It took how many users for Facebook to become cash flow positive?

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Facebook recently announced two significant milestones:

• They crossed 300 million users worldwide
• They are now cash flow positive (they were EBIDTA positive).

Given the size of the network, it amazes me that it took that many users for them to become cash flow positive. There have been many discussions about how Facebook needs to discover new ways to monetize their base but having to get to 300m users to become CF positive is mind boggling.Granted the following shows their extreme cost structure:

From Techcrunch: The company is likely spending well over a $1 million per month on electricity alone, say experts we’ve spoken with. Bandwidth is likely another $500,000 or more per month on top of that. The company has earmarked $100 million to buy 50,000 servers this year and next. And sources say they’ve been buying one NetApp 3070 storage system per week (me: like to be that sales rep) just to keep up with all this user generated content. At up to $2 million each, that adds up quickly – we’ve heard estimates that they may have spent as much as $30 million this year alone with the company. And the icing on the cake – earmark another $15 million per year in office and datacenter rent payments.

One of the difficulties cited to becoming CF positive was the huge amount of photos that are uploaded and stored on Facebook. However, I do not see the growth in uploads of pictures decreasing any time soon so how do they continue to scale (even with Haystack) and have the corresponding revenues to stay positive? What if utilization rates of users drop off making it harder to attract advertising (already limited). How do they keep adding people and keep up usage? How do they generate more revenue/user? It will be interesting to watch. Any one else have any thoughts?

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• Bret Taylor: Facebook Crosses 300 Million Users. Oh Yeah, And Their Cash Flow Just Went Positive (techcrunch.com)

Eloqua and social networking

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For those of you not familiar with Eloqua, it is a marketing automation platform. The software as a service allows you to track email campaigns, website visitors, lead nurturing and prospect profiling (among other things).

My company, Harvard Business Publishing, had a full time person working on Eloqua up until about 4 months ago. Since then I have been in charge of it. I have a basic understanding and really had just been using it for email campaigns. Lately, I have been trying to utilize more of the functionality to help drive leads.

One very interesting campaign I just launched involved placing links to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on the landing page and encourage people to use those platforms to pass along information about the article we were giving away.The audience was probably not perfect for this experiment (high level C types), but the potential is very intriguing. Considering that many firms are seeing traffic from these sites explode I hope to take advantage of this trend for our website.

The one outstanding question is does our customer base utilize any of these services. I know a lot of our prospects are on LinkedIn yet I do not know how many are on Twitter. I expect few to be on Facebook, let alone use it for business. All of this goes back to a previous post I made about whether or not every business can use social media sites to driver traffic (Can any site use social media to drive traffic?). I think this will be a good experiment and possibly provide a glimmer of an answer to that question.

You can see the landing page here

The voodoo that you do to price software

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Of all the marketing P's, pricing evokes the most emotion across an enterprise. My perspective is in software pricing, a voodoo like process that somehow results in a "price." However, this is not before emotional feedback from all impacted - and that is just about everyone in an organization.

Marketing: Pricing should reside in marketing as part of the marketing mix. Mostly it does, but not without a lot of "marketing" volunteers.
Sales: In their opinion, since they actually develop proposals and talk to users about pricing, they own it and have the most knowledge of it. Marketing? Who needs marketing. Sales will tell us what the price should be, marketing just needs to develop a nice little slick.
Product Development: They want to make sure their "baby" is priced appropriately given all of the hard work and features and functions that are included (even if they are not needed. Hello, Microsoft.)
Accounting/Finance: They are privy to all the costs so they know what we need to generate in revenue to cover the costs and produce an acceptable margin.
CEO: Ultimately it is his/her head on the line if numbers are not met.
Your mother: OK, kidding, but just barely.

So be careful, once the subject of pricing is actually broached, be prepared for a lot of bitter feelings, hurt looks, and fighting over who is right.

If you have a blog and nobody comments does it really exist?

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I knew when I started this blog that I was doing this on my own to experiment and not to fill some untapped need for people clamoring to read my thoughts and ideas. However, not one comment? Not even by accident?
It does go to show that for a blog to be successful you need a following. Obvious, I know, but what does this mean for businesses who are being told to blog, blog, blog to drive traffic and generate leads but have very little brand recognition or following?
Blog it and they will come? Not so much.

Comments as market research

Blogs, wikis, communities, etc. are a great way to reach out to customers and to start the "marketing" conversation. Another great feature of these technologies is mining all of the comments to conduct market research.

I have recently been reading a lot of the comments on The Boston Globe's website, in particular, about the proposed tax increases here in Massachusetts. If I were a politician I would be reading the overwhelming critical comments and wonder about my future if I supported the increases. Some articles produce 100's of comments that provide great insight into the issue as well as alternatives to help solve the crisis. These comments may be a politicians nightmare, but they are a market analysts dream.

The current methods of focus groups, surveys and phone interviews are certainly useful, but gathering reliable market intelligence in these ways is time consuming, inconsistent and unreliable. What good is running a survey if you only get 15 responses? It would be so much easier if you could mine comments to see immediate feedback on product concepts, positioning statements or other elements you are trying to test and gather feedback.

