What’s Wrong with Facebook? When Strategy Fails to Meet Execution
Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web
Over the last few weeks, Facebook has been rolling out its latest redesign. Within days of the first changes, a polling application on Facebook showed that 94% of the 634,484 users who took the poll hate the redesign, and some 1.7 million users signed a petition to bring back the old design.
Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com — a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and Social Media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.
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Facebook made more news in recent weeks when the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) announced it would file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over Facebook’s updated privacy terms, which essentially make user information the property of Facebook and give it free reign to use it as it may.
By now Facebook should be accustomed to criticism. Despite having had a tremendous growth spurt, it seems to be on a trial-and-error journey, guided by an ever-changing map and an elusive destination. In a way, it acts like a child in transition to puberty, slow to catch up on change, impressed by its new-found power, and definitely not bothered by such nuisances as “planning” for its future. But in the end, by will or by force, it too will have to grow up. What can Facebook do to make the transition less painful? What will it take for Facebook to start thinking like the grown-up company it is becoming?
Better to Have B-Level Strategy but A-Level Execution
That’s what Kulwant Singh, Dean of the National University of Singapore’s Business School, told us each day when we entered his classroom. It’s a pretty basic principle, but one of the toughest for companies to uphold.
Facebook is still a pretty simple business: it is an online platform that facilitates community-building and provides multiple methods and points of interaction for users to express themselves and connect and share with each other. Its strategies, then, should also be pretty simple and its execution near flawless. That hasn’t been the case, however. Facebook has failed to demonstrate that it is truly able to monetize its platform, and it continues to invest in meaningless endeavors, such as the recent redesign. This is due not to a lack of vision or talent but rather to the mile-long canyon between Facebook’s strategy and its ability to execute.
Facebook’s Strategy Simplified
In a recent interview, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, said the company will be focusing on growing its community and on monetization. To add some clarity to an otherwise generic statement, we can say that Facebook’s strategy most likely includes these three key goals:
- Increase user base. Grow network effect even beyond the current 175 million user base.
- Increase wallet share. Leverage existing platform and find new ways to make money (e.g. applications, advertising, revenue share on partnerships, paid services).
- Maintain and grow leadership in social media/networks. Effectively compete with and beat other online media platforms and
tools on which users spend time and money, or form a partnership (like with Twitter) for a piece of the action.
As with all strategic plans, each of these goals can be further broken down into multiple objectives, each of which has its own specific requirements. All that’s left to do is execute them. But in Facebook’s case, the flow from strategy to execution is disjointed, resulting in a very bad case of broken telephone. What should have been a relatively easy and flawless execution has turned into a terrible blunder that continues to put Facebook in the hot seat for not realizing its potential.
Facebook Vision Realized
While it may have started out as a project by a couple of passionate students, Facebook today, like most successful startups, is in the business of making money. Advancing this vision does not mean spending what must have been countless hours of team meetings to discuss the corner radius on the new profile chicklets. Nor does it mean risking getting sued for quietly attempting to take over user data. It’s time to lay down some fundamental principles to help Facebook bridge strategy and execution:
- Start thinking like the large company you are becoming. Instead of kneejerk responses to competition and internal whim, Facebook needs to set a long-term vision and work backwards, taking into consideration priorities, technological capabilities, and company as well as (most importantly) user needs. When a company knows what targets to keep its eyes on, it can choose one of many roads depending on the circumstances at the time.
- Choose an identity and stick with it. Is Facebook a fun startup, or a large successful company? Engineers and geeks, or business people? Is it about connecting or sharing information? The next couple of years are going to shape Facebook’s identity and redefine its culture, focus, and value proposition. Planning ahead by testing a few ideas can be of tremendous help to reducing noise and confusion.
- Listen to your users. It’s not just about blogs, notes, and user comments. Facebook should proactively seek to understand its growing base of user segments, their needs and desires, and their relationship to upcoming technologies and Facebook’s own strategic objectives. This will enable Facebook to design a complete experience (not thumbnails) that turns users into customers, while making it extremely difficult for competitors to match the experience.
- Grow with your market segments: While Facebook may have started with tech-savvy early adopters, it is now certainly crossing the chasm and attracting different user segments. Does Facebook understand the value proposition it offers to each of these segments? What about the growing base of 35- to 49-year-olds who are now flocking to social networks? Does Facebook know how to keep its original evangelists active? Keeping a close eye on these evolving segments and making sure its services speak to their unique needs will be key to Facebook’s success.
