Six years ago I sat in a room with a group of 'clever' people all punting Facebook as the next 'Tech whizz kid on the block', much like those who were punting the Bitcoin con not so long ago. People love false hope and things that are just too good to be true. They fall for it time and time again. Much like sitting at a slot machine in a casino. As if we were so naive as to have forgotten the 'Tech Bubble' Financial Services con of the late 90's, the Financial Services property overvaluation con of the early 2000's.. So-called 'highly respected' Financial advisors where now trying to persuade poor, naive investors to buy extraordinarily overvalued Facebook stocks as the next big flyer.
Meanwhile the young marketing 'wizards' in the room attempted to persuade the who's who of Global Marketing that this Social Media platform was going to be the big advertising alternative to waning traditional media and literally "fly".
I was the lone voice of, in my view, simple logic and reason in the room, as I could just not get my head around their valuation justification, nor understand how a Social Media (emphasis on the word 'social') provider thought that they could make money out of users, without having to bastardise their free communication model and commercialise something people used for socialising and sharing amongst friends and family, by bombarding them with highly annoying advertising banners, whilst using their database to unscrupulously abuse loyal users to the point of losing them altogether..
And that now appears to be exactly what has happened.. 6 years down the line.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2018-07-26-facebook-in-freefall-as-weak-outlook-stuns-market/
No comments:
Post a Comment