especially high tech companies. It is not impossible to monetize that which is free. Apple did that with 99 cent songs on iTunes. But it is difficult.

Giving economic value to social networks is the new holy grail in advertising and the media. An army of economists and mathematicians are at work on this task. To date, most of the work has focused on metrics — how many friends, how many linkages, how much influence. Facebook's problems with privacy highlight the need to understand culture as well.
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Gary Vaynerchuk - Social Media Diva

Gary Vaynerchuk - Social Media Diva from Art of Talk TV on Vimeo.

The new web connects people - Now you can reach people directly!
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Successful by managing an on-line platform or a blog

These days everybody can make a living by doing what he/she loves most. You might not make it to one of those featured on CNN or Today’s Show but you have a good chance to make a good living by doing what you are passionate about. The internet allows you with numerous FREE marketing tools and shareware to achieve your dreams. You can use community platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Friendster to get in touch with peeps and use tools like Twitter, Tumblr, Ping to spread your message out there. All those tools and platforms are out there for FREE and wait for you to get used properly.

Using those tools will not guarantee your success they will just help you to achieve your goals.

First step to become successful in on-line business, you need to evaluate yourself truly and learn everything you possibly can about your passion. There is no way around it and you need to be willing to do what it takes – if you wish to be triumphant. You need to know and find out everything about your passion to become the best because competition is huge out there and only the finest will be successful.

Second step to take is you need to build yourself a nice home, it doesn’t matter if it is an informative blog or an instructive website or simply a community platform, you need to build your home in a way that it suites and serves your idea best around your passion. Your home is where you live and where you bring the peeps you met on the various community parties to hang out while they showed an interest in you or your passion already. The other peeps you met, you need to leave them alone, because you don’t go to parties to pitch everybody or do you want to be the geek. Just leave them alone, they might come later on by themselves by reading your web address on your detailed profile you set-up.

Third step is you need to work hard, hustle and get involved with like minded people. There is no secret. You need to engage into conversations in forums, blogs and in communities where those people are and publish valuable content around your passion by writing on blogs and/or uploading videos and/or pod casts and/or pictures for FREE. Share and give out as much valuable content you can – you will be rewarded with lot of eyeballs that you can monetize, other people will pay it back to you by doing business with you.

This is how it works out there, but make no mistake, it’s a lot of work and requires determination and patience to be victorious at the end.

Now good luck and just do it!

The Social Media Revolution

Take a few minutes of your time and think about the Social Media Revolution – it’s worth it, if you want to succeed and stay in business.

Just to give you an inside view how social media marketing work and how to use the tools available - I just wanted to present to you a few short videos to help you grab the massive potential of it. Take a few minutes to take a look at it by just clicking the links:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gza8dvN8Hkc

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

Social Media is a “Thank You and Support” ecosystem in which you need to give away quality content (video – blog – podcast – etc…) for FREE to draw interest for your brand, your business, your services or your products. The word of mouth in Social Media is so much more effective and powerful then ever before thanks to tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Blogger and many more, which could be used for FREE by users to give them a voice.

You need to be aware of the fact that you don’t control the message any more – the users out there control the message and businesses need understand that. The game has changed considerably. So what companies need to realize is that they will just endure in this new ecosystem when they listen, react and communicate with their users and customers out there.

Basically they need to give a shit and care about their users and customers!

More content value you spread out there for FREE through Social Media, more people will talk about it – more feedback for your business will be a result of it, which will be converted positively into brand recognition and increases the potential to monetize.

Content is King - Marketing is Queen and runs the Household

But putting out valuable substance is just not sufficient to be successful, it’s just part of the way – now you need to hustle, spread the word become part of the communities relevant to your business and live in it. Be supportive and help people in those networks and they will pay it back to you multiple times. That’s the key and that's how it is.

Always keep in mind, the first step to be successful – the better your content is, more word of mouth you will obtain out of it, more it will profit your brand and your business.

Small town rules apply in global business now

Due to the social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Tumblr and others the world has become closer, a small town ecosystem. For today’s business, small town business rules apply in a globalized business economy.

Everything is connected and everybody knows you, your business and your brand. So I am wondering how this will be handled by existing businesses and brands which aren’t use to care and give a crap about their users.

The rules of 1950’s will become more important when building a business and a brand. So you need to care about your customers and apply some of those rules to stay in business. Think about it.

What are your thoughts about that?

Make money doing what you love most

Today you can get paid with doing what you like to do! There are huge opportunities out there and everybody can play the game, just do what you are passionate about and hustle. Hustle, work hard and give a shit. This is the most important message I could give you today.

You need to be visible and transparent, basically you need to brand yourself!

In the past it was necessary to invest huge sums in TV spots, radio casts, magazine ads to market yourself, in today’s world this isn’t necessary any more. Your customers are everywhere you just need to lead them to you, your products, your services and you need to care about them.

Be supportive, Be Passionate, Be Patient

To succeed in today’s altered business ecosystem you need to speak with your customers by producing quality content about your passion. In a second step you need to listen to them and most essentially you need to give a shit about them. You need to care about them, you need to interact with them.

You need to be patient and work hard to succeed in this new business ecosystem called social media or web 2.0

To create a successful business on the internet you need to be everywhere, be passionate and patient, you need to work hard and hustle, you need to spend 80% to 90% of your working hours in the web to produce quality content – answer e-mails – post quality replies to blogs related to your activity or business.

What’s social media?

It’s word to mouth on steroids, if you have something to say and if it’s quality, because quality is always king, it gets expanded in so many directions and this is the real power of it because everybody has a voice and not certain select fields.

You need to treat social media like twitter – facebook – tumbler – flickr – youtube like a party and not like a presentation. You don’t use them to talk about business or pitch everybody. You try to get into conversation like you do on a party in the real world those media are just a translation into the virtual world and you should use it like that.

To communicate, just do it.