Marketing Technology for Growth

Still basking in the afterglow of Facebook’s long overdue social, or “graph search” announcement, I couldn’t help but reflect on an old saying of my high school guidance counselor: “generalists don’t get anywhere in life. If you want to succeed, you have to specialize.” In my youth, I took this advice to heart as I plodded along to obtain an undergraduate degree in history and a master’s in mediaeval history. It was only after crafting the thesis of my future Phd, “The Extent to Which the Carolingian Conception of Milites Christi Influenced that of the Franco Normans of the First Crusade,” that I took a hard moment to reflect on the sagacity of my guidance counselor’s advice. Shortly thereafter, I jumped ship back to America, and well, the rest is history. That experience taught me two things: 1) Sometimes questioning the conventional wisdom is necessary, 2) Perhaps the being a generalist isn’t so bad after all. Maybe the old saying, “Jack of All Trades, Master of None” isn’t meant to be a disparaging epitaph, but rather a guiding, aphorism.

I love data. Some new search engine usage stats from Experian Hitwise for September 2012 search got me thinking about the future of search. According to the data, there were slightly over 2 billion (2.126B) visits to the top five search engines during the week ending September 15^th, representing approximately 90% (91.46%) of all search engine traffic. The top search term was “Facebook,” representing 3.28% of ALL searches. Not surprisingly, Facebook was also the number one website visited after search as well, capturing 6.62% of all post-search traffic (don’t ask me why 2X as many people ended up at the FB website as searched it; maybe this number represents the lost tribe of G+ users).

Zuck, baby, what’s up big guy WAAZZUP! (virtual fist punch…..left hanging). We haven’t heard much from you lately, so I thought I’d drop a line.  Wow, what a crazy few months it’s been for Facebook, huh man! I mean with the IPO, and subsequent stock crash, or its “corrective recapitalization” (don’t worry, Zuck, nobody pays attention to those Wall Street namby pambies anyway-they don’t get visionaries like you and me. By the way, have you had time to look over that idea I sent you a few months back? No biggie if you haven’t- I’ve been swamped too).

Imagine this scenario… You are strolling through your favorite store picking up a few items that catch your eye. When you go to the register to pay, the merchant asks, “would that be Visa or Facebook?” “I’ll go with Facebook,” you say, with a Cheshire-catlike grin. “Great,” beams the merchant. “I’ve automatically checked you in as well. By doing so, you saved 10% on your purchase today. Just tap your Facebook PassCode into the keypad, and you’re all set.” If you think the days of Facebook-as-payment-solution are far off, think again. It just makes too much sense for everyone-you, me, Facebook, and its millions of shareholders looking to make a fat profit on future earnings.