Where does Facebook go from here? Part II

A few months ago, I rambled on about whether Facebook had a bright future ahead of it. I thought it did back then, but going public in such a ramshackle, overly optimistic way killed my cheery perspective. In fact, I can't imagine anything more damaging to FB than this IPO fiasco.

A large part of that is a tarnished brand. Sure, Facebook had skeptics from the beginning. But until now, the hard numbers were all positive--huge growth, users numbering close to a billion, ever-increasing pervasiveness in popular culture, and profits to boot. Now they're not. There's a big, tangible minus next to its name--a loss of billions on its second day of trading.

And this chink in the armor very well could lead to far more than brand issues. Already there's a Wall Street Journal article [subscription required] on CrowdStar, a big-name gaming company, bailing on Facebook because it fails as a mobile platform. Worse yet, more advertisers are likely to follow GM away from Facebook, which would impact their primary revenue source. And if you move from a P/E ratio of 85 to 100+, you're just asking for trouble.

Organizations can and do recover from tarnished brands and big falls. Just think Apple, Xerox, Intel, and IBM. All faced issues, all are thriving now. But my opinion is it's different with Facebook. They're more vulnerable, both as a brand and as a business, so the IPO albatross around their neck has the potential to drown them.

The twisted wisdom of football.

Not a good time to say you're an American football fan, is it? I understand the beefs against the sport, and I'm far from rabid about it. But it still speaks to me.

Maybe that's the result of pre-teen years filled with Fighting Irish, Monday Night Football, and Mean Joe Greene. Or perhaps it's because the game is driven by strategy, but really defined by interconnected and tangled complexity. An interview with Texas  Longhorn's defensive coordinator Manny Diaz (HT: smartfootball.com) gives a glimpse into exactly how tangled and complex:

"Last year, everybody was wondering six games into the season why our defensive ends couldn't get sacks, and then the next couple games they started getting sacks," Diaz said. "But we were also covering better those games. Quarterbacks maybe held onto the ball a half-second longer. All of a sudden the defensive ends get the plaudits, but a lot of it was maybe because of the coverage. 

"Nothing happens to a defensive player in a bubble," Diaz said. "That's what makes college football the opposite of baseball. Because in baseball, everything happens in a bubble: this guy pitches, this guy hits and the ball is hit to that guy." 

Because of that, Diaz said it would be difficult to come up with accurate statistical measurements for individual defenders. But he said the fact that people are finding different ways to look at the game was a great thing. 

"The way an iceberg looks from a ship going by is very different from what's happening beneath the surface," Diaz said. "That's what's so fun about this game. There's so much going on beneath the surface, and I think that's the point."

Corporations, also known as people [working together].

Even the simplest items in our modern-day, first-world lives come to us via complex paths. When Michael Pollan tracked the origins of a store-bought steak, he discovered an extended assembly line that depended far more on the economics of oil and biological manipulation than the simple act of eating a sirloin would imply. It's not the pleasant picture we'd like to have for our food, and it certainly has many drawbacks, but it's how our food supply has evolved to meet the demand for cheap beef.

This may seem wrong somehow, and in many ways it probably is, but it meets a very basic human need, food, at scale. And I don't see how we can meet the caloric requirements of a world population of seven billion without involved, "unnatural" processes. In fact, the only way I see overcoming the evils of food production isn't by dumbing down to some fictional old-school utopia. It's by pushing forward with technology and finding inventive ways to make the production of food more humane, biological even, and sustainable.

How an economist looks at good eats.

Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and avowed foodie, has a great article in this month's Atlantic: "Six Rules for Dining Out." Although his rules might be helpful for finding good eats for cheap, his perspective is what I found most fascinating. Cowen employs economic drivers to decode what's likely to be best or bust. And no surprise that a supply and demand perspective applied to dining leads to some surprising conclusions.

Low-rent restaurants can experiment at relatively low risk. If a food idea does not work out, the proprietor is not left with an expensive lease. As a result, a strip-mall restaurant is more likely to try daring ideas than is a restaurant in, say, a large shopping mall. The people with the best, most creative, most innovative cooking ideas are not always the people with the most money. Many of them end up in dumpier locales, where they gradually improve real-estate values.

It's like psychologist Daniel Kahneman breaking ground--and winning a Nobel Prize--in economics. Outsider thinking often shakes things up. And it often wins.

Variation on theme.

