Strand Consult: We Suspect that the Credibility of Facebook will Decline
“Operators need to be vigilant in their use of Facebook and ensure that they take a multichannel marketing approach, to minimize risk of any one platform. Ideally operators should build their own communities on their own properties (website, email, SMS, customer support websites etc) with their customers.”
Such is the advice to the telecom industry from Strand Consult, a consulting company aimed at the telco, IT and media business. Strand Consult believes that Facebook will lose credibility and that companies need to be careful not to build their business solely on that one social network.
The newsletter from Strand Consult also mentions the new trend from the book Fake It:
And while we don’t support fraud on Facebook, we cannot ignore the other side of the equation, that of users. One new method to protect individual identity has emerged, that is to “fake” profiles.
This not indefensible suggestion comes from journalists Pernille Tranberg and Steffan Heuer, who citing privacy and security concerns on Facebook and other digital platforms, instruct users to create fake online identities on purpose (when used for other purposes than purely professional). Their new book Fake It takes a critical view of online identity and how it can be violated by digital platforms. They detail a number of unresolved risks and questions for users of Facebook and other social media and propose a menu of digital self-defense tactics so users protect their identity online. Their upcoming presentation at TEDxOxford suggests their ideas are gaining momentum. www.digital-selfdefense.com
Indeed the journalists raise important issues of uncertainty and unpredictability in the Facebook environment. Facebook can change its terms of service for any time and for any reason. Some changes can have material impacts to operators, for example the move to the Timeline format which essentially voided operators’ investment in designing their page in Facebook. Millions of dollars of development costs to create mini-websites in Facebook, tabs, apps and so on turned out to be a waste. If Facebook can’t be straight, why should its users be? It turns out that to “fake it” is a rational response.
Read the whole newsletter here and get the report “The good, the bad and the ugly side of Facebook – A report that describes how Facebook affects the mobile industry strategically, operationally and financially”.