Should Mark Zuckerberg Apologize?

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I've been meaning to pen a follow-up to my post from a week ago on Facebook's advertising strategy, but the company's now infamous IPO quickly suffocated any opening for a fresh take from a PR (and personal) POV. Yes, readers, I too believed Mark, Sheryl and the bubblicious hyperbole that streamed from the tech, media and marketing pundits I've blindly chosen to follow on Twitter.

PandoDaily's Sarah Lacy

As PandoDaily's Sarah Lacy observed in the aftermath of the debacle:

"That said: These are smart people. They knew the stakes. They planned this for years. How on earth could it have gone this badly?"

I am now the un-proud owner of a couple hundred shares of $FB at $34/per and frankly, I am stewing. I took to my Facebook wall to vent:

Of course I could count on my always loquacious pal Andrew Giangola to chime in with a reasonable retort to my request that Facebook’s soon-to-be Quixotic founder Mark Zuckerberg serve up an apology to the millions of small investors who bought into Aaron Sorkin’s celluloid depiction of him and his audacious creation. (Also, didn't Mr. Zuckerberg publicly state that he wanted to allow individual investors to have a stake?)

Andrew noted that "The Right thing = Liability" and the newly public company's lawyers likely had the founder's hands tied. I decided to let the post die until today when the stock slipped another 10% to $29/share, and USA Today sought ProfNet's help in seeking...

"...someone to write a 350-word opposing view for USA Today that the Facebook IPO is the latest example of small investors getting screwed because insiders had better information. It will run with our editorial saying that the larger lesson is that small investors should stay out of IPOs."

I'm depressed.

I still believe that lawyers or no lawyers, the public consensus was pretty consensual: individual investors (i.e., active Facebook users) who chose to believe in the gospel of Facebook got burned, and for this, the company would be well-served to publicly address this unfortunate reality.  Should it apologize for its CFO's indelicate indiscretion to the underwriting banks? No.  Should it apologize for Nasdaq's meltdown? Hardly.

Mr. & Mrs. Zuckerberg at the Sistine Chapel

But when Mr. Zuckerberg emerges from his Roman honeymoon mode, he should task his PR consiglieres to work with his lawyers to hammer out some heartfelt language that seeks to temper the anger felt by his most important constituency, let alone the inevitable class action lawsuit. The company's silence over this unfortunate chapter in its once-promising young history is deafening, IMHO.

Or maybe not, especially when one considers how the incessant media hose turns all page one memes into ephemeral mush over time.  Here's the latest take from Ms. Lacy:

"Right about now the communications team at Facebook is just praying for someone else in technology to be bought, go public or generally screw up. Anybody. We’re in week two of the post-mortem over Facebook’s IPO. The narrative has shifted (somewhat) from “WHAT A TRAINWRECK!” to “Wait, Facebook made a pile of money without inflating a bubble…is that really so bad?”

I'm still depressed.

Media's Future & Cupcakes

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On Friday, the last day of Internet Week/NY, I finally extricated myself from client obligations and set off to check out two happenings near one another in the city: the TechMunch Food Bloggers Conference and I Want Media's "Future of Media" panel of players and pundits waxing poetic on, well, the future of media.

Stephens, Cupcake Queen

If food's your thing, the day-long TechMunch drew a who's who of the city's food blogging community. Ironically, I was invited by Erik Deutsch, a PR pal from SoCal, though I soon recognized some familiar folks, including two of my favorite cupcake bloggers Nichelle Stephens and Allison Robicelli. Panels, cooking demos, content, eating...you get the gastronomic gist.

I Want Media's "Future of Media" Panel

My visit was short, which was good given the waste-expanding consumables that were in abundance. (Summer is upon us.)