It's a given that a company can't sit still. It must constantly evolve its brand, products, and overarching strategies. It needs to keep a firm finger on the pulse of now, catching even the most subtle shifts in the competitive landscape and customer desires. RIM comes to mind as someone who's fallen flat on all those fronts, but they're far from alone.

Even old-school consumer brand Pepto-Bismol had to change in order to stanch dropping sales. But the question for them was, as for every business and brand, how to change? Unsurprisingly, the fine marketing folks at P&G tapped into social media to find an answer, which I also found unsurprising: Pepto-Bismol and weekend partying go together. From a recent Businessweek article:

So P&G decided to try to lure potential customers before their eating and drinking binges by touting the product on Facebook with the upbeat slogan “Celebrate Life.” The result was an 11 percent market-share gain in the 12 months through fall 2011.

But for big corporations, wholesale positioning changes aren't quite so easy, especially for those with complex and diverse offerings. So what's a behemoth brand to do? Change its entire brand positioning on the whim of the marketplace? That's like an oil tanker being asked to swerve around like a speed boat. Most likely it just can't do it. But even if it managed to pull it off somehow, it'd likely capsize on its first zigzag.

Even though they're competitors to my primary client, I have to give a hat tip to AT&T in this regard. They're currently respinning "rethink possible," their brand positioning line--not with a new line, but with new twists to the idea behind the line. It's a brilliant way to evolve a big, complex brand to fit right now, again and again, without throwing away hard-earned equity or appearing trendy and fickle.

One way they altered the campaign was with a bolt-on line: “It’s what you do with what we do.” It steers the campaign away from idealistic and forward-looking and toward personal and life-enhancing. This is what über-famous and -fantastic creative David Lubars from BBDO, the agency responsible for the campaign, had to say about it:

By augmenting the theme with the new phrase, Mr. Lubars said, “we put a new suit on” the campaign and emphasized “how people’s lives are entwined with technology” and the benefits of “life on the network” (the AT&T network, natch).

"Rethink possible," like other lasting positioning lines, has yoga-like flexibility."Priceless," "Smarter Planet," "You're in good hands," "Just do it," whatever--they all can be, and have been, spun in a myriad of ways. Now, just to pick a random example from a magazine, let's consider Trend Micro's "Securing your journey to the cloud." It's certainly focused and relevant right now, which could be a good differentiator in the short run. But what do you do in a year or so, after everyone's already made the journey? It's back to the drawing board.

For awhile, positioning lines were becoming very passé in the agency world. Although there's clearly value in the best of them, a line like Trend Micro's can be highly constricting. It's comparable to strict brand guidelines that kill execution latitude. They're great for brand consistency, terrible for consistently surprising and relevant brand expression. With ongoing change as our era's theme, how can a company leave surprising and relevant expression off the table?

Smarter planet, mainframe profit.

For years, IBM was the one technology brand that regularly captured my attention. And then the Smarter Planet campaign took my soul. I'm hooked by the campaign's vision of a world that works like a Swiss watch thanks to IBMer intelligence and über-computing. If I had a CIO title and a few million bucks extra, I'd totally hire them to turn my data into business smarts and planet salvation.

However, IBM isn't all about fisherman-saving cloud solutions, analytics for perfectly synchronized supply chains, or even beating Ken Jennings to a Jeopardy! pulp. In a recent BusinessWeek article, Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, estimated that 40 percent of IBM's profits are related to mainframes. Mainframes are visionary only if you live in a cabin without indoor plumbing.

I'm not knocking that IBM's messaging doesn't include its moneymaking legacy stuff. It's okay to focus on the part of the business that's leading the way, that has the potential for broad positive impact, that's less meat-and-potatoes profit makers and more gee-whiz innovative. In fact, it's more than okay. It's the only way to stay relevant in technology.

It's all about framing. Not just because it's marketing's job, although it is, but because it's the only way to create story and meaning from the massive, disparate, complex thing that is a technology enterprise like IBM. Or like my primary client, for that matter.

Savvy strategy @twitter tempo.

Part 01: A whole new dance at twitter tempo
Once a person or organization has a strong vision for the future and a solid strategy for achieving it, making it a reality is solely a matter of proper execution. At least that's the traditional wisdom. It's empowering in an Ayn Rand-ish way, but as realistic nowadays as Atlas Shrugged. Here are a couple of this maxim's more blatant flaws: