Facebook Flatlining? My Prognostications for the Social Networking Behemoth

It might still be the world’s second-most-popular website with 700,000,000 unique monthly visitors – behind Google’s 900,000,000. But, as history has taught us, it’s usually when you’re flirting with the top that the bottom drops out.

And when it comes to Facebook’s dominance, the digital Visigoths are amassing on the web’s virtual borders.

Who are these digital invaders? An expanding list of mobile messaging apps like Kik, GeeVee and WhatsApp, among others, that are growing increasingly popular with tweens and Millennials. Kik, for instance, launched in 2010, now boasts 40 million users, GeeVee has quietly amassed several million users since 2011 while WhatsApp recently became Canada’s top paid downloaded iPhone app. Once Facebook’s most coveted demographic, the 15-25 age group is starting to bypass the originally built-for-desktop/laptop site, calling the website decidedly un-cool. Does Facebook think that its “F-phone” might stop the bleeding?

Even in our age of instant communication, it’s amazing how fast the conversation has shifted. Just last spring media outlets were writing about the time when Facebook would reach the billion-member mark. The early call was for last August. Instead the feat was achieved in October. Not bad for a nine-year-old company.

Fast-forward six months and now a Google news search returns dozens of articles hinting at what I think will be inevitable, the flat-lining of Facebook. Even with an encouraging Q4 earnings – revenue was up 40% from a year ago – the stock is down 1.4% and profit margins have narrowed sharply as spending increases. To me, this sounds like an engine being pushed to its limits – running hard and fast until breakdown. In other words, Facebook’s present business model is not sustainable.

As with many other great empires, Rome’s final downfall might have come from without – the real Visigoths, a Germanic tribe, conquered it in 410 AD – but the beginning of its end came from within. Facebook has become too big and its autocratic intrusion on our privacy, culminating in a $15 billion class action lawsuit, bears ironic resemblance to any super state’s trampling of peoples’ rights.

Another shortcoming: the digital soapbox that Facebook became, with people collecting fake friends like poker chips, may finally be coming to an end. Maybe we’ve all just moved on and the cultural pendulum is swinging back to a desire for smaller groups of actual friends. You know, people you might actually meet in person and actually know, not just “like.” Apps like Kik, GeeVee and WhatsApp are also great for young users as they avoid cell phone data network charges and it’s a little harder for hovering “helicopter parents” to join social messaging apps. And forget about prospective employers snooping around too.

That said, it’s not as if Facebook is going to unfriend itself anytime soon. A recent Reuters article is right to point out that the many Millennials turning to this new breed of mobile messaging apps haven’t abandoned Facebook – yet. But the true canary in the coal mine will be tracking how their usage patterns change in the coming months and years. And you can be sure Facebook is well equipped with its prodigious metrics-gathering ability to learn its fate long before it’s sealed.

Even then, though, the great Facebook empire may still fall, as all empires do.

Do you think Facebook is flatlining? I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Are Marketers About to Face Facebook Fatigue?

Call it a building generational misstep.

Just as marketers seem to be catching on to social media’s professional usefulness, new data suggests sites like Facebook may be losing some of its youngest faces, today’s college students and recent graduates, who will soon form the next generation of adult consumers. Fed up with the site’s frequent rules changes, feared invasions of privacy, and overwhelmed by the never-ending stream-of-consciousness thoughts that seems to ooze from its millions of users, so-called “Facebook Fatigue” is growing.

The “disease,” which was diagnosed by Inside Facebook, a blog who owes its existence to tracking all things Facebook, (along with social gaming and mobile applications), found that while the number of Facebook users continues to grow, growth rates have slowed. In the US, some 6 million users have defriended the social media site, dropping its total number of nationwide users to 149 million, down from 155 million in recent months, a nearly 4 percent drop. Across the pond, UK Facebook user numbers also took a dip, where 100,000 people –out of about 30 million users – deleted their accounts.

So what’s the big deal if Facebook’s portrait these days isn’t as bright?

The Facebook usage study coincides with marketing research that suggests Fortune 100 companies –if belatedly – plan to ramp up their spending sharply on social media campaigns in 2012. A summer 2011 study by Booz & Co. and Buddy Media, as reported on eMarketer, found that nearly a third of respondents said they expected to grow their social media budgets to as high as 10 percent of their overall marketing budget in the next three years. More than a quarter, (28 percent) predicted their social media spending would surge to 20 percent of their marketing spending.

