Facebook: the race to mass media

 As I headed for the room where I was to give a lecture, I walked along a resting area for students in the faculty building and saw students using wireless Internet and logging on to Facebook, one of the popular social-networking sites. Four out of five students were on a Facebook page, updating their profiles, posting and chatting with friends about content from other websites or tagging and uploading photos, among other activities.

It is breath-taking that this digitised web community has become

 so popular in less than a decade. I also got a chance to peruse the latest article from Fortune magazine - from early March - and learned that Facebook had reached 150 million users this January.

A graphic showed how long it took other technologies to reach 150 million users: telephones 89 years, television 38 years and mobile phones 14 years. Even the iPod needed seven years, while Facebook got there in only five years.

Of course marketers want to find ways to tap into this audience, but some who have tried have been burned. The Fortune article said that Facebook apologised for introducing Beacon, which allowed members to see what websites their friends visited and even showed purchases on e-commerce sites. Users protested and filed a lawsuit on privacy grounds.

However, I really appreciated Facebook when I learned also that not only did President Obama use it to get elected, Dell has also recruited with it. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, has step-changed the world of communications to the social-networking era.

Generation Y and future consumers are more sophisticated and moving forward to new touch points. Zuckerberg and his team are working on how to derive profit from the site's scale and popularity, and we will all learn from his business model pretty soon.

I also have applied for this social-networking site in the last few years and have been amazed at the flow of information. Whatever you do on your profile or page, Facebook will let your circle of friends know about it. This creates an on-going interaction with your community, which is quite different from any traditional communications platform you have been exposed to in the past. As I said earlier, users are not keen on being intruded upon by commercials.

Now Facebook has added "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" buttons next to each advertisement on the Web page for users to click on. This shows how Facebook is working hard to understand its users in person. Also, Facebook tries to create a pleasantly tailor-made community for its users, which will help maintain its total users in the long run.

As a marketer, it's too early to jump to the conclusion that this is the effective touch point to reach a huge number of target consumers. The starting point for us is to learn and understand first if this is a touch point that is relevant to our target consumers or not. The more you understand your consumers, the more you can reach them effectively.

That's just what Facebook is trying to do: understand its users so that they can grow in a sustainable way in the future.

I strongly suggest to anyone involved with marketing to enrol in Facebook and other such sites. You may discover amazing things the sites may be able to do for your business.

 is senior marketing and corporate-communications manager at Procter & Gamble Trading (Thailand).