Facebook: history, impact, and social influence

¶ … Public Relations

One of the most important part of our public relations campaign will be to differentiate between Facebook and some of its most important competitors, notably Myspace, and communicate to the individuals and potential customers that Facebook will better fit their own communication needs.

This can be transmitted in the form of articles in online and regular media, communication in online forums that target the youth or other potential consumers and even in the form of direct communication in seminars etc. Practically, there should be no limit in the communication channels, because the information age we live in means that information is able to reach the recipient in its form through any channels.

The communication message and the public relations campaigns need to be simple, because one needs to keep in mind the fact that Facebook addresses regular and occasional computer users rather than those operating in the it industry. This means that the communicated message will need to focus on Facebook's competitive advantages, such as an increased capacity to share pictures and videos with friends and a better solution for locating friends among the other Facebook members, which altogether lead to a better communication framework within Facebook.

On the other hand, the public relations campaign will also need to emphasize the fact that with Facebook, the personal data of the users are at no risk, as well as the fact that there should be no concern in terms of using the personal data for advertising and spamming purposes. These two elements may be among the important negative perspectives that a user may have when using Facebook. In the communication and public relations campaign, the interest that Facebook has in protecting the individual data should be emphasized.

Competition

Facebook is operating on the communication and social segment of the it industry. In this sense, it is offering a multitude of services to its clients, which include, besides the actual chat or forum-like services, photo and video sharing and, increasingly, the capacity to generate an entirely customized and personalized page for the user. From this point-of-view, we can identify primary competitors, competing in the social segment of the industry, but also secondary competitors, who focus on partial components, such as photo or video sharing.

In terms of the primary segment, the most important competitor that Facebook has is Myspace. Myspace has successfully benefited from being launched earlier so as to attract an additional 30 million users, ranking at 100 million users before Facebook's 70 million. Bebo and Blackplanet also provide important competition on the primary market, however, the ain competition is between Facebook and Myspace. Both sites try to diversify the portfolio of services they are offering their customers and determine an increase in their market share exactly through the additional services they provide.