Face of the future

BOOK:  The Facebook Effect

AUTHOR: David Kirkpatrick

PUBLISHER: Virgin Books

ISBN:  978-0-7535-2274-5

If you’ve seen the movie ‘The Social Network’ about the meteoric and maverick rise of Facebook and enjoyed it, The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick is a book you will want to read. It’s billed as “the inside story” after author Kirkpatrick was granted exclusive access to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of its top executives.

There’s no doubt that Facebook has contributed to changing the world. It not only created the global phenomena of social networking in the mainstream, but it ensured that the individual, joe public, was able to build a fairly basic personal, now company, web presence – for free.

It also demonstrates the supremacy of a simple idea and the incredible power of the ‘crowd’. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have changed our worlds. It has been barely a decade of Google and social media – we can hardly envision a time before the internet these days.

It is so important for brands to understand the Facebook power dichotomy. Facebook is where people share their lives and that includes talking about your brands, whether you like it or not: brands wanted to be an integral part of their world of their consumers, tap into their emotions, and they have succeeded. Brands already hang out where their consumers do – that now includes Facebook.

And this is just the beginning… Zuckerberg still sees Facebook as “a work in progress.” And his biggest challenge is leading the user base through the changes still to come, he told the author: “We need to be sure we can still aggressively build products that are on the edge and manage this big user base. I’d like us to keep pushing the envelope.”

It’s hard for brands to accept that they need to be on Facebook, despite that fact that they don’t own the content on this platform; and that they have to relinquish control to their mercurial consumer base. In other words, they have to be human… well, just like the rest of us!

In his postscript, the author talks about how Facebook has become increasingly embedded in the fabric of modern life and culture and takes a look into the future of a world in which Facebook participates as countries do: with ‘passports’, an economy, currency, and so on… quite phenomenal.

*This book was reviewed by Louise Marsland, editor-in-chief of AdVantage