- Implement a co-creation architecture. Facebook could learn a great deal from the open-source environment by creating both feedback and contribution channels. The addition of OpenID and the increased flexibility for developers were significant steps forward, but they need to be integrated into a more holistic tool set and be linked to a strategy that answers more than, “How do we make money off our users?”
- Dare to change. Fear of change is one of the greatest pitfalls of established businesses and makes it easier for startups to take a significant share from them. Apple’s iPhone, BlueNile, and Zappos are but a few examples. Only by focusing on the whole experience and daring to break out of its own mold will Facebook maintain momentum and growth.
- Seal those gaps. This is a tough one for most people, more so for companies. It means pulling up the curtains, going from room to room, and figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It also means sitting down and devising a strategy to address all those gaps in a way that enhances the business while not hindering its operation. Not an easy task, but crucial for growth.
- Stay honest. Stating that public-figure pages are good for users is borderline disingenuous, and placing friends’ photos on ads is probably grounds for lawsuits. Take the example of Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, who says clearly that ads mid-program are Hulu’s way of monetizing an otherwise free platform. Facebook should clearly distinguish between pursuing business objectives and meeting users’ needs and should thus communicate the true intent of its actions.
For a people-based business, it’s shocking how little attention Facebook pays to understanding its own users. Less shocking is how poorly it has been executing its strategy, given the nature of this developmental stage it is going through. Parents often look for signs that those terrible teenage years are over and that their child is finally coming out of his or her self-involved state. For Facebook, this will happen when execution matches strategy, when the terms “user” and “customer” are integral to every single one of its strategic goals, when useless design tweaks finally meet their end, and when Facebook provides services and goods that users actually want. If nothing else, though, we can always take comfort in knowing that teenagers don’t stay teenagers for long.
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Why You Have to Use the Standalone Google Contacts Page
Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web
Over the weekend, you may have heard the news about how Google finally assigned their standalone Gmail Contacts page a proper URL. Although the independent site has been available since fall of last year, it was previously somewhat hidden through an obfuscated URL. Now the site is online at google.com/contacts, a web address that’s sure to encourage more people to use Google and/or Gmail to organize and maintain their address lists. What you may have not known about this special contacts page, however, is that it’s actually the only usable place to organize your contacts within the Gmail system.
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You may have skipped over this news thinking it of relatively minor importance. In the grand scheme of things, it is. But being a heavy Gmail user myself (and a somewhat obsessed online organizer of online data), it was great to hear that Google was focusing on improving the contacts experience. Let me explain.
You see, I haven’t been able to actually use my contacts within Gmail for some time.
The problem stems from what is perhaps an overuse of the “Groups” feature on my part. Upon reaching a certain number of groups, a bug in the code for the Gmail contacts page prevents me from seeing the remaining groups available below a certain point on the dropdown list when I’m trying to add a contact to a group.
Here’s an example (see the bottom of the groups list where it cuts off):
Because of this issue – a problem found both in Firefox and Google’s own Chrome browser – the only way I could use the Contacts feature was via the hidden page.
On the standalone contacts page it works:
Without a handy URL to access this site, the only recourse was to bookmark the URL on all the home’s computers. But if I ever strayed from my own machines, believe me that URL was quickly forgotten. Obviously, you can see why I cheered for the news about google.com/contacts.
Now that Google Contacts finally has a proper URL, maybe the company can focus on making the contact manager a bit more robust or even integrating it with Google Sync technology for easy import/export to your mobile devices. That would be impressive. Until then, it’s nice to just be able to access this site with ease.
(By the way, Google Apps for your Domain users have to go here: https://www.google.com/contacts/a/YOURDOMAIN.TLD – sorry!)
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What Can Voice Do For You? Ribbit Announces Winners of KillerApps Challenge
Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web
Ribbit, the VOIP platform that was bought by British Telecom last year, announced the winners of its $100,000 KillerApps challenge today. The contest was obviously meant to stimulate interest in Ribbit’s APIs among developers, and judging from the line-up of winning applications, a lot of developers came up with highly creative ways of using Ribbit’s platform in their apps.
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Ribbit opened up its API about one and a half years ago, but even though the company was quickly bought up by British Telecom in July 2008, it was only after this year’s SXSW, where Ribbit won the Innovative Web Technologies category in Microsoft’s BizSpark Accelerator, that it appeared on our radar again.
We spoke to the Ribbit team yesterday, and while Ribbit is currently focused on providing SDK’s and toolkits for Adobe’s Flex and Flash platforms, it is also currently testing a RESTful API in private beta, which will soon allow developers to integrate Ribbit’s platform into numerous other programming languages as well.
