Global Strategy | International Business | Emerging markets | International Finance | Social Media | Technology | Higher ahead of the curve
When most company bosses think about Facebook, Twitter and all those other oh-so-fashionable darlings of the social world, it is usually about how they stop their employees wasting their valuable time on those sites.
Yet a small but growing number of chief executives are coming to realise that social networks offer significant opportunities for marketing and selling their products, for engaging with their customers at a deep level and for using them to guide new product development. Read more.
Facebook, the popular social network, has found a deep-pocketed friend in Russia.
Digital Sky Technologies, an Internet investment company based in Moscow, said Tuesday it has invested $200 million in Facebook in exchange for a 1.96 percent stake in the company, and would eventually offer to buy at least $100 million in Facebook’s common stock. Facebook said the deal values the entire company — which Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, founded in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 — at $10 billion.
More details about the deal can be found here. A backgrounder on this story can be found here.
Facebook is quickly expanding into many world regions and this internationalisation strategy seems to pay off. According to figures released by comScore (SCOR) on Aug. 12. Facebook has overtaken Myspace and now counts 132 million users, nearly 63% are outside North America. The site, which had been translated into 20 languages including French, Spanish, and Mandarin, has recently added 69 more. “Now, through translations, we are seeing a lot of growth in international countries,” says Javier Olivan, international manager at Facebook in a recent interview. Read more.
Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later (Social Media Will Change Your Business, BusinessWeek Online)
“Blogs werethe heart of the story in 2005. But they’re just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter—they’ve all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. “
A good primer for business executives that are just starting out in social media initiatives. We’re just standing at the beginning of the social media revolution. In the next three to five years the entire media world will be turned upside down and advertising, communications/PR, market research, etc will be performed in ways never seen before.
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