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Facebook, Inc. Strategic Analysis Faizan Qureshi BPS 4305.502 Soo Jung Kim

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Facebook, Inc. Strategic Analysis Faizan Qureshi BPS 4305.502 Soo Jung Kim Facebook, Inc. Strategic Analysis Faizan Qureshi BPS 4305.502 Soo Jung Kim Executive Summary Facebook, a company which attributes its humble beginnings to a student in a college dorm room, has had an explosive amount of growth in the past ten years. There isn‟t a major website, corporation, or even a university that doesn‟t have its own Facebook page. This staggering fact illustrates the profound impact that this company has had at all levels of business and has embedded itself in contemporary culture. In fact, Facebook‟s position in the social media market is so strong that there is no major platform that can directly compete with it. However, many of Facebook‟s most vocal critics have used the “bigger they are the harder they fall” approach when criticizing the success of Facebook by asserting that all it takes is another revolutionary website that will blindly attract the masses to knock Facebook out of its spotlight. It‟s a valid assertion given the fate of websites such as MySpace and Xanga. Given the fickle nature of consumers collectively, Mark Zuckerberg torpedoed an approach to this website in which the dynamics is constantly changing, new features are available, and most crucially, branding the name of his company into different aspects of people‟s lives. Facebook is not only an American name, but it is also an international brand which transcends to different nationalities and different cultures. Introduction The fundamental problem of Facebook has always been the issue of Privacy of its millions of users who unlike the founder, have a more limited definition of making the world a more open and connected place. Facebook was originally founded by Mark Zuckerberg, who as of today is still the Chief Executive Officer of Facebook. Originally intending to be just a „Harvard Connection‟ Facebook‟s primary motive was to be a website exclusive to Harvard students and as a way for them to be able to interact and meet with each other. Harvard University had a policy that did not allow basic information of students, such as a photo and a list of individual names next to the each photo being available to the student body. Mark Zuckerberg, seeing this redundant policy, tried unsuccessfully to have Harvard release this basic information. He ultimately decided to take matters into his own hands, and through hacking the Harvard computer system, along with breaking a dozen school rules, he obtained the basic information of the student body. He decided to share this information with the public through a website called „Facemash‟ which portrayed photos of female students side by side and asked the user to rate them based on attractiveness. After the Harvard staff discovered the incident, they disciplined Mr. Zuckerberg and asked him to take down the website or face expulsion. Mark wasn‟t discouraged, however, because internally he still believed that connecting people and making his campus a more open place was the right thing to do. This led him to create a website called TheFacebook.Com, which was anticipated for students to enter their individual basic information, and subsequently have access to many students as contacts for social interaction. In spring of 2004, TheFacebook.com was formally launched at Harvard and as awareness of the website grew through word of mouth, many students started to create their own Facebook page. Students would use it for interacting and meeting, for example, during exam times, students would network online to create study groups. Everything seemed well at the beginning, but little did Mark know that his legal troubles were about to begin. A few days after the initial startup, three of Zuckerberg‟s classmates filed a lawsuit which asserted that Mark used their own idea for a network connection, and promoted it as his own creation. The lawsuit was later settled out of court. As Facebook grew at Harvard, Zuckerberg decided that it wasn‟t prudent to keep the website exclusively for Harvard students and within a few months, Facebook was available in at least thirty different campuses. This was the turning point of Mr. Zuckerberg‟s fortunes, because at this time it was realized that Facebook was not only going to be reserved at the local level or even at Universities, but it had the potential to expand to a national and international brand name, which as history records, is exactly what happened. After his second year at Harvard, Mark, and two of his classmates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, made the bold decision to move to Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley to which it is home to. This was also when Zuckerberg collaborated with Sean Parker, founder of the peer to peer file sharing program, Napster. Parker, being an experienced Entrepreneur, guided Zuckerberg to find the big players of investment in his company because in the beginning Mark didn‟t want to simply generate revenue form ads, which would make his website unique. This was also the time when Mr. Zuckerberg was introduced to Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and managing partner of Founders Fund. Peter Thiel, invested $500,000 into Facebook, giving it the trajectory to launch into the multibillion dollar company it has become. After passing the 1,000,000 user mark in November of 2004, Facebook received another investment, this time from Accel Partners for a total of $12.7 million. With this new plethora of capital, Mark Zuckerberg took the initiative to buy some office space, hire a network of engineers, and lead his colleagues to a position on the Fortune 500 charts. External Analysis Before a discussion about the specific governmental guidelines that have inhibited profit producing of Facebook, I want to have a discussion about the primary category that Facebook belongs to and which market it hopes to prosper in. Facebook is a website which has substantial complementary fields that divide into games, applications, and of course, social media promotion. It is an online set of connections which aspires to restructure as its Chairman Mr. Zuckerberg has frequently stated. It‟s a social listing where colleagues, clients, businesspersons, and many other individuals can get in touch with another. The essential trade model and the many divisions have vulnerabilities with regard to environmental regulation. Moreover, it will specifically have particular consequences in many laws which state the privacy of the individual extends to the data uploaded and also explicit guidelines amongst online ads to get rid of even the smallest idea of a competitive advantage. Following the discussion of two ecological factors which will extraordinarily affect the mode of operation of Facebook, there will be a discussion of the Porter‟s five forces independently with a section committed to each part: bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of customers, intensity of existing rival, threat of substitutes, & lastly the threat of new competitors. One of the most crucial repercussions as discussed above is indeed the privacy of those that use Facebook with regard to the data they upload and this will be where we begin the discussion. To give some legitimacy for this grievance, it‟s important to realize that there is a legal precedent for this outcry of privacy. It can be traced to a regulation called the European Data Protection Regulation. The basis of this law is defined in the following manner: Users must be notified exactly when their data it is being used, for what purpose it is being used, and the duration of its use. This is a direct contradiction with the essence of Facebook because Facebook uses user data in the form of photos, wall posts, and many of its features that make up its website. This essentially requires Facebook to set up protocols to directly inform the users how their information is being used, which as opposed to all its progress is an issue that it has significantly lacked in. In addition, if there is a data leak, for example, the servers being hacked, then the company must inform its users within 24 hours. This is a sufficient amount of time to notify and do a thorough cleaning to make sure that any breach of security has been dealt with. The consequences of such leaks, which happen from time to time to many of the best companies is more fines and regulations imposed by the government but even more importantly, consumers will lose faith in the company, which could amount to revenue lost in millions. The following point of discussion relates to Social Media Marketing. Facebook prides itself at the fact that “It‟s free and always will be” Therefore, much of the revenue that it generates is in the form of advertisements. Starting in the spring of 2013, Fair Trade Federation guidelines have set an entire array of new standards and requirements for advertisements in order for them to be “clear and conspicuous”. Before going into the particular ramifications of these guidelines, we will have a short discussion on their specific contents. According to the FTF the advertisement‟s disclosure must be “clear in intent, hyperlinks must be visible, and disclosure supersedes any online transaction pertaining to the product.” The main ramification is the reality that advertisements first and foremost produce revenue through the appropriate mix of directness and shrewdness. To be able to market merchandise, one is required to only be attentive of the positives. As an advertisement become abundantly “clear and conspicuous”, more social media marketers statistically see a noteworthy plummet in the revenue derived from advertisements. The lasting consequence of this action is that it will have a direct impact on the primary method of revenue for Facebook.
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