Facebook – the water cooler fountain for all our lives?

Dominic Finney, director at digital consultancy FaR, says Facebook at its heart is the most networked company in the world and therefore has the ability to pool the greatest single mass of noise around your brand…

It can be compellingly argued that Facebook is simply the truest company in existence to the internet’s original network vision, as outlined by people such as J.C.R.Licklider – and turned into a reality by people such as Tim Berners Lee. As the net is at its core simply and truly just a network, which enables us to communicate and share things with vast networks of people and organisations.

Facebook has simply followed this model to its logical conclusion by developing an interface that enables you to communicate and share things with large numbers of people at the same time.

Facebook has effectively ensured that the vast majority of people online now live networked lives. And therefore the new reality for brands is that they need to ensure they communicate in and through these relationship networks in order to remain an active part of consumers lives.

The great shift that we have therefore seen from a media perspective is that media companies no longer have exclusive access to core sources of information and the sole means of mass communication, which enabled them to broadcast to the wider public. And, brands can therefore no longer just use these types of media companies to have more straight forward conversations and relationships with their consumers.

In the new-networked world, consumers can have multi-layered relationships with brands in all sorts of places and environments, whether they be digital or otherwise. And use lots of tools, influencers and sources of information to engage with brands and make purchasing decisions.

Brands that fail to deliver communication strategies, which engage with this networked way of communicating, are simply doomed to miss out on engaging in key elements of the conversation around their brands. Facebook at its heart is the most networked company in the world and therefore has the ability to pool the greatest single mass of noise around your brand.

However, Facebook, as with all pure communications tools, is simply a tool for communicating with friends and sharing information. Albeit arguably the most powerful tool the world has ever seen.

What it isn’t is a compelling media environment, where memorable experiences occur (which, by the way, is one of my favourite games to play when people go on about how amazing and some would say life changing Facebook is… I simply ask them how many truly memorable experiences have they actually had on Facebook – and depending on your threshold of memorable experiences the typical answer is, after a long pause, zero, noll). But that, maybe, is just up until now…

As Facebook makes a huge strategic play (and gamble for those who remember previous social networks) to transform itself into a media provider. Facebook’s new Timelines initiative enables users to express themselves through the life stories, movies and songs that express their life. And Facebook, through some smart media partnerships, will enable users to play and share the music (Spotify), Movies (Netflixs) and books (Kobo) that express users and their friends’ passions and interests.

By seeking to tap in to and enabling the sharing of users’ major passions, Facebook is hoping to create a multitude of mini, and sometimes major, water cooler moments for users and their friends to experience and share on Facebook.

And the commercial reason d’etre that this is all predicated on is simple – a media property where people come together and share memorable life experiences and passions is just the kind of place that brands want to be. It is something that has been the main frustration for brands when it comes to Facebook. As an environment, it has been relatively uninspired in terms of the content available and the ability to deliver the type of memorable and exciting media experiences and environments that brands are always keen to associate with.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook succeeds in becoming a media provider while maintaining its audiences’ loyalty to the service – as this unique combination of network scale aligned to strong media is when brands can build their deepest and most meaningful relationships with their customers.

So expect to see a lot more brands engaging, sharing and influencing these media sharing tools and environments, if Facebook is even only half way successful…

Click here for further information.