According to the data presented by Morgan Stanley Internet trends(1) , of the massive population of 550 million Facebook users, about 4.1 million people “like” Redbull, the famous energy drink. What makes this piece of data, a virtual goldmine for marketing guys is that precise personal and behavioral information about extremely enthusiastic consumers of the product is readily and freely available on the web (wow!). Yet the tragedy of sorts in this case and so many others is that how much of this data translates into dollar revenues and sales for the company is anybody’s guess. Here is a group of people (over 4 million!) who love the drink, we know what they do for most part of the day, which bar they’re going to frequent in the next week, which movies they watch, what other products they consume…you name it and facebook knows it, yet what we don’t know is how to use Facebook to push Redbull to them!
I think that crossing the 500 million user barrier for Facebook and the entire buzz that it generated was an event to watch out for. Perhaps more importantly because with as many users, social media now should have more that its fair share of critical mass that it would need to transform and take the next upwards leap in value creation. I think a far greater challenge than merely connecting people and devices is to figure out a way to sustain those connections and more importantly create greater tangible value out of them. I still remember the time when everybody thought that dotcoms were the way to go and every teenager in the neighborhood had a few dotcoms to his name. But as events unfolded, we all know what happened to some if not most of them. Interestingly, the article “The web is dead…”(2) makes some great revelations about increasingly emerging usage pattern over the network. Most of the internet usage does seem to be converging to a handful of players, quite counterintuitive to the perfect competition sort of imagery that internet is popularly associated with. The point that I make is that as a business community we need to look beyond the sheer fascination of the numbers that technology throws to us ( A huge chunk of internet usage is dedicated to Youtube, but the question to be asked is that where is the money?) and start looking for increasing value that’s out there to be captured. The opportunity is fantastic and now is the moment to seize it!
(1)http://www.morganstanley.
(2) http://www.wired.com/magazine/
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