Winners
Here are the winners of the five categories in Ribbit’s KillerApps challenge:
Media, Advertising, Entertainment: Lucid Viewer
Lucitd Viewer is an authoring tool that allows developers to create interesting, immersive experiences. This demo here, for example, shows a 3D, Google StreetView-like view of a street in Rome, with the ability to call up stores directly from the Flash interface through Ribbit’s service. Lucid Viewer also won the Grand Price in Ribbit’s KillerApps contest.
Business: Sugared Frog
Similar to Ribbit’s own integration with Salesforce, Sugared Frog integrates Ribbit with SugarCRM. With the help of Sugared Frog, users of SugarCRM’s open source solution can use Sugared Frog to organize their voicemail, and dictate notes and memos right from their mobile phones.
Social Networking and Communication: Save A Life
Save a Life is an interesting Adobe AIR application that allows you to quickly reach a group of friends or community members by phone. Currently, the application focuses on blood donations (you can download the application here), though the program could be used for other donation campaigns or emergency services as well.
Breakthrough: CYHAA
CYHAA won Ribbit’s free-form ‘breakthrough’ category. CYHAA, which stands for Control Your Home, Anytime, Anywhere allows users to control their smart home devices with their voice right from their phones.
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Banner Exchanges Come to the iPhone: AdMob Launches Download Exchange
Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web
AdMob, one of the world’s largest mobile advertising networks, released its Download Exchange today. In return for running ads for other apps, developers can now promote their own apps across AdMob’s network of over 1,000 applications. At its core, Download Exchange is basically a more sophisticated version of the many banner and link exchange services that are very common on the Web.
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According to AdMob, developers will be able to target their ads by OS version, geography, and device (iPhone vs. iPod touch). AdMob will also assist developers with creating ads for their apps, and developers will be able to access download and monetization reports on AdMob’s web site. Because some apps are obviously quite similar, developers will also be able to filter out apps from their competitors.
AdMob will allocate ad impressions based on the quantity and quality of the inventory that each member contributes.
Given that developers have relatively few outlets to promote their applications outside of Apple’s App Store, this looks like a good way for developers to get the word about their applications out to users. Given that the ads appear in other apps, the targeted users are obviously already interested in downloading iPhone apps.
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Skype for iPhone: It’s Real and It’s Spectacular
Mar 31, 2009 Read/Write Web
I had about 3 story options on my plate to write about tonight. But I found myself constantly returning to the iTunes store and searching for Skype, over and over again. Finally, there it was: As promised by no less a personage than Om Malik himself, the official Skype iPhone client has arrived. Although video streaming is a no-show, both full IM and voice communication is supported directly over wireless networks. Plus there are a few additional touches specific to this client that make it really great.
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First, let’s talk about the interface. In short, it’s about as close to the PC/Mac client in style and utility as it can possibly get. Contacts, instant messenger, dialing pad, call history and profile can all be accessed at any time via the navigation bar at the bottom. Here’s some more of the primary features:
- Contacts can be listed alphabetically or by who is online.
- You can see all ongoing chats or just new chat messages.
- When calling out, there is a button that links to the iPhone address book.
- Call history can be switched from everything to missed calls.
- The info page lets you update your status (even with a photo!), access your profile, change your status, buy more credit and check your voicemail.
Rest assured the interface is slick and the app works as promised. But, I think the real reason why we are all so excited about this release over other Skype-enabled iPhone apps like Fring or Truphone is simply how much it works like its desktop-bound big brother that we know and love. Instant messaging chats just work. Group chats just work. Getting at-a-glance status on your Skype friends just works. The bottom line is, other apps may get the job done, but due to bad interface design, a critical missing feature, or trying to do too much, are not a pleasure to use. This client actually is a pleasure.
With all that said, it’s still not perfect. It’s better than everything else Skype-related on the iPhone, yes, but optimally it could support Skype SMS (though the carriers would probably never allow it), notification of new IMs when the app isn’t in use (hopefully coming shortly after the iPhone 3.0 firmware hits), and.. well, support for video. Why not? People were recording MMS videos with their cellphones in 2004. The Japanese have had dual-camera phones with live video streaming for quite a while now.
And yes, I do realize the camera is on the back of the iPhone, making it hard to use the screen and the cam at the same time. I don’t care. It’s time Apple realized people are willing to trade some battery life for the ability to record a short video and start allowing apps that support it. But, until that day comes, Skype for the iPhone is highly recommended. I have already put it up on the first page next to Tweetie and DVR Remote. You can find the link to Skype in the iTunes app store here.
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