Posts
Facebook for All
The highly anticipated Facebook for All! Haha. Not quite, this was our entry into the Deloitte-Facebook Case Competition hosted by the Asian Business Association at UC Berkeley. For my first case comp, it was quite a pleasant experience, though stressful at that. However, regardless of the deadlines and the nitty gritty details of submitting a case, I felt like it was a thoroughly education experience that I could definitely apply to the real world. First off, I'll mention that our team did not win. Though I thought we had quite a strong case for Facebook and some strong empirical data to back up our findings, in the end it wasn't enough to make it to the final round. I'm not displeased. I believe if our team had a little more experience working on cases, we would have had more knowledge of how to organize cases and what specific layout/criteria judges were looking for. I'm still quite proud of our content.
Let me lay out the gist for you. We split it up into 4 segments in which Facebook would be show growth through market expansion, growth through new product development, and growth through revenue streams. To do this, we really had to think from an outsider's perspectives. As someone that is deeply obsessed (really obsessed) with new technology, SaaS, gadgets, and general social media/internet development, I was trying to think of what we could institute from a biz-tech perspective. In analyzing the trends of various companies and market segments that Facebook would be able to steal from, we figured that it would be a wise move to incorporate businesses into Facebook better.
Yeah, we know, businesses are already on Facebook - but that doesn't mean that businesses are able to use the platform to its full capability. For example, take a local restaurant. So they create a Facebook Page (formerly Facebook Fan Page). With previous model (before the recent f8 shift), most businesses could post some pictures, put up a menu, maybe add an application, and most importantly - interface with their customers. Well, what we were aiming to do was take market share from Yelp, a big hitter in local restaurant/business reviews. In doing this, Facebook would not need to rely on "less secure" Yelp databases (which they are having trouble with now) and institute a system in which businesses can develop a personalized page to interact with customers better. We suggested the ability to create reservations via the Facebook page, which would give real time SMS notifications for reservations made via Facebook. Facebook would then be able to get a cut for every customer that successfully uses the system. Again, this is just a thought.
Among other things, we were talking about institution some changes to their credits program, which companies and bands using pages would use as FB currency to charge for products they advertise on their personalized pages. Moreover, all of it would be integrated into the marketplace, which - let's be honest - is dead. We suggested that FB buy Oodle or some similar third party company to aggregate all of their e-Commerce related goods into one place - a way to monetize through Facebook Credits. Sound familiar... Well, I'm not going to be petty, but these new Facebook developments are ALL ON OUR POWERPOINT. Why would the panel reject our ideas? Well, we may have executed that slide poorly (no case comp experience), but I thought it looked nice?!
Anyway, enough of the ranting. Check it out for yourself, let me know what you think! Also, give props to my teammates Tim Yung, Anhang Zhu, and Tian Wang. Go Bears!
0 comments:
Post a Comment