Warren Cammack

Tonight at the Ivy, Paul Borrud head of Facebook Australia  spruiked the latest products from Zuckerberg’s stable. He began by talking through the new Facebook Places functionality which is targeting the competition from Foursquare and others who are now beginning to capitalise on the commercial models that are enabled by having the geographic location and intended actions of a loyal user base. There was very little detail from an Australian perspective but Paul cited examples in the US where merchants would provide limited availability offers to those customers who “checked in” to locations. He also said that the new functionality would be released in the local market in the second quarter of this year (April?).

The most interesting point (from my perspective) that Paul made was in the examples of how companies were effectively using Facebook to engage with their customers. Chase began by offering their customers the ability to share credit card awards points totals with friends and pool them to purchase goods and services. This was particularly useful to the college students who couldn’t afford to buy anything useful with their relatively small spend however when pooled they had greater purchase power. This worked most effectively in sorority houses however I’m not sure Chase bargained on beer fridges and inflatable pool toys being their most popular items!

Chase then went on to use Facebook to enable it’s customers to vote on how it should donate it’s money to charities. Rather than being the larger national charities, the facebook platform gave smaller local charities the ability to pitch themselves and try to obtain a slice of the $5M pool. This proved to be a huge success and as of today over 2.5M users “like” this page. It would be great to see more companies take this step and enable money to get to the grass roots charities rather than just the usual suspects.

The key takeout from the presentation was that Facebook are now focusing on commercialising their platform – after all how else is Mr Zuckerberg supposed to justify the price that has been put on his company unless it starts making some serious money.