Facebook And Profitability: Interesting Video And Some Thoughts About Potential IPO

Facebook keeps growing at a fast pace, and has matured as a strong marketing media, used by a large number of companies throughout the world.

I recently watched this video on Youtube, and wanted to share it with you.Unfortunately I am not able to upload it on my blog...

It is a CNN show where analysts discuss about the move of Godman Sachs to buy for $450 million of Facebook shares, evaluating it at $50 billions. It was on January 2011, a year ago.

At this time, Facebook was counting 600 million members, $2 billions in revenues. The analysts are discussing about the actual profitability Facebook may get. Indeed, it is very difficult, and it remains difficult now, to know exactly what kind of profitability Facebook is right now achieving. Also the fact that Facebook is not public, it does not need to give specific financial data, which could help us see how it works.

Facebook and social media company in overall is a brand new business modell. And as all new groundbreaking business modell, it is difficult to analyse the company's result and profitability in ten years from nom (which is what really matters).

Facebook has great ambition in 2012 to launch an IPO, and to enter stock exchange market. It will allow the company to raise massive money, and therefore give a lift to their effort of developping a leading advertizing hub, to attract advertizing budgets from companies and communication agencies.

 

This video has been published a year from now, and since then, very few information on the financial and business end of Facebook have been released. If Facebook actually really wants to enter the stock exchange market, they will have to publish some information about its profitability, and this is based on these information that the company will actually be rated.

The context is pretty tough for Facebook for a potential IPO:

• The world is experiencing a major economical downturn, and it impacts most of the Index, including Nasdaq
• The competition is getting tougher as Google is reaching more and more users with Google Plus.
• A lot of regulation complains have come up with Facebook, and new laws restricting Facebook's terms of condition may hurt its will to master users' data for commercial purposes.

2012 will be a crucial year for Facebook, because even though the IPO does not happen this year, Facebook will have to prepare for it, and we will probably have more information about Facebook's actual results.

Some Thoughts About Tablets And The End Of Computers

Tablets have been the biggest success in the high tech market in 2011. We have seen tablets blossoming and most of the computer manufacturers have launched their products. The two great leaders remain Apple with its Ipad, and Samsung with the Galaxy Tablet, empowered with the Android O.S.

I remember having read couple of Loic Lemeur's about Steve Jobs considering that computers were "trucks", and that ultimately they may disappear. But I am not really into that state of mind.

Here is a very interesting video I found on Youtube, where Bill Gates give his thoughts on the Ipad.

Obviously, as Bill Gates explain, his opinion is biased. But I must agree also with one of his point: there is a lack of ability to edit things with a tablet.

I personnaly own a tablet (an Ipad 1) and I truly love it. I use it all the time, read news, watching videos. It is a great device, which actually is in a lot of cases easier to use and better than PCs, even laptops.

However, a tablet is not enough, if you have to own only one computer device. Indeed, I find it very hard to write a blog post, or to use a worksheet, or edit a powerpoint presentation. A computer remain by far the easiest way to create or edit something.

So I do agree with Bill Gates when he says there is a lot of room for improvement for tablets.

The fact is that I don't believe we will have a sole "computer device" at our hand. The tablet is the perfect example of what is happening: We did not really need a tablet, but it just expands our connection with Internet.

And computers, the ones we use to edit and create which will exist at least for the next decade and beyond, will be a slight part of our interaction with computers and Internet.

Most of our "products", or "things" will be connected:

• We will have our smartphone, connected to the Internet, with enough computing power to play, to watch videos and so on.
• Our tablets, to relax and have access to Internet
• Our computers to work, to edit, for "inputs" as Bill Gates say
• Our car, where we get more and more options to access to social media, to GPS information (traffic, restaurant yellow pages, among other things).
• And all the things we are not aware of, but that will eventually come.

Sort of like in the Minority report film, we will have access to computers and Internet every where, and therefore, tablets will have its place, but I believe not the central place, and computer also will have an important place in it.

I believe that what will remain the core, will be the smartphones, as they are always on people, so the easiest way to get in contact with the Internet.

What do you think about it?

2011: A Year To Remember

In these times, it is a tradition to look back and go through all the main events which happened last year. 2011 has been a long year, full of important moments.

Here is a melting pot of the different events that marked the year:

• The Japanese Tsunami
• Fukushima's nuclear catastrophe
• Usama Bin Laden's death
• The rise of democratic protests in the arabic world
• The Greek crisis
• Then, the following Euro crisis
• The death of Steve Jobs
• The Dominique Strauss Kahn affair
• The Lybian war

I don't remember another year which could have been so full of important events. 

Some Facts About The Mobile Application Market

Mobile application has been a gold mine for a lot of people. And it is indeed a category still growing at a fast pace. I found this very good article which gives us some data about how mobile applications work.




