Trendsetter: Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg Looks Forward to Building the Future of Marketing
Often compared to a young Bill Gates, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is certainly famous for creating Facebook in his dorm room while studying computer sciences at Harvard. Now the founder of the world's largest social network is recognizing how community and consumer interaction are becoming critical to the future of brands and of marketing. And it looks like the company will double its global base in the next several years-- to hit the 1 billion user mark.
Last week in Cannes, Zuckerberg shared his thoughts about the intersection of technology and advertising as he was honored as Media Person of the Year by the Ad Festival, a decision that marked a dramatic departure from the "lifetime achievement" associations of many past winners like Viacom's Chairman & CEO Sumner Redstone, The Yomiuri Shimbun's Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Tsuneo Watanabe, AOL Time Warner's CEO Gerald Levin, and Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer.
Interestingly, two key themes emerged from Zuckerberg's comments—globalization and personalization. Combined, the two concepts underscore the how digital media, particularly social networks like Facebook, is reshaping broader notions of marketing and targeting.
With nearly 500 million users around the world, Facebook's extraordinary growth in just 6 years can only compared with the early exponential rise of Google. Zuckerberg said at Cannes that there was "no chance" that Facebook would reach 1 billion people in 2010, but stated it was "looking really promising three to five years out."
He also admitted, "We are down to four countries where we are not the leading social network." These include Japan, Russia, China and South Korea. (Japan's leading social network is Mixi, while Russia's most popular social sites include Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki. Cyworld has been in existence in South Korea for a decade. Interestingly, China's dominant social network QQ has investment from Tencent, another Chinese company that is also backing Digital Sky Technologies or DST, a major Facebook investor.) "Now for the first time we are focused on doing some specific things in specific countries."
However, Zuckerberg also stressed how Facebook was essentially used in the same manner throughout the world as the "core need" of the service is "for people to share things and be part of a community."
It is the advertising and applications developed for the platform that differ somewhat by country.
He also mentioned the on-going development of a location-based application for Facebook, and said: "Almost any product is better when it is based around personalization, and the internet is becoming more personalized and personalizable."
Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg's own statement in recognition of the Media Person of the Year honor says it best: "We are still in the early stages of our mission to build things that make the world more open and connected. We will continue to innovate and push technical boundaries to create better ways for people, developers, and advertisers to connect and share on our platform."