Obviously, there are many analytics out there such as Google analytics and others (see a good overview of some tools here). However, these tools appear to only provide tracking data on site visitors, sign ups, etc. I wonder if there is a firm out there that can mine comments and provide an analysis of the content for reliable market intelligence. Anyone know of such a firm?

UPDATE: Just came across a firm called Crimson Hexagon, Crimson Hexagon's VoxTrot listening platform provides companies with actionable insight into consumer opinion of their brand, product, or market. VoxTrot technology can identify opinion from large quantities of text, whether it's an in-house content repository or the vast blogosphere. Pretty cool.

Can anyone use social networks to drive traffic?

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You’re all aware of the rise in social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Businesses are using them more and more to reach out to customers. An interesting stat that highlights the emerging power of these platforms to reach customers is that some commercial websites are reporting Facebook and Twitter as the number 2 and 3 referrers of traffic behind Google.
That type of trend begs the question: Why aren't' all firms, B2B and B2C, using Facebook or any of the other social media platforms to drive customers to their websites? First, you need to think about whom is your typical customer and ask which social media platform they would frequent for information to help them do their job.
Facebook
Facebook has seen huge growth in adults lately. The growth in older adults would make you think that Facebook is a great place to interact with your customers. However, do you believe that your target market is frequenting Facebook for work? If the answer is no, then move on but continue to monitor its relevance for you audiences.
Twitter
A lot has been written about Twitter, a micro blogging site. Twitter also has seen huge growth rates, particularly in the workplace. In fact, in February the largest age group on Twitter was the age group 35-49 (42 percent of the site’s audience). Nielson ratings found that the majority of people visit Twitter.com while at work, with 62 percent of the unique audience accessing the site from work only versus 35 percent that accessed it from home only. Again, this is a pretty amazing trend. However, if you look at the top followed people on Twitter you see that Britney Spears is #3, Shaq is #8 and Whole Foods Market is #24. These facts may lead you to believe that Twitter is not a place that your target market is going for information about your product.
LinkedIn
At my work, I am currently discussing setting up a Harvard Business Publishing Group on LinkedIn. We feel that LinkedIn’s business focus lends itself well to interacting with our prospects and partners. In fact, according to the latest January data from comScore, the LinkedIn’s U.S. unique visitors shot up 22 percent to 7.7 million, up from 6.3 million in December. Total minutes spent on the site doubled in January to 96.8 million, from 47.6 million in December. These trends do make us feel comfortable that LinkedIn may be a good place to interact, and help, our customers.

Web Marketing Manager opening

Keywords: marketing manager, Web marketing campaigns, demand generation, lead generation, campaign metrics, b2b marketing, AdWords, webinars, Eloqua, Website management

Harvard Business Publishing is seeking a highly motivated individual for the role of Web Marketing Manager. This person will be responsible for creating and managing marketing campaigns designed to generate quality leads for our sales team. This position will work closely with our corporate marketing team and sales team to develop a solid strategy for quick response to the resulting leads. The individual will also be responsible for the Corporate Learning website, editing/proofreading content for style, accuracy, grammar, punctuation, spelling, and search engine friendliness. This person will manage the content development and overall design of the website to ensure branding strategies and marketing plans are effectively administered through the site.

The ideal candidate will have a strong background in driving qualified sales leads and will have a track record of demonstrated success in demand generation. The candidate will have experience creating/managing and maintaining a highly engaging and interactive website. The candidate must possess strong leadership skills, outstanding communications skills, and the ability to adapt quickly in a changing environment. Prior experience in a fast paced, high growth emerging business is desired.

Responsibilities:
1. Manage strong web marketing campaigns to drive qualified sales leads and awareness in our target industries. Work cross-functionally with product marketing and sales team to create targeted web-based campaigns including: webinars, Google AdWords, and other lead-generation campaigns.

2. Develop all internal and external communications to support the campaigns including email invitations, online ad/landing page content and newsletter sponsorships.

3. Manage online events including the development of strong messaging and the ability to drive traffic to our website. Define budgets and campaign metrics, monitoring and measuring campaigns to improve results and achieve lead goals.

4. Manage Corporate Learning Website including all content updates, multimedia content, identify and execute new programs based on a target account/target industry strategy.

5. Track and report on all programs and resulting leads. Effectively communicate the results to sales and marketing management for continuous improvement and refinement.

6. Oversee internet and electronic marketing media activities to include: Search Engine Optimizer/Search Engine Marketing, internet advertising, e-mail campaigns, customer data capture, social media, viral campaigns, affiliate marketing, mobile marketing, etc.

7. Develop promotional and informational e-mail list through utilization of our customer and prospect lead database.

8. Source and acquire the services of external agencies/vendors for internet marketing media.

Qualifications:

- 5+ years experience in B2B marketing, with demonstrable track-record in demand generation and campaign execution
- Highly motivated, self-starter who thrives under tight deadlines; quick learner with a "roll up the sleeves" approach and attention to detail.
- Experience working closely with field sales team
- Highly proficient in MS Office (Word, Excel and PowerPoint); CRM tools such as Oracle and Webex (or other Web events program) highly desirable
- Experience using Eloqua a plus
- Experience in pay-per-click, online advertising and SEO a plus
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Travel required: 15-20%
- Bachelor's degree in marketing or related field; MBA a plus