I know that right now they are focusing on the consumer - people market and they want to grow the number of accounts exponencially, and I understand that a large portion of their income comes from Ads, but I can't stop thinking about other potential growth areas they have and they are not saying:
1. They have a tremendous social p2p platform and they are always enhancing it, not only by what they add in terms of functionality from their R&D department, but also by what people ask Facebook to improve on it's platform. So you have a platform that has not only the experience of one company, but also has the requirements of thousands of people that have helped to have a better platform.
2. Imagine a company, like for example the Bank I work for, that has more than 10,000 branch executives that interact with customers. This executives sell and service thousands of customers everyday, and whenever they encounter a problem, they go through the regular channels and report the problem expecting to have either an explanation of what they are doing wrong or a solution. As you know most companies have high rates of beurocracy and to detect a problem, find a solution or explanation and tell the other 9,999 executives what happens, might take forever and as a branch executive you don't have time to waste and most likely the next xxx customers you will service will have the same problem.
3. Imagine that you have a platform that enables them to either communicate with themselves or get communications from corporate in an online way. This way if someone posts a threat or problem or question, everybody will know, and if it is a real problem or a good question, probably most of them will also have it, even if they don't know yet. This will enhance productivity by allow them to give short term solutions, best practices and interact with each other by aggregating the knowledge and help of thousands of people that do the exact same job and most likely face the same questions.
4. You might think... Well there are companies that already sell that service, why don't just buy it from them... Well... The answer is simple, I've seen some software sold from this mayor software houses and they make sense, but they lack the aggregated features and enhancements that Facebook have developed in the past few years...
So if I was Facebook's
I would assign a Top Executive to start evaluating corporate needs and start making a Busines Plan to Rent/Sell/Lend/Host Facebook's platform to this guys who are willing to pay a lot of money for this service.... I mean, after the cow runs out of milk... you need to find another cow right????
I know you will tell me that there area lot of things to consider in my theory for example information security on corporations or change management for this type of social networks, but that is why I said that I would hire a Top Executive to address this issues.
For example, If I where appointed to this assignment I would develop this same infrastructure that could run within Company's VPN and only some things could be shared with other Company's VPNs...
What impressed me the most after Laura's speech is the low number of employees Facebook currently has. After Enrique's class finished, I approached Laura and asked who was the country manager of Facebook in Mexico because after my MBA, I am going back to work for my Bank and I would like to contact them and see what how can collaborate between the two companies, and although she was very nice and gave me her info and asked me what type of collaboration I wanted (and I am sure she will help me solve this issue) I was impressed to know that Facebook does not have a country manager in Mexico and they ran the country from US, which is fine for me only if they are sticking to their actual Business Plan, but if they want to expand to other stuff like the one I am mentioning above, they will definitely need to strengthen their Head Count.
Anyway, it's just a thought
Arnoldo
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