Why Facebook entering the world of work is an advertising goldmine. #facebookatwork
So, Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch announced that Facebook has finally entered the world of work.
As far as the consumer market goes, think about it: Facebook is worth 212 billion dollars by having a strong hold on our actions, interests, and preferences from 5pm to 9am and some fraction of your work day. If only it could get a legitimate way to suss out our interests from 9am to 5pm, that’s presumably twice the data it can mine to improve its targeting on you and me. And presumably, twice the Total Addressable Market. It’s just too lucrative to not fully know what you and I do for all those 8 hours. Investors should love this.
On the enterprise social networking front, as I discussed with Matt Kapko at CIO Magazine, Facebook’s entry finally polarizes this market into two very complimentary collaboration metaphors. On one hand, super simple, single purpose messaging and community applications like Facebook @Work, Slack, HipChat, etc. And on the other, collaboration deeply integrated across the application fabric at companies to improve process outcomes such as sales service marketing, HR and Supply Chain. and industry solutions. SAP Jam, the business I lead, is an example of the latter. At both ends of that spectrum the market is growing like wildfire right now at comfortable triple digits. Everything in the middle, not so much: they come off looking like either bloated Facebook @Work or a messaging app, or a weak process-centric collaboration application. The market really needed this line drawn in the sand to remove all confusion. And it gives Facebook a real shot at making this work which is needed to support its advertising goals.
Welcome, Facebook @Work.
