The Only Way is … Facebook!

So yes we’ve had a lot of focus on Facebook recently … from the media industry in general (when was the last time you saw a TV or poster ad with a good old-fashioned but boring simple WWW URL ?) to the specifics of suddenly feeling that the Livemusic “Like” page is a bit ‘unloved’. It wasn’t even that long ago we didn’t have a Facebook ‘Fan’ Page at all (as they were called back in the heady days of 2010!) I think you’d have be living in a cave not to notice that Zuckerberg and pals have been making a serious land-grab for large swathes of cyberspace in the last 18 months or so …

Groups & Pages have been overhauled, FB Email & Places have been implemented, only Events remains a little neglected. I thought 12 months ago when one of my colleagues remarked “in a couple of years there won’t be the internet, only Facebook” it was a highly amusing and fanciful remark. Now I’m almost thinking could he be right!? In the same way that the new generation of ‘faux-reality’ TV shows like ‘The Only Way is Essex’ and ‘Made In Chelsea’ are taking over our TV screens … is Facebook taking over our desktop screens. Is it true to say that ‘The Only Way …’ to connect with your audience is… Facebook?

Ever since we had the advent of the Facebook ‘Messaging’ announcement through to the simple utility of ‘Using Facebook as a Page’ it’s been fairly clear that Zuckerberg & Co are upping their game. From assigning aliases to ‘Like’ Pages (which sounds a bit better to Corporate Boards than ‘Fan’ pages no doubt) to the ‘Messaging’ facility; it’s been clear that FB has been going for the jugular and pretty much on a collision course with the mighty Google. It had already seriously challenged Flickr & Photobucket with it’s basic Photo service (though I don’t think YouTube will be overly worried by it’s flakey video hosting service) … and the implementation of ‘Places’ felt like a sucker-punch to FourSquare (Although interestingly it still remains as a service and is frankly a lot better. But then so was Betamax.).

But what’s it really like trying to use Facebook (FB) as a serious marketing tool and a a way of connecting to your audiences in practice?

I have occasionally written off Facebook as a serious marketing tool and nothing more than a gossip hub … and it remains to be seen whether it will really have a longevity as something to connect to your base audience (though admittedly clicking ‘Like’ is the sort of simple advocacy that none of us could have foreseen as becoming all-important in 2011.) The main problem is that the whole platform feels like quicksand and is about as stable as Mariah Carey after (yet another) bad album review. If I see that ‘Sorry there was a problem …’ popup once more I’ll scream. I assume this is mostly bandwidth issues – as the video service is particularly bad for this. But it feels like it’s something deeper.

There’s no doubt that FB is a fiendishly complex beast – I still find new features on a regular basis – and some of the user flow architecting is beyond esoteric, making one feel a lot of the time that the ‘releases’ are patchy at best. Features such as the ‘@’ linking mysteriously disappear and stop working … only to start working again ! This is pretty frustrating on a practical day-to-day level and I am reminded of some of the fairly clandestine Google ‘tweaks’ that screw up your carefully crafted SEO strategems occasionally. I was amused when watching ‘The Social Network’ recently when the actor playing Zuckerberg quipped “We’re Facebook, we never go down” … clearly he hadn’t hit reload repeatedly to be faced by the header strip and a big white expanse at least once or twice a day.

But whinges aside what is going on at FB? Are they really seriously making a play to ‘be’ the internet (at least from a personal user’s point of view?) Certainly a lot of brands and advertising agencies have already bought into using it as a portal to connect directly to their target audiences. And there’s plenty of scope in the implementation of iFrames opening up the door to really embed more complex content.

In the music industry it has also had an effect and almost come hand-in-hand with the somewhat inevitable, but no less disappointing, fall of Myspace. The only real thing that is missing from a Fan (sorry ‘Like’) page now is the ability to upload your tracks (although you can add videos.) I can’t see it being long before SoundCloud (which is much better for audio uploading anyway) releases a widget which neatly embeds into the fabric of your ‘Like’ page. Personally I haven’t seen it being used yet natively in FB (but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist yet!) but it’s the logical next step for the Band (sorry ‘Like’) pages. Or having said that Facebook has announced it’s own rather vague ‘Music’ proposition to be launched in August… and like the much-touted Google music a year or so ago, no-one really knows what it’s going to be about yet. Perhaps not even the dudes at Facebook.

Another practicality of running a FB Group or Page is that your audience is pretty clear for everyone to see. Or is it? Sure people could look up your website traffic using Alexa or similar but no-one really trusted it totally. For some reason people trust that ‘XX,XXX people like this page’ number implicitly. Personally I’m not sure these numbers are that meaningful, as it seems pretty easy to enhance with minimal spend and effort … and let’s remember that’s not unique users, that’s people who supposedly clicked a ‘Like’ button one day and may never engage again with the page. It’s not a “real audience” in the same way that distributing 100,000 leaflets doesn’t mean 100,000 of them got read.

As ever, the picture is far from clear, it has been an interesting ride over the last 5 years with Facebook, and to some extent it has grown up a little and no-one has tried to bite my Werewolf for ages (or suggested we build an app so that people can bite each others Vampires, Werewolfs, Zombies, Mutant Killer Lamas or whatever). Pointless apps do seem to be on the decrease (thankfully) as are the requests by shell-shocked marketing execs playing catch-up asking you to build them. There is some real effort at proper brand connection and one thing’s for sure everyone’s very focused on their “Like” pages now (and the accompanying alias). From a music perspective the Events need to have the same overhaul as Groups and Fan Pages … and if Places isn’t going to just malinger then you need to be able to ‘use it as a page’ soon and start having more interactivity/reasons for “checking-in”. And of course we’re all waiting to see exactly what FB ‘Music’ really is … will it actually be a Spotify killer or will it incorporate Spotify? Or is it just another aggregator of Music news … or will it morph into a way for people to upload music content? For the moment it’s very low-level. Whatever happens, one thing’s for sure; I guess we’ll all be watching FB very closely. BUT since most of us are on it on a daily basis that’s not a problem!

Finally I do wonder where Twitter is in all of this, it has been very quiet for some time. Perhaps it is happy with it’s position of micro-blogging on trending topics largely with people you don’t personally know … or in actuality is that the real aim of FB’s ‘Like’ pages in that they allow people who don’t know one another to interact? I don’t think Twitter should be worried yet – but it is interesting to think when was the point when MySpace would have suddenly realised that Facebook not only had caught them up, but had stolen their ‘patch’ of cyberspace and finally put them to the sword (or more accurately panicked them into ‘falling on their own sword’ if the recent ‘own goal’ restructuring and re-branding is anything to go by!) Personally I wonder how much MORE time I’m going to be spending on Facebook in a professional capacity a year from now. I’m pretty convinced I won’t be spending any on MySpace, that is for sure!

Tags: facebook, google+, marleting speak, social media, twitter