Facebook is Dead.
So I had an interesting epiphany today. Facebook is dead. Interactive Marketing killed it. I know this sounds a bit grandiose but hear me out.

We all know the great story of how Facebook came to be. It was created by some Harvard kids to essentially automate (again the 'Remote Control factor') the paper facebooks that students would use to get to know one another on campus. It eventually grew into a huge community of users who use it to keep in touch with their friends lives. Great technology, right! Great purpose. It helps us to stay in touch with people. Score one for technology once again helping peoples lives...

Enter the Dragon
Being the cool useful technology that it is, it quickly grows to 127 million users. That’s sounds like dollars and the marketers want in! They are going to throw anything at Facebook to get the attention of anyone in hopes that a viral spark will be lit and massive amounts of business will be driven back to the client! Can you blame them? 127 million people is a BIG audience? Not a problem. We can deal with some branded mini-apps and we consumers enjoy exploring our advocacy powers for brands we like. Heck, I just convinced someone on Facebook NOT to buy a Samsung Insight (I think) because I found out it was a piece of crap! Either way, I still have my community of real friends whom I can keep in touch with from afar…

Here comes evolution.
OK. So we created a cool tech, and we let the marketers in to monetize it and give us some face time with brands, but wait…something doesn't feel right. I have a lot of friends now…some of them aren't real people…some of them I don't really know that well! Oh well, it's kind of cool and gratifying to see my list of friends grow. I wonder if I can get a many friends on Facebook as I have connections on Linked in?

The Point
So what is the point of this rambling narrative? I was at a conference recently where the presenter listed his count of Facebook friends as a credential to validate his net worth or value on the internet. It was listed right along with the amount of blogs he authors, columns he writes, education background, etc. As I was explaining this in a client meeting I suddenly realized… our value on the internet is quickly becoming directly attributed to the amount of people we have access to through these social networks. The amount of people you can share a thought, link, pitch, idea, or product with at any given point is critical to your success of your personal brand. This in itself is monetizable, similar to how a user registration database full of email addresses is valuable to a web based business. If you have a massive reach on the internet, I have to believe that companies would be willing to pay large sums of money to advertise to your network through you.

And now…the Amway Effect
So your 'friends' aren't really friends anymore. They are now all potential customers. If my goal is to market my personal brand and try to be successful in this new networked age, should I try to build my list of connections as much as possible on all of these networks, irregardless of if I have a personal relationship with these users or not? If I want to validate myself in my field, how many Facebook connections makes me interesting? How many make me a rock star?

Score another one for the Marketing folks. They have turned our precious Facebook into the ultimate PR tool. Or maybe we technology folks we're just naïve in not seeing the PR potential of a technology that communicates to so many so easily.

Suddenly, I feel conflicted. What do you think? I'll think I'll blast this post out to my network on Twitter and see if I can't gets some clarity, or at least some consolation.

interactive marketing, personal brand