Blake Chandlee, Commercial Director for Facebook Europe, and their first employee outside the US, spoke to us about Facebook and its vision for the future of the internet.
Blake was very clear about Facebook’s vision: “It’s not a website. It’s a utility to help you communicate.” If Google’s vision is to make information as easily accessible as possible, Facebook’s is to make communication as easy as possible. Facebook’s messaging and chat capabilities are replacing more ‘traditional’ methods such as email and IM clients for many Facebook users. And whilst Facebook doesn’t create content (users and 3rd parties do this) it provides the platform to enable the content, which is mainly communication. In other words it is simply a utility.
To achieve Zuckerberg’s vision, there is a real challenge for Facebook over the coming months: “the battle for the web”. More than 10 billion photos have been uploaded to the platform (more than all other social networks combined) and these represent what is increasingly becoming for many users, what Chandlee calls “a record of your life”. As Zuck said in his recent blog entry “Facebook is a good, trusted place for you to share your lives with your friends”. And that’s precisely what users are doing. Sharing their lives. At some point your interaction will be so intricately woven into Facebook that a bit like closing your email account or throwing away your mobile, you simply will not be able to walk away easily. There will come a tipping point where there are so many people using the platform that Facebook will be the single most powerful communication utility in the cloud, and that will determine the outcome for the battle for the web. (If all your friends are on Facebook why would you use another site?) “For some people we’ll win that battle if we hit 200m [users] by end of 2009″ says Chandlee. That’s significant growth given Facebook achieved 100m on August 25th. However, given Facebook grows on trusted referral, growth should actually be exponential before market saturation, and there are still a number of markets to conquer.
Facebook’s mantra of efficiency and effectiveness has been crucial in its ability to grow outside the US and other English speaking countries. Chandlee explains that global growth has been pursued not through infrastructure expansion in other markets, through translation. One of Zuckerberg’s innovative stances on the web is that users are not defined by their nationality, but rather by the language they speak. “Rather than launching Facebook in France, we launched it in French.” This in itself is a novel way of thinking… and the method they used for local launches is quite astounding. Facebook set up a translation application within the site which 3000 Spanish speakers signed up to. The app requested each user to translate an English line into Spanish. Then all the users would vote for the best translation of that line. The most popular line became the Spanish version. This process was repeated for a number of lines till the site was fully translated. Wiki-Spanish.
By crowdsourcing its own user base, it took 3 weeks to translate Facebook into Spanish.
German took 6 days.
French took 6 hours.
6 hours… It doesn’t get mouch more efficient than that. This means that Facebook currently only employs 32 people outside of the US - most of whom are based in Soho Square. By launching in languages rather than countires, Facebook can afford to run out of continental hubs with only a minute sales team operating locally. Of course, the sales team is critical for Facebook. Afterall, they are wholly transparent about the data they accumulate and don’t sell on (check out their Lexicon which analyses chatter in Facebook, as one example). So the real revenue will come from advertising. And in this field, Zuckerberg is challenging norms too. He will soon be evolving the ad platform to move into a more “engagement based advertising”.
The Facebook ad platform evolution is three-tiered: ‘Standard Advertising to Social Advertising to Engagement Advertising’. Push to pull; it’s hardly innovative. However the platform allows advertisers to leverage the actions of its 100m users. In essence, the ad appears in your news or mini-feed if a friend of yours interacts with it. It is spread by word of mouth - what Chandlee calls “trusted referrals”. This form of social advertising is still ‘push’ but as it is endorsed by friends, this viral word of mouth is a far step from banners and buttons of ‘Standard Advertising’, the global sales for which Facebook has now farmed out to Microsoft. The next step is engagement advertising which Chandlee assures us is not far away. But the key leap here is that Facebook is “allowing advertisers to put themselves in our conversations” through consumers interaction with the ads. If I see an ad for the Tropic Thunder trailer, I can comment on how funny the film is and this comment, would endorse the film in my friends’ feeds.
As with every change to the platform following the introduction of Newsfeed and Beacon, a backlash could be expected from the advertising evolution too. However, as Chandlee says, consumers don’t dislike advertising - only irrelevant advertising. By allowing consumers to endorse brands and products, the appeal to consumers and advertisers alike has already risen. And given the constant attention and resources Facebook is dedicating to advertising (including Chandlee’s charge to double the Soho Square sales force over the next year), it is clear that advertising is at the top of Facebook’s agenda. This is key to Facebook’s ambition. Chandlee twice mentioned that Zuckerberg’s vision to connect the entire globe is not profit driven: “if he [Zuckerberg] makes one dollar more than it takes to run Facebook he’ll be happy”. However in order to achieve that vision Facebook must grow to win the battle for the web. And as with any war, the land-grab is now on.
UPDATE: 18.12.08 Facebook is now at 140m users. Growth is becoming exponential. 200m by end of ‘09? 
Easy.
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