Facebook’s Success Strategy: Doing Away With Monetizing

Our second keynote speaker is Blake Chandlee, VP Sales, Emerging Markets, Facebook, (@bchandlee) who gave us an inside look on how Facebook innovates by embracing a different mindset, different approaches and different ways of working. This innovation has proven to be a key to its success and resilience in the global market.

Facebook targets 3 distinct audiences – users, developers and advertisers, and they work on the basis of efficiency, effectiveness and scale; with standardized basic offerings throughout the world.

Users

The basic premise of allowing people to connect and share, according to Blake, is reality. Users do this through publishing their identities, connections, and sharing information (such as photos – there are about 80 billion photos on Facebook). With real people and real identities, you also have access to your own personal newspaper via news feeds.

Developers

With an open platform that’s free, it’s now possible for brands to develop programs (with FBML, of course) that allow users to connect to friends in interesting ways.

Advertisers

Blake showed us the first ever banner ad by AT&T in 1994:

And the plain truth is that media still looks like that. For the most innovative media produced, it looks like we didn’t innovate much; agencies and advertisers contributed to that too, with their mindset that if a platform was to be monetized, it should be easy to buy.

Facebook took the lead in developing a platform truly designed to connect. Facebook ads are designed for participation – through poll ads, gifting ads, comment ads, event ads and fan ads, users are doing what they’re already doing on Facebook – but with your brands. The organic and viral distribution through the social graph is priceless for brands.

Facebook pages allow brands to have an ongoing conversation with brand ambassadors. Successful brands on Facebook mentioned that they value their Facebook pages for being able to feed information from and act as a direct channel to their most important customers – brand advocates and evangelists what would add to organic distribution.

The basic idea that drives Facebook ads: marketing is about connecting. Set up a Facebook page for your brand. If it offers value and is worth talking about, the ecosystem will surround it and take care of it. Users will raise hands to volunteer for it.