I walked around the corner to the TV studio of NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute where an overflow crowd had a chance to watch media news aggregator I Want Media's Patrick Phillips take a group of seven thought leaders through their paces. The talk centered around:

• The Facebook IPO about which all were exuberantly bullish, in spite of the lukewarm reception the company received from the financial markets
• The fate of The New York Times for which The Daily's Greg Clayman cited a recent report that The Times's  digital subscriber base would eventually replace lost ad revenue from the print publication, while BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti opined that we'll soon look back and question the morality of reading a newspaper given its negative environmental footprint.  
• The explosion of commercially produced and socially syndicated content, i.e., "owned" media.
• The use of real-time reader data to enhance a site's stickiness (and editorial choices).  

I personally would have liked to have heard a few other media trends including:

• The rise of Aereo, a service that delivers HD broadcast TV to one's tablet, and in so doing bypasses the cable co's (and the broadcast networks that sustain them)
• The growth in socially driven news aggregators like News.me, and other innovative ways to incorporate multimedia in presenting news and information packages such as The Atavist. 
• The continued diminishment of broadcast TV audiences from changes in viewing habits. 
• Time-shifted TV viewing and the social TV/second screen revolution 

But there's only so much ground one can cover with seven speakers and 60 minutes of time. To his credit, Patrick ended the session by asking everyone to "make a bold prediction about the future of media." Here were their responses::

Cooper

Jim Cooper, executive editor, Adweek:


"My ten-year-old daughter will spend more time with Instagram than she will with Disney and Nickelodeon combined...it's interactive. It goes with her on her iTouch. She's very swipey...and she's going to grow up in that world where the new metric is not a click...it's a swipe." 

Wolf

Michael J. Wolf, founder/managing director, Activate: 


"Today social gaming is a huge phenomenon. A lot of it is driven by the sale of social goods. As we move into a world where online gambling is legal, I think that the nature of social gaming is going to explode because once people can win real cash versus virtual goods, I think we're going to see a tremendous interest in how games get played socially." .  

Coen

Jessica Coen, editor-in-chief, Jezebel:

"This is pretty basic but I would bet my entire income on the fact that five years from now tablets will be the number one way people are reading media. ...once content becomes better and better on the tablet and tablets become more and more accessible to the general public, people are just going to start using that exclusively."

De Rosa

Anthony De Rosa, social media editor, Reuters

"I think Instagram will become much more pivotal to Facebook's future than it currently is. And I think that the fact that Mark Zuckerberg realized that it was such a threat is kind of indicative of how important that company is. I think in the future Instagram is going to grow and grow and tere's going to be a little bit of friction over whether Facebook will change that product or if they'll let it be. If they're smart they'' just let it be." 

Lerer

Ben Lerer, Co-founder/CEO, Thrillist:

"I don't know.... I actually think the mobile thing is the biggest movement that we're seeing.  More and more popular sites...you're going to see the percentage of traffic coming by mobile growing in an insane way...everybody should be building mobile first for sort of everything at this point."

Clayman

Gregory Clayman, publisher, The Daily:

Foursquare becomes absolutely ridiculously huge...the couponing business blows up...they make gobs of money...and Facebook buys them for an outrageous sum...I think their product has gotten better and better and better..." 

Peretti

Jonah Peretti, Co-founder, Buzzfeed:


I think on a five year horizon you can see that both social and mobile are going to increasingly start to eat in to existing industries and change the status quo...how things are done now. You'll see social publishing become bigger and bigger...social advertising become bigger and bigger. Social will happen on mobile devices.  We're sort of at a beginning of a shift...you can extrapolate. 
   


You can watch the one-hour session here:

 

Facebook Advertising: To Like or Not to Like

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As the Facebook IPO frenzy crescendos, the media pendulum has swung from fawning friendliness to sudden skepticism catalyzed by one giant automaker's decision to pull its $10 million ad budget from the 900-million+ strong social network.

Interestingly, and mildly reminiscent of its defiant public posture during the government bailouts of its rivals, Ford Motor Company promptly countered by expressing confidence in its own social marketing endeavors on Facebook.

The company's social media chief Scott Monty, a friend and one of the best in the biz, used his own Twitter pulpit - with its 75k+ followers -- to carefully reinforce Ford's support for Facebook, i.e., he didn't stray too far from the company's prepared statement.

