Company Stage I, II, III Discussed Text.

¶ … company Stage I, II, III discussed text. Please creative. MY NOTES: You summarize stage (stage) management stage. Then make a list practices discussed text address (a literal list fine - words, copy text).

Potential best practice for a company in Stage I, II, or III

Facebook is a controversial company amongst investors. Almost everyone uses Facebook (or so it seems), particularly consumers in some of the critical demographic markets for advertisers, such as young people and twenty and thirty-somethings with disposable income. However, the company has struggled to achieve a profitable model that is commensurate with its popularity as a social networking tool. As seen in the recent disaster regarding its going 'public' and the fall in share value, investors are uncertain if the popularity of the site can translate into meaningful revenue for shareholders over time and truly reach target audiences. "Facebook is not yet profitable, and marketers say it needs to make campaigns easier to develop and manage before the site becomes an essential part of their marketing budget" (McGregor 2012). One potential 'growing pain' for a developing organization is that the firm has begun to expand in sales but not in profits -- in the case of Facebook, the company has expanded in terms of the users that have joined, but it has not satisfied advertiser's worries that it can be profitable for them, and if Facebook is not profitable for advertisers, than its revenue model is not sustainable unless it completely reconfigures its business model and begins to charge users (Flamholtz & Randle 2000: 30).

"Facebook is trying to prove that Facebook marketing can work for advertisers in general -- not that it does work for any one advertiser in particular" (Elliot 2012). This suggests that Facebook, despite the fact that it is a very valuable company and has all of the trappings of success from a fancy executive cafeteria to many young people working under its umbrella, and its estimated financial work is still fundamentally a Stage 3 company, the stage of professionalization rather than full maturity (Flamholtz & Randle 2000: 61). The company is still demonstrating its financial worth. It is still determining how to position its offerings to generate consistent value. Facebook is now charging for various services, although it remains a free website, and while it insists it will always be offered free to users, whether this is possible over the long-term remains an open question. The company is still creating its business model and generating standard operating procedures to create the final, solidified form it will take in the next decades. In terms of its 'best practices,' it is critical that Facebook creates a clearer sense of self-definition in terms of its value for advertisers.

Theoretically, in some respects, Facebook has a great deal of potential for marketers. Marketers can focus on a segmented population, as only people who 'like' the page will be reached, meaning that an advertisement will not be lost in a cluttered newsfeed of products and services that are not of interest to the user. However, "Facebook doesn't make any money from branded pages; it only makes money from paid ads. The result? A fundamental disconnect. Facebook simply doesn't care much what happens after an ad is shown or clicked upon. & #8230; [it doesn't make] branded pages work better for marketers, soon the effectiveness of the ads that drive users to those pages may become a moot point" (Elliot 2012).