As with any hot new trend like social media at large and Facebook up close, it’s critical marketers, aided by their in-house and external Public Relations partners, remain fresh with the times. Anyone remember Friends Reunited, Bebo, (short for Blog Early, Blog Often) and MySpace? Well, maybe you remember them, but when was the last time you checked your profile or sent a post? Chances are it’s been a while.

Thanks to the growing bonds between social media and mobile communications, its likely the new medium will continue discovering ways to reinvent itself and maintain popularity. In other words, if it’s not Facebook or Twitter, chances are it’ll be something else.

So is there a building generational misstep?

It’s too soon to tell. But when marketers express confidence over their social media spending plans, remind them that on today’s fast-changing digital high seas, it’s easy to miss the boat.

Old School Media Is Still Relevant, For Now

By: Vanessa Horwell

For all the funerals planned and obituaries written for traditional journalism — those things called newspapers, magazines, broadcast television, oh, and radio — one would consider them finished. Just how many years of revenue and circulation declines can an industry endure before packing it in?

Plenty, it seems.

Without question the last five years, or even 10, have not been kind to traditional media. Its influence has shrunk from a global superpower to merely a component of an increasingly diverse set of media outlets all vying for attention and relevancy. I liken traditional media’s current power position to the United Kingdom following World War II: Stripped of its empire status, the war-torn country reemerged as a component of Western power, no longer its sole mover and shaker, or indeed master.

In response to a rapidly remade media landscape, PR firms have rightly shifted their focus to all things digital. Can you imagine a PR company — or any successful organization — not relying heavily on the digital space to advance their company or client’s brand?

Our clients now expect digital competency as a matter-of-fact and not some retainer-plus extra. Many of the college graduates knocking on our door have been using Facebook for a third of their lives, they prefer texting to talking (which we try to undo) and some have even earned their Masters in social media.

But for all the hoo-ha over social media, it’s essential that companies, especially PR agencies, remember the UK analogy. Traditional media, may be a shell of its former self –at least in terms of average profit margins — but it persists. Our industry gives so much lip service to integration and being multi-channel. Perhaps it’s time we listen to our own advice and not jettison traditional media from the marketing mix?

At a recent mobile marketing summit in New York, I sat next to the mobile marketing director for USA Today, and talked with several digital media directors of magazines that many would consider very traditional – only they are far from it.

Their digital model has and continues to evolve as they realize that traditional media still does have a place — and is it not in the coffin. The PR industry shouldn’t forget this either.

In its annual report on American journalism, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, highlights some positive news hinting that the worst of traditional media’s die off has ended. Newspapers, once a bulwark for our industry, saw its weekday circulation numbers contract by 5% in 2010. While not fantastic, the losses in 2009 were twice that. Revenue too, saw, similar declines, (a drop of 6.3%) but that softening was nowhere near the death spiral of 2009 where revenue atrophied 26%.

The revenue picture looked even brighter at cable news, network television and local news outlets, as all three saw growth. Overall local news and radio faired the best, as many stations added early morning programs. For instance, in 2010 69 US cities offered a 4:30 a.m. TV news program, up from 28 in 2009. Radio, which has long since found its niche on car dashboards, saw revenue tick upward by 6% in 2010 after an 18% fall in 2009. Finally, magazine ad revenue was flat, compared to a 26% drop in ’09. While readership/viewership struggled, all traditional media outlets combined still enjoyed many millions of consumers.

As for the fine print beneath the big picture?

The reports of old school media’s death (in all its forms) are exaggerated. Americans continue to rely on traditional outlets — along with newer ones — to consume information. They are still relevant to many of us, as least for now.

My advice to my PR peeps?

Don’t turn your back on traditional media. Not yet. Remain plugged in with your broadcast and print contacts – don’t overlook them for lure of likes and RTs. While the media pie has gotten bigger and there are more pieces to cut, you never know when you might need them.

Winston Churchill, England’s WWII Prime Minister, cautioned against looking too far ahead into the future, saying, “Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”

Let’s wait and see how the future media chain links connect and how that affects the destiny of traditional media before we sever those ties for good.