USA Today noted:

"But Scott Monty, social media leader at Ford -- which to his credit has more than 1.5 million likes on its main Facebook page to GM's more than 378,000 -- is actively promoting Ford's commitment to Facebook through his Twitter account (@ScottMonty). He tweeted that Ford believes Facebook ads are effective as part of a general strategy, but not as a "straight media buy."

Scott even tweeted a Ford/Facebook-friendly video link  to influential industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang of Altmeter Group (and his 104,000 followers).

Be that as it may, the whole kerfuffle on the eve of Facebook's initial public stock offering set media tongues-a-waggin', including this prominent piece in The New York Times Dealbook titled "Ahead of Facebook I.P.O., a Skeptical Madison Ave:"

"Despite the overwhelming level of interest, Facebook is facing fresh concerns over its ability to attract enough advertising revenue to justify that stratospheric valuation."

Facebook actually has itself to blame for the skepticism in the marketing marketplace. In February, the company's top executives, minus its famous founder/CEO, travelled to New York for a conference it dubbed fMC. Anybody who was anybody on the creative and buy sides of Madison Avenue attended this live-streamed event wherein Facebook laid out its vision for helping marketers market and in so doing, articulate its "ad"-driven revenue-generating business model. It was summed up by one of the company's senior marketing executives thusly:

"We are in a revolution from ads to stories."

Nearly all who left that conference had drunk the Kool-Aid. Facebook unilaterally declared its intention to dispatch with traditional digital advertising and replace it with "stories" as the primary means for engaging customers. It promised companies that have invested in the construct of elaborate Facebook pages and timelines to amplify the positive fan-generated messages (i.e., stories) to a much wider audience -- for an upcharge. The wider the amplification, the greater the fee.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (Photo: Peter Himler)

At the time, attendees were so smitten with this vision of consumer-generated stories driving home the marketing message, let alone seeing and hearing from the always inspiring Sheryl Sandberg, they neglected to consider the practical shortcomings.

First, agencies are simply not (yet) organized to capitalize on Facebook's envisioned paradigm. The creation of original content, e.g., FB pages and timelines, has typically resided in the domain of the PR professional, while ad creative and paid placement, sat squarely in the realm of the ad and media buying agency. While there has been much conjecture about these distinct silos breaking down, for most agencies it simply hasn't happened yet.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, a Facebook ad or story is an entirely different animal than let's say a Google-delivered search ad that pops based on the recipient's stated intent. If I'm searching for a digital camera, Google knows and will serve up relevant ads now, or six weeks from now via re-targeting. If I'm a Canon marketing rep, how can I leverage Facebook's voluminous amount of personal data to pinpoint and engage a pre-qualified buyer? I probably can't. However, if I'm repping an estrogen-replacement therapy, finding and engaging women over a certain age on Facebook is likely much more do-able.

From The Times piece:

WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell

"It’s one of the most powerful branding mechanisms in the world, but it’s not an advertising mechanism," said Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, the giant advertising agency.

(Who knew that WPP was an advertising "agency?")

But Sir Martin, my old boss, is essentially correct. Facebook's value to marketers lies in its ability to reinforce brands -- through fans' stories or otherwise -- and less in its ability to spur (trans)actions from a user who has shared a desire to purchase a specific product or service.

Still, with its 900 million+ users globally, and the data it has collected on each of them, marketers would be remiss in not "liking" what Facebook has to offer. I have one client in the ad tech space who created a birthday greeting ad for his wife and delivered it to her Facebook page, and only her Facebook page, based alone on the targeting data FB made available to him.

"It [the move by GM] will make people rethink how well their investments are working on Facebook but I can’t see a bunch of people following suit,” said Peter Kim, chief strategy officer of Dachis Group, a big-data marketing group."

Here's a clip I caught this morning featuring the New Yorker's always astute chronicler of all things media Ken Auletta waxing on the subject. Video link here.