Media Perspective: Facebook's sudden rise is so typical of the new landscape

by Russell Davies, russell@russelldavies.com Campaign 08-Jun-07

This was originally supposed to be one of those "X is the new Y" pieces. New-media people (and columnists) love to do that kind of pronouncing and the recent emergence of Facebook as "the most talked-about social media thingy" provides a perfect opportunity to talk about it being "the new MySpace" and have a poke at the billions of dollars paid for it by Rupert Murdoch. As ever, though, it's rather more complicated than that.

Facebook is definitely a fantastic social media product. It's more adult
than MySpace (in the good, non-smutty way), it's simpler and less
startling to look at, it's less anonymous and it has recently made

itself into an open platform for all the little web widgets and

applications that people use to run their online lives - Twitter,
Flickr, Last.fm, etc.

Usefully, for my purposes, there's also an active network of
communications planners on Facebook, and I asked them what they thought
of it. Not surprisingly they were big fans, but the most revealing
comments were along the lines of: "Damn, I've just spent the past six
months persuading my clients to invest in a campaign through MySpace and
now we should probably be using Facebook instead, everyone's moving over
there."

You have to feel for these people. Think of the hours they've spent
toiling over a hot PowerPoint projector, cajoling, persuading,
hand-holding, trying to get a careful client to devote some budget to a
new-media idea. And then their client sees a slew of headlines
announcing Facebook is the new MySpace.

But there's a useful lesson to learn here: Get Used To It, because this
is how our lives will be from now on. You remember that scene where
James Bond escapes an awful fate by leaping from one alligator's head to
another until he reaches the river bank? It's going to be just like
that, except without the river bank. We're just going to have to keep
leaping, because things aren't about to "settle down".

We won't ever get back to a world where there are just a few dominant
players, who we can just do some deals with and get back to sleep. The
costs of invention are too low for entrepreneurs and the costs of
switching are too low for the audience.

So Facebook might be the new MySpace, for a bit, until something else
is, but it won't mean that either will disappear, or become not worth
doing deals with.

We're going to have to get quicker about our planning and
decision-making, more immersed in the media lives of our audiences, and
we're going to have to stop looking for the new dominant media vehicle.
If anyone's going to dominate, it'll be the audience, but that's a
different piece for a different time.