It is a very interesting information. That shows you want should be your target depending on the platform in order to consider your application productive. You can see that there great gaps between the different services. That shows that a lot of the different services may disappear soon. For example, Blackberry has unfortunately failed at developping an interesting app plaftorm. Google has clearly become the leader in the market.

Freemium is becoming a more and more important part of the business model of mobile applications. The bigger the audience will be become, the larger the advertizing opportunities will be, and the easier it will be to propose free applications.

This is an interesting one, because supposely it explains that mobile advertizements are more efficient than Internet once. However, I would like to know what they consider as mobile campaigns. It is more and more difficult to identify mobile campaigns, as now they are closely linked to the Internet. The consumption of email and social media thanks to mobile devices constantly grow, and it is important to consider these new usage to propose an accurate way to deliver commercial messages through those devices.

I remain skeptical about the methodology of this chart, as I do not know the data itcomes from, but I believe there is something to digg there.

The mobile aplication market is for sure a marketing with a great future ahead:

• The penetration rate of smartphones, and other mobile devices allowing to download and use applications is growing at a very fast pace.
• The market is becoming mature, and users are increasing the number of applications they download.

Insights About Marketing On Facebook

I wanted to share with you a great article I found on a blog about the cost of marketing on Facebook. It has been a long time now that I have interested myself in social media marketing, and it is impressive how fast it grew. 

You can check the figures, they talk for themselves. But I just wanted to underline some facts about it, that I believe are interesting to understand and notice:

• It does cost money to communicate on social media. A common wisdom, especially at an early stage was that it was cheap and almost free to communicate on social media. Also, a lot of people thought it would be a great opportunity for small business to communicate, as it was a fast growing medium, and the freedom of speech would bother and limitate big corporations. However, it is the total opposite that happened, as the medium became pricy, and the efforts need to be high in order to bond with the community.
• There is no cost scaling possibilities.Whatever your number of followers/fans is, it will cost you per user about the same price. It is very diffferent from the other "direct marketing" tools, where the bigger the data base, the cheaper the costs are.
• There are big gaps for cost per clicks. Now it would be interesting to see the return on investment of the different categories. Indeed, cost per click is not really important. What does really matter is the conversion rate, and the way you may transform one lead into a customer.

Quand Google prend la plume

Je souhaitais réagir à l’édito du numéro de décembre 2011 de Marketing Direct Magazine. En effet, cet édito est consacré à Google, et notamment à la stratégie de recrutement du géant de l’Internet.

Le cœur du modèle économique de Google est le « référencement payant », avec les fameux « keywords ». Google, et ce depuis de nombreuses années, à recours à des campagnes de marketing direct pour démarcher les entreprises, petites ou grandes, en offrant des offres de tests avec des bons de xxx € d’achats.

La rédactrice, Dominique Fèvre, met l’accent sur le côté incongru de cette société vivant sur la révolution du marketing direct vers le numérique, qui utilise un support pour le moins traditionnel, qui plus est en crise (il suffit de voir l’état économique de la poste américaine).

Mais, comme elle le signale, ce n’est pas si abérrant : le média papier, et courrier reste un média très important dans la relation client. En effet, parce qu’il se rarifie, il en prend encore plus de valeurs. Le média papier est beaucoup plus personnel que le média Internet. Il conserve par ailleurs d’excellent taux de transformations.

J’ai toujours été partisant du mailing. Il est d’ailleurs, bien qu’ancien, l’un des médias qui permet le plus de laisser libre court à la créativité (choix du papier, des couleurs, de la découpe etc…).

Google a bien raison d’utiliser un média papier, et depuis le temps qu’il le fait, je suis sûr que c’est pour une raison.

Et vous, qu’en pensez vous ?

Where Is Heading Twitter ?

I have always been a big user of Twitter, which is actually my favorite social media. Nevertheless, and for quite a while, I have been wondering about their business model and their ability to generate long term revenues.

One figure comes up to my mind. Twitter has 100 million users. It is a pretty large base, and it makes it one of the most used social media in the market. But when you pay a close attention to this figure, Twitter is by far smaller than Facebook, and on an international scale, it remains small. Will it be enough to become an unquestionable media?

To me, the question is not solved yet. I have learned recently that Twitter is still raising funds in order to develop their advertising platform. It is for sure a very important step they are taking. They now focus all their efforts on developing this needed business model, and achieve profitability. But it has been several months that they are working on it, and still, it is unclear if they have really made any progress.

Twitter is a new medium. And most of the new medium, like television or radio, have started by providing great quality program before becoming profitable. Eventually it works. Twitter has no questioned change the way we consume information. Twitter it also changes the way we interact on the Internet. And it really brings added value to the user.

Twitter suits well for:

¨     Accessing information fast on a mobile device thanks to its short text messages

¨     Being informed to the most recent news.

¨     Interact with others who share the same interests.

But once again, Twitter really needs to find a way to monetize its service, otherwise its system may have no future.

I think they should have focused on this point right from the beginning, as it would have been easier afterwards to adapt the platform to advertisements.