Emerging Technology -Facebook's Timeline - Essay Example

?EMERGING TECHNOLOGY - FACEBOOKS TIMELINE – One typical corporation that has made the best out of the growing phenomenon of social media networking is Facebook, which recently added an emerging technology to its style of business in the form of what is termed Facebook Timeline. This is generally an electronic automated biographic feature that allows users of the social network to add critical personal information and data about their lives to the network’s platform in the form of cloud service. Ever since this emerging technology was introduced, Facebook has made some significant improvements in its market orientation, which is largely focused on advertisement and marketing. Currently, the corporation attributes 85% of its revenues to advertisements, a situation that has shot the company’s revenues to an all time high in the high in the past five years. Facebook’s Timeline continues to bring the company profits because of the level of dedication that the company has for research and development, which makes it possible for it to provide user-centered service that accounts for the ever growing number of users of Facebook. Currently, there is a massive monthly active user base of 85 million people worldwide. This number, with the data collected through the Timeline makes the company the holder of most personal data than any other ad seller online can have access to. Keywords – advertisements; revenue; marketing; timeline; number game; Timeline; metadata; updates; information mining; research and development; cloud; social media network I. INTRODUCTION As technology advances and the internet become more and more useful, entrepreneurs, especially those whose business orientation is directed at information technology continues to take advantage, depending on their business strategies. More specifically, social media network has come to add up an entirely new paradigm to the concept of internet surfing (Arnould, Albert and Schau, 2009). Bickart, and Robert (2011) note that the total number of internet users have quadrupled since the introduction of social media networking. Clearly Facebook dominates when it comes to the concept of social media networking. But even so, the corporation continues to introduce very ideas and emerging technologies that ensures that it does not only become a global leader in the provision of social networking services but also well tailored advertising services to marketing departments of various multinational corporations. In its early days, no one really understood why Facebook will be so much committed to offering free social networking service that brought everyone on board from all over the world but now that the corporation has access to over 625,000 terabytes of compressed data on a daily basis and working hard as online ad sellers, much more sense is being made of the initial moves of the company to be committed to the provision of high quality social media networking service (Brown, Amanda and Nick, 2007). In this paper, there is a critical scrutiny at Facebook’s emerging technology in the form of Timeline to see how this emerging technology makes the corporation more competitive as an online ad seller. II. SURVEY FINDINGS A. Facebook’s Motivation No corporation undertakes a major business strategic program such as what Facebook did without having a core motivation that pushes it to do so (Shirky, 2008). In the case of the Facebook timeline, the motivation has been found as the need to have a better focus on advertisement as adverts account for as much as 85% of the corporation’s annual revenue (Surowiecki, 2012). In line with the need for companies to build competitive advantage for themselves in line with their market exposure and the search for customers, a lot more companies are putting emphasis on the 5P marketing mix (Terranova, 2000). But within the 5 strategic scenarios under the 5Ps, promotion has been found to be a very vital component because it has the power of directly targeting consumers or customers to get them to do business with companies. This way, a lot more companies apportion greater sums of their budget expenditure to advertisements (Pasquinelli, 2011). Meanwhile, the use of social media platform as advertisement tool has been found to be one of the cheapest options for undertaking advertisements. It is for this need that various social media networks continue to record fruitful values as ad hosts. Facebook is thus motivated with the introduction of this new technology to help it have a better targeting in the numbers game to ensure that it can prove to companies wanting advertisement platforms that it offers the most workable avenues for them to carry out their advertisements (Petersen, 2008). B. Using Timeline as a Business Tool For various users of Facebook’s social media network, of which various companies, institutions and organizations have profiles, the use of Facebook’s Timeline has been found to be a very useful business tool that can better enhance the fortunes of contemporary business engagements (Neervens, 2009). The basis of this survey finding is in line with the fact that demographic information about day to day consumers of various products and services have been said to be a very important variable, based on which comprehensive and highly reliable business decisions and strategies can be developed (Marres and Rogers, 2005). In conceptual principle, every organization, business, institution or company serves a targeted market. But for these business entities to know their markets well, they have to have a fairer idea of the demographic factors that influence purchasing decisions by their customers. In a very typical example, a car manufacturing company needs information on the demographic variables of the people who purchase their products most so that they can have a better markets segmentation that will target not just any other person but people who can be assured of doing business with the car maker. Meanwhile with the Facebook Timeline, users of the social medial network are made to add very extensive volume of metadata to their updates, most of which determine the kind of lifestyle they are engaged in on a daily basis (Lyons, and Kenneth, 2005).this way, companies are put in a better position to use these information for mining value purposes, based on which decisions can easily be taken on the users for business purposes. C. Advancing Timeline As much as the finding in the survey by various reviewers showed that Facebook’s Timeline has very valuable business opportunities to offer, they also established that there are ways that the platform could be advanced to make it even more profitable for advertisers and Facebooks as a corporation (Marsh, 2010). In the first place, the need for Facebook to have a persuasive marketing strategy that encourages users to be regular visitors of the site has been recommended. This way, users will be constantly updating the information they put on the database of the Timeline, making it possible for companies who act as users of these information to have a reliable assurance that the information they are depending on for decision making are those that are current and meet present marketing needs (McNamara, 2009). As much as periodically updated activity take place on Facebook’s social media platform such as likes, comments and connections to friends, it will be possible to boast of an ever ready revolving information base for decision making. The depth of information added by users has also been suggested as a way of advancing Facebook’s Timeline. Currently, it is noted that the need to add certain information, which could otherwise be very useful for decision making are largely optional for users. This way, there is often the tendency that users will overlook the need to be active participants of the Timeline idea (Pauwel, Randolph and Chase, 2009). This has brought about a need for Facebook to hold its users binding to some of these activities as part of the terms and conditions of usage of the social media network. III. CHALLENGES As it strives to keep up the dream of becoming the most reliable platform to get comprehensive metadata on users for the sake of advertisement purposes, Facebook is faced with several challenges and problems that it seeks to overcome to give excellent service. The first of this has been identified to be the cost of Research and Development (R&D). Clearly, it is only through comprehensive R&D that Facebook can have a well tailored understanding of the user base it has to know how best it can serve this group. Currently, the revenue allocation that the company makes to R&D has been found to be 10% of its total working profit (Peluchette and Katherine, 2009). This is by no means a very huge budgetary demand that the company makes. According to Greenwald (2012), the approximate value of this 10% allocation is $1.6 billion, which if diversified into other business areas could certainly earn the company so much profit (Rojek, 2011). IV. CONCLUSION From every indication, the internet has dominated global lifestyle in almost all variables of it such as business, socialization, education, and even religion in the present generation than any other since phenomenon has done. This has generally been made possible due to the ever growing advancement in technology (Schau and Mary, 2003). Today, Facebook has developed the concept even further with the introduction of the emerging technology of Timeline to its social media network platform. Certainly, we have come to an era where computer-assisted autobiography has been made easier through the Timeline. 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Self Presentation in Personal Web Space," Journal of Consumer Research, 30 (December), 385-404. [18] T. Greenwald (2012). Facebook’s Timeline. [Online] Accessed from http://www2.technologyreview.com/article/427678/facebooks-timeline/ [December 7, 2013] Read More