If I had the ability to switch desks with Mark Zuckerberg for a day, I'd probably take the day off and fly around in a corporate jet, sell all of my positions in Facebook and buy an island somewhere.
On a more realistic note, if I was tasked with developing productive solutions for Facebook, the company, I would probably sit down and seriously examine one study:
ARTICLE: Facebook directs more online users than Google [SFGate] states:
"...15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion's share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook."
"...Google accounted for 21.3 percent of referrals to sites catering to movie fans, but Facebook was second with 12.4 percent."
I'd then have a huge smile on my face as I called a meeting to announce my new easy-to-implement idea for our existing audience. This idea won't be about forcing users to do anything they don't already do, it will merely be focused on how people naturally behave when they exit the cozy confines of Facebook. Real-time social search.
The Twitter effect
In order to better explain, let's examine a competitor - Twitter. Countless times over the past 18 months I've wondered why Twitter hasn't taken advantage of the mindshare of their brand before someone else comes along and does it. Everyone knows they're working on a business model (or that's what we're told) and I've been wondering if, when they ever roll it out, they might be too late to the party.
Twitter has a relatively strong brand right now and it wouldn't take much (all non-programmers talk like this) effort to monetize their search results. Real-time social search is the future of online search and is already a major reason why so many people use Twitter right now.
As a user, if I want to know what I want to know, when I want to know it, I go to Twitter. I may have to filter the noise a bit, but if an earthquake or my beloved Seattle Mariner off-season player news needs to be had, chances are it'll be on Twitter before it's hit any major media outlet.
Now, a handful of context-relative text ads embedded in the sidebar of a search result would be accepted. Also, a text tweet ad embedded in the stream would be accepted too. Why they haven't done this yet is beyond me.
Conclusion
At Facebook, the outbound traffic I refer to in the above study quite often will be heading to a search engine and has gone from social mode (interaction) to hunt 'n peck mode (info gathering) so what do we need to create? A ubiquitous search box that saves them a step and monetizes the process using much the same methods that made Google, well, Google!
In addition to this, user behavior such as link-sharing, citizen journalism, blog entries and general chatter can all be accessed to create crowdsourced content. This is a 'wave of the future' idea either, just look at Twitter Search. Facebook could be up and running with a project like this very quickly too.
Easier said than done? Maybe. But if even a small portion of the outbound traffic could be channeled into a Facebook search engine with a value-add that produces real-time results it would be a windfall for the company.
An innovative investment that makes a lot of sense. No round pegs and square holes here considering the audience already exists and more importantly, the behavior does too.