Via Marketing Daily

Next Generation’s New Pathways – And Potential Dead Ends, All Just A Click Away

A recent post on the Future of Media (my favourite new blog) predicts that the next big business boom is likely to be in occupational therapy, (OT) and intimacy counselors. Millennials, the generation born post-1985, will increasingly require their services, having become too plugged in to remember that a “friend request” isn’t always a mouse-click away.

Sadly, I don't think this a prediction, it's turning out to be true - and growing. A report, “Cyber Communication on Today’s Youth,” by the American Counseling Association was already ringing alarm bells in 2008. Reading the document three years on, it's fascinating to note how much the digital landscape has changed in such a short period. While Myspace gets at least minor billing, Facebook, which was already 4-years-old at the time, does not receive a single reference.

How the mighty have fallen. Or, more to the point, how the mighty squandered a golden opportunity. But I digress...

If that much can change in three years, it’s rather hard to envision the next 1,100 days. While I'm praying for an economic rebound, I would hate to think that these new, or "reinvigorated" professions would be spurred by society's digital addiction. When President Obama talked of job creation, it's unlikely he was referring to these.

Taking advantage of our "click addiction"

A recent article in the New York Times looks at Americans' growing reliance on their shrinks - online. Can't make it to your weekly couch-session in person? Not a problem. Just fire up Skype and connect with your therapist anywhere. Having an anxiety attack, possibly caused by having to do an "in-person" interview? Get some webcam time with your therapist for an online RX.

And the irony continues..

Driving to the beach this morning, I was reminded of this growing "click-to-counsel" profession: A huge billboard touting a local hospital's ER room "click and book your ER visit online."

The scenario could go something like this..

Have an accident with the automatic carving knife. Put sorn-off finger(s) on ice. Log on to hospital's ER booking system and reserve your place in the ER queue. Wait at home hoping you don't lose conciousness in the meantime, or take a leisurely stroll for a few hours (with ice pack of course), stopping at a drive-thru before your appointed time slot.

“Turn on, tune in,” may have been part of ‘60s countercultural icon Timothy Leary’s well-known phrases. I doubt he would have imagined the phrase’s 21st century impact on the Children of the Sixties' children.

Of course, "click-to-counsel" hadn't been invented then. I wonder what he would have made of that?

What’s Your Digital Fitness Level?

Work It Social Media!

Earlier this week PepsiCo’s director of digital and social media B.

Bonin Bough again chastised the PR industry for being digitally out of shape. “Digital fitness,” or knowledge about how clients use social media and a 101-understanding of the science behind search algorithms, said Bough, is essential if communications companies wish to stay on top of the ever-changing digital front.

To a large extent Bough’s tonic for the industry falls flat - pun intended. Put another way, if the PR industry –and the country – were as physically fit as we are digitally, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic on our hands. Digital fitness may be a great buzzword that generates web traffic, (of course we wouldn’t know as digital luddites) but the reality is, social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds or the almost-antique email, are already major components of our communications tool belts.

Think about it. Can anyone really imagine a PR company – or almost any successful organization – not relying on social media to promote their brand in some way? Moreover, today’s clients expect social media outreach as par for the proverbial course and not some gimmick-driven extra. Many of today’s college graduates entering the working world have already been using Facebook for a third of their lives, first signing on when they were in early high school in 2004.

A growing number too are graduating with degrees in social media.

And while demographers and the like forecast a graying workforce, data indicates that 78 percent of the US workforce in 2009 was made up of individuals ages 25-54. I don’t know about you, but I know plenty of 40 and 50-somethings who are just as (and if not more) iPad-savvy as the next 20 or 30-something.

To Bough’s point that Facebookers and Tweetters must intimately understand the science behind their media outlets, comparing the process to how children learn to ride bicycles, I cry foul. Yes, it’s true children don’t learn to ride a bicycle watching it sit idly by the curb. That’s why they get on and pedal. But ask a five-year-old about the basic laws of Newtonian motion that lie at the underpinnings of his first successful ride and he’ll draw a blank.

My point: Intimate knowledge of the inner workings of social media is important, to be sure, but just by using social media and receiving immediate feedback from our clients ensures that its usefulness and effectiveness grows organically.

Of all the ailments besetting our economy and the challenges communications companies face at attracting new clients in these difficult times, our collective digital fitness is not one of them. Now that I’m done exercising my fingers with this post I’m off to hit the pavement for a 5-k run.