Seven Steps to Graphing Your Facebook Strategy
This guest post is written by Dave McClure: startup advisor, angel investor, PayPal alumnus, and Master of 500 Hats. Dave is organizing next week's Graphing Social Patterns conference on Facebook, covering many of the topics and companies mentioned below.
Context & Ripple Effects
Back in June, Between the Lines argued that Facebook itself was becoming the enterprise social network, collapsing the build-vs-join question for companies. By early October the conversation has moved past whether Facebook matters to how exactly a company should play it — and Dave McClure, the PayPal alumnus turned startup advisor and angel investor, is packaging the answer as a seven-step guest post that doubles as promotion for his Graphing Social Patterns conference the following week.
The surrounding chatter explains why a strategist-audience exists at all: power users like Robert Scoble are hitting Facebook's 5,000-friend cap, a localized French version is rumored though unconfirmed, and emerging Facebook ad networks reportedly depend entirely on the platform's continued tolerance. A platform moving this fast creates demand for someone to tell companies where to stand.
First-order effects
- Startups and marketers reading the post get a concrete template for allocating effort on Facebook days before McClure's Graphing Social Patterns conference convenes, converting the guest column directly into conference registrations.
- Any company adopting the playbook commits resources to terrain whose rules — friend caps, tolerated ad networks — Facebook alone sets, a dependency Scoble's 5,000-friend ceiling already makes visible.
Second-order effects
- A specialist advice-and-events circuit forms around the platform, with operators like McClure monetizing expertise about Facebook rather than applications on it, and rival networks like LinkedIn entering the same strategic conversation.
- Ad networks built atop Facebook face the reported risk that its tolerance evaporates, pushing strategists toward tactics the platform explicitly sanctions and away from gray-zone distribution.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the platform owner captures the leverage while an ecosystem of consultants, conferences, and dependent intermediaries absorbs the risk — a structure in which one company's policy changes reprice everyone else's Facebook strategies overnight.
The trend: Autumn 2007 marks the pivot from debating whether Facebook matters to selling paid expertise in how to operate inside it.