How much is Facebook worth?

10 Billion...

I love to see this mass growth in digital applications and solutions but 10 Billion??? Phew... Lucky Facebook guys eh! Margaritas and Senoritas for eternity in the place of their choice!

No really... What is Facebook worth?  

YouTube had a price tag of 1.65 billion last year with over half a billion of that said to put towards legal defence!

Now talks of Microsoft acquiring a tiny 5% of the platform for nearby half a billion!!! No wonder every guy is going crazy in the efforts to come up with the next best digital thing - its kinda like going to hollywood to be an actor! 1 in a million or so make it!

But what do people think about this price tag? Can it go up? Or will what happend in the dotcom boom happen and prices will just drop massively in the coming years... Difficult to predict but interesting space to watch!

Personally.... I simply can not quatify this amount but hey... Good old bill gates has a little more in his pocket than I do! 

Online Medias Sold Out

I have been a little inactive over the past few weeks as I have been moving around alot but something that has proven that Finland is 1) on the up in digital & 2) perhaps not ready is that some of the key online medias have sold out of advertising space for the coming months!

Is this a sign? Sites like nelonen.fi which is 'channel 4' in Finland have pretty much sold out of 'banner' space until mid November! This is a good sign, as we can see the spend in TV reducing and the spend online increasing!!!

Finally... fingers crossed they do not increase their prices to much as the clearly can moving forward! Also opens up doors to more medias opening up doors in Finland and the surrounding Nordics!

Interesting to see if any other regions have these issues in digital media space being sold out?

MobileMonday Global summit - Helsinki

I attended the Global MobileMonday summit in Helsinki yesterday and sat through a few discussion panels on Mobile Marketing, Entertainment and Social media in Mobile Marketing... While these notes are my summary I thought some would be interested...

I also pose the question out there to other peoples thoughts on where Social Media on the Mobile Phone within Europe is going...

Summary of discussions

Global markets were discussed with key speakers from Italy, Japan, China, Korea, UK, Germany, Venezuela, Indonesia & the USA. These speakers combined discussions on Mobile as an entity in entertainment, marketing as a whole & the impact of social media on the industry.

All speakers equally agreed that changes in the infrastructure of most countries are required for Mobile services to grow more rapidly – the core change is in the revenue service providers and aggregators are making! In most cases the actual operators are taking up to 90% of the revenue for all services redeemed making it not so enticing for content providers.

Japan, China & Korea are some of the key successors in this market. The key is collaboration between the Operators and Content providers & realising where the revenue is for each! Operators, unlike most other countries are only claiming a small percentage of the fees averaging 10% but are making their revenue from date/bytes downloaded – the more people download the more they make! Content providers are making the most part of the revenue meaning they have more money to inject into new cutting edge services.

It is clear that operators in other European, South East Asia, North & South American continents need to change their outlook on the market for it to grow so that more players will come into the market offering much greater and advanced services in these continents.

From a Mobile Marketing perspective, it was also agreed that Mobile marketers need to bridge the gap between offline and online content. Forget push marketing & old fashioned marketing with mobile! Countries like Korea and others admitted that the OPT IN rate in most cases is always very low. An example concept that successfully bridged the gap between offline and online was a brand that allowed people to purchase & send ‘virtual codes’ to their friends for a real item E.g. Send your friend a virtual ‘beer or Coke’ & they can redeem it in a bar. This idea can be as simple as TXT your friend a ringtone or Share this song with your mate… It’s all about the Trust & building social advocism & giving real added value to the user!

The social media panel was equally interesting with a diverse panel including Kathleen Legg who focuses on political impacts of social media & Gregory Gorman who is a psychologist of 20 odd years focusing on enterprise 2.0. Interesting discussion as it lead away from the youth audience and more into the impact on global organisations and ‘us’ older folk and how we are using it to better our daily work processes & lives. The key summary was that rich browsers, the ability to synchronise all our data in one area, share all our data easily from wherever we are is how things are moving forward – Social media is not just for the kids in the playground but it being utilised in everyday business in innovative organisations. While politically the US is moving backwards due to paper voting again in California this year, it was agreed that using the mobile as a voting instrument when it becomes trusted by the continent will be of great advantage… it was also discussed the blogging & mobile blogging had made some steps for politicians in the US on the voting front.

Oh yes, and a great quote, by John Grant I believe was “Brands that are consistent in social media are liars” - sorry, this quote was not word for word but such a great statement influencing and comparing old school ATL marketing & media with new digital social media thinking!

Facebook has opened up to Public Search

One of the key triggers that has brought a more mature & professional audience to Facebook has been the privacy that only people whom you accept as friends can see your profile - this however may just be an illusion so I am finding out!

So will google find my zombies on Facebook!!! Or how much booze MrBoozeMail has sent me???

The public search listing launched last night will provide, at most, the name and profile picture of any Facebook member that has their search privacy settings set to Everyone. While the information is minimal it is there with a picture! - better change those Hasselhof pictures to a nice picture now eh!

So when looking for a job or someone is seeking professional information on you, will your potential employer find this in the first instance above linkedIn or other things you have done in your life that are online?

In my opinion this is simply another step towards the loss of privacy online... A friend of mine who is very tech savvy has completely removed himself from Facebook already! Do we want a paper trail of everything we have done online to be viewable by the audience in a few years!!! I don't...

So I post this question to you, the audience?...