Habari Media organised what looked to be another big.company.meets.small.country gathering. The gist of the gig: Facebook now offers SA more options on ad placement on the site through a chosen country representative with established relationships, enter: Habari Media. thrilling stuff. In preparation I took an aisle seat by the stairs for the discreet duck when frosty aircon and conference-grade coffee wore off.
Curiously, the show was fairly compelling and I’ll tell you why.

Three things tweaked my perception of Facebook’s global sprawl.
1. the heft and speed of Facebook is hastening the entropy or evolution of media’s relationship with advertising.
2. the company is undertaking an inspired globalization strategy.
3. as you suspected, Mark Zuckerberg (or Google to be sure) has your number.

AD JUICE

The announcement hasn’t been met with general joy at some of our bigger media houses who see ever more leakage of ad revenues on their web publications. Cracks in the wake of Google Ads lumbering through, meant nourishing ad-spend was leaving the local market, and Facebook will do nothing to stem the flow. Elan Lohmann, Digital GM at Avusa murmured colonisation.

There’s a rumour batting about Twitter, that once enough of us suckers who depend on the site for our daily social nibbling are in, they’ll close the doors and charge admission. It was dealt with swiftly: read my lips, Facebook will never charge for membership (Blake Chandlee be lashed if he’s doing a Bush). The model is run solely on ads at the moment, and they’ve barely begun to get interesting.

“Branding is in its infancy online. Anyone who says that brands have embraced the internet is lying” – VP of Emerging Markets EMEA, Blake Chandlee

CROWDSOURCED GLOBALIZATION

From the heady days of the world’s first multinational, the Dutch East India Company to this moment, the opportunity to do business in grand scale has been guaranteed to disrupt. From hilarious product-naming gaffes, tragic resource-plundering, to very costly beliefs that successes are formulaic across borders (a Discovery even some local companies have bitten down on). We bungle in each other’s backyards. Patriotism and protectionism don’t hold back the eventual forces of globalization (North Korea exempt).
We don’t want to be left out, but we don’t want to give up the farm.

Facebook’s approach is one to watch though. Drawing on a Wikipedia-style model of crowdsourcing to get polyglot members to translate the site with head-bending speed, Facebook wins by coming in at the language level first (70 languages served to date). Developers around the world contribute applications that make sense within their context and culture. For free. Genius. It fits because it isn’t a solution retrofitted to a new market, the market crafts what it wants FB to do. No team deployed to set up an office abroad, grab the native intelligence and get it to plug in. That’s the magic.

Facebook is actually a global UTILITY company. As with electricity, we choose to use it, how to use it, and billions of pluggable appliances have been spawned in the wake of being able to tap power into our homes. Without the appliances the electricity is as good as useless. The appliances are developed independently of the supplying energy company. In the same way, we make Facebook useful. [BTW if you haven't read Nicholas Carr's "The Big Switch", it's worth it for the fresh look from history at cloud computing and the next ubiquitous utility layer]

Unlike electricity or fuel, HOW you use it is tracked, monitored and mined for its gems.

THEY’VE GOT YOUR NUMBER

Know this: with a motherlode of data and elegant predictive modeling, the geeks have you decoded. Given a few days worth of initial interactions, your behaviour on the site can be extrapolated for the next six months. It’s all in the algorithms buddy.
If that doesn’t freak you out, your tranquilisers are a little too strong.
Enter left, the conundrum of our time: would you prefer to be known and understood, so that the right products/services shimmer in at just the right time like Jeeves – discreet but omniscient. Or are we happy to bumble along serendipitously, missing out on being a thin-sliced data set, examined at by those who can afford to buy access to your behavioural quirks.

We understand the tacit contract when we engage with trackable modernity, we register for RICA, we upload our photos online, email sensitive correspondence. We secretly know that if it could turn nasty if it went awry; but as our species is prone to, we choose to engage, to trade, to trust because the downside of being left out is infinitely more scary and less profitable.

Hopscotch lightly over the existential traps that await if you think too hard about the fact that baby-faced Marc Elliot Zuckerberg could know you better than a shrink could ever hope to, without ever meeting you. With more colour than the desiccated analysis of an actuary. The patterns that emerge from the flow of your attentions are tradable. Which means a new kind of economy can be shaped.

Okay, okay, enough with the philosophy, what does this mean practically?

For local business, it means you can do more interesting things to draw Facebookers attention your way than the sidebar ads you can buy on your credit card. Now that we’re official m’dear, it just means our status updates, picture tagging, zombie bashing and invitations from those old school friends, have paid off.. we too get to sup at the big table.. if you’re a big player and have the money for big campaigns that is (and bless you for keeping the doors open for us with your money).

Other than that, well nothing much has changed. Go back to your desk, all is well or you’d know it because someone would have posted it on Facebook.

er..

Unless this happens >> (thanks Adrian Hewlett & Comedy Central for this slice of internetlessness)

The TEDxJoburgNorth programme, launching on the 15th July 2009, will  be the beginning of many more such TEDx events in the city. I’m helping to gather the forces for a city.size TED Johannesburg in November with TEDsters and fellow raving fans, under the passionate leadership of publisher Alicia Woolf [want to get the early heads.up on getting your seat or collaborating to make it legendary? mail me or leave a comment below.]

TEDx Events have the same general goals as TED Conferences. TEDx activities are dedicated to leveraging the power of ideas to change the world, and they cover a broad set of topics including science, arts and design, politics, culture, business, global issues, technology and development, and entertainment.

Joburg’s first TEDx organised by:

Extraordinary documentary filmmaker and liaison for HH the Dalai Lama for his visits in South Africa, Guy Lieberman.

Ephraim Moss, a first class geek – using the latest in technologies and computing to develop holistic business and communication systems.

Nachi Mendelow, who considers himself an ever evolving monkey trying to work out why we ever descended from the trees. Loves banana’s, which clearly generates the formidable energy to his supercerebral cortex.

I’ve been invited to give a talk that shakes stale ideas from comfortable crusted niches.. to present ideas worthy of TED grade – dear mercy! (If you haven’t been introduced to the TED treasure >> map here). The brief is simply to talk about the ideas that burn the brightest for us – for 18 minutes. Counterintuitive evidence around my research that “The Machines are making us more Human” will fill my nerve.fraying 18 TEDx minutes. (Not sure there’s any space left – but just in case, I’d love you to join in if you’re in Jo’burg on the 15th July, check here).

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For TED fans and prospective speakers, below the lesser-revealed TED Commandments that ensure that the talks aren’t just your average powerpoint parade; and why attendees to the annual conferences in California, will do homework in the hopes of being offered an invitation for which they will eagerly pay $6000, if accepted.

(the stone tablet is delivered to TED speakers as they prepare to give the talk of their lives)

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