FaceBook is loosing market share. They are on the downturn and if they don’t take action quickly, more than a billion users will defect. How long does it take a billion users to jump ship in favor of another web app that allows them to commune with friends and family? Lets look at MySpace. Lets go back further and look at AOL? They were a great innovation, but they weren’t great innovators. They didn’t change with the times and therefore they got left behind.
You can see the handwriting on the walls and it is inevitable that FaceBook will fail, and sooner than their shareholders think. You see FaceBook is making the fatal mistake of taking their customers for granted. They believe their hold on us is so strong that they can infiltrate our news-feeds, our personal community, our space, with ads and sponsored sites. They have put aside the mission of FaceBook in favor of short dollars. You can almost hear the sucking sound of the corporate MBA’s that are blindly steering the ship into an iceberg they can’t even see. And as fast as the Titanic sunk, so shall FaceBook. Fast, cold, deadly and with few survivors. People do not take kindly to being taken for granted and they sure won’t tolerate being used. Mark should know better.
But we do need to connect. All of us seek out others with whom we share our lives. We all need to be part of a greater community. This is the premise upon which FaceBook and all social media is built upon. However, people will not long tolerate abuse.
Mark Goulston said it quite well in a 2011 article he wrote for FastTimes:
“Most people in the world feel multiple absences and gaps in their careers, their effectiveness, their jobs, their relationships, their marriages, their families, their friends and perhaps most importantly in their actual being. They not only feel these absences, they feel self-doubt and confusion. That is what makes them initially open to pushy people (who on the surface seem supremely confident). However when it is revealed that those pushy people don’t really care about them and only about themselves, self-doubting people feel baited and switched, ripped off and betrayed.”
FaceBook, take note. Stockholder’s beware. Innovators, opportunity is knocking. Knock, knock.