Do You Remember When The Terms “Social Media” And “Web 2.0” Did Not Exist?

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Do You Remember When The Terms “Social Media” And “Web 2.0” Did Not Exist?

Social networking has always been a fundamental aspect of our business and personal relationships. But, now, ubiquitous internet and web-based technologies have revolutionized networking opportunities.

Let’s consider social media giant Facebook and its success creating a Blue Ocean of uncontested market space.

Founded in February 2004 by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.

It allows content consumers to become content producers.

Blue Ocean Strategy is a proven system for making competition irrelevant by creating new market spaces through simultaneous achievement of differentiation and low cost. Instead of being locked in red oceans of fierce, bloody competition, you can apply Blue Ocean Strategy to move to clear, uncontested waters of highly profitable growth.

Making the competition irrelevant is exactly what Facebook has done. Since becoming the first Web 2.0 social media networking site in 2004, here are the statistics:

Facebook now has more than 350 million active users – 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day, more than 35 million users update their status each day, more than 55 million status updates posted each day, more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month, more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week, more than 3.5 million events created each month, More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook, more than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook, more than 70 translations available on the site, about 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States, over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application, more than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries, every month, more than 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications, more than 500,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform, More than 250 applications have more than one million monthly active users, more than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008, more than 60 million Facebook users engage with Facebook Connect on external websites every month, two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have implemented Facebook Connect. There are more than 65 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users. There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products.

In just six years Facebook has been able to create its own Blue Ocean of uncontested market space.

Let’s consider the reason Facebook might be an example of Blue Ocean Strategy…

The metaphor of red and blue oceans describes the market universe. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today—the known market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of product or service demand. As the market space gets crowded, prospects for profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities or niche, and cutthroat competition turns the ocean bloody. Hence, the term red oceans.

Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today—the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Blue Ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential of market space that is not yet explored.

Facebook has experienced such growth because of its value innovation. The corner-stone of Blue Ocean Strategy is ‘Value Innovation’. A blue ocean is created when a company achieves value innovation that creates value simultaneously for both the buyer and the company.  The innovation (in product, service, or delivery) must raise and create value for the market, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating features or services that are less valued by the current or future market.

Facebook is now the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world, and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases.

Is Facebook an example of Blue Ocean Strategy? It certainly has become ubiquitous, just six years young, making “social media” and “Web 2.0” part of our everyday language.

Blue Ocean Strategy is the result of a decade long study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than 30 industries. Blue Ocean Strategy is a best seller across five continents, has been published in 42 languages and has sold over two million copies. Blue Ocean Strategy can be applied for corporations, associations, governments and academic institutions. Blue Ocean research, practice institutes/centers have been set up across four continents and interest continue to grow worldwide.

To get started in Blue Ocean Strategy visit Strategize Blue( www.strategizeblue.com). Strategize Blue offers a variety of services in including Keynote Presentations on Blue Ocean Strategy, Training Seminars/Workshops on Blue Ocean Strategy, Corporate Training Programs on Blue Ocean Strategy, Consultraining, Idea and Strategy Evaluation Services as well as  Blue Ocean Strategy Consulting.

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