Bebo and the lost generation of brand managers
Raymond Snoddy on the decline of Bebo and the “lost generation” of brand managers who just don’t get social media.
A long, long time ago, in the early days of social networking, an important press conference was held at Bafta.
Though the details are starting to fade in the memory now, there was definitely a well-known pop group on stage, though not well known enough for the name to stick.
There were impressive examples of original content in the form of online soaps aimed at the teenage market. It was a first really for networking sites. Original drama online, for goodness sake, instead of recycled clips.
This clearly wouldn’t do conventional television much good. There was already an audience of 40 million and rising, and surely it was only a matter of time before the likes of MySpace and Facebook would be in the sights of the challenger.
For the media professionals there, the impressive company president Joanna Shields outlined what was claimed as a new entertainment platform, Open Media.
The users would get free access to entertainment content from media companies such as Turner, MTV, the BBC, Channel 4 and ITN, with any ad revenue going back to the media owners. The number of users would certainly continue to soar.
That was Bebo. That was then – or, more precisely, November 13 2007.
In 2008 Bebo was sold to AOL for more than £400 million. It turned out to be a very clever sale by somebody, because that 40 million figure turned out to be very much a high water mark.
Today (Wed), as AOL confirmed that it would either close or sell Bebo before the end of this year, the 40 million users had melted away to a mere 12.8 million in February.
Who knows, maybe the sale will give ITV a chance to get into the social media world at a knockdown price.
For some reason it seems to be British teenagers and British teenagers alone who have stayed loyal to Bebo.
Everyone else has joined the stampede to Facebook – now claiming more than 400 million users worldwide.
All the signs are that AOL is not prepared to invest more money to try to resurrect a dying brand. The likeliest outcome is that Bebo is doomed and will just collapse obliterating 12.8 million profiles from cyberspace.
Even the least alert must have started to notice a pattern here. Social media is obviously the future, an important new medium etc, but beware – you really can get your fingers badly burned actually investing in it.
AOL have got form here. The totally misguided merger with Time Warner was the worst media merger of all time – destroying billions of dollars of corporate value on both sides.
By comparison, Bebo is chicken feed and AOL is certainly not alone in the current distress. The list of under-performing, over-priced social networking sites obviously also includes MySpace and Friends Reunited.
In fact in this case, AOL is showing some maturity and wisdom by deciding to attach a Do Not Resuscitate label on Bebo, thereby avoiding throwing good money after bad.
Bebo provides an important new lesson for everyone interested in social networks.
It was already clear that this emerging medium did not engender loyalty among its users. They were fickle and fashion-conscious, off to the latest new thing.
You could allow for fickle and fashion-conscious and design strategies to cope, perhaps. We now know it’s a lot worse than that.
This is starting to look like a winner-takes-all poker game. There is room for segmentation. Twitter has its role, as does Linkedin.
But as for pure social networking, there may now only be room for the likes of Facebook and YouTube, and their strong gravitational pull will simply drag in everything else.
Some US analysts believe that Facebook will now become the social networking platform and that the competition – and the money – will come from applications specially designed for it, rather like the outburst of creativity generated by the iPhone.
I am sure it is something that must have crossed the mind of Simon Clift, the out-going marketing chief of Unilever.
Clift warned in a valedictory FT interview yesterday of the dangers of a “lost generation” of brand managers who just didn’t get the importance of social networks and were still stuck in the television era.
If you are 25 or 20 you know this stuff because you have been brought up with Facebook or YouTube, argued Clift. If you are aged between 30 and 45, the very people in charge of important brands, then your only hope is if you have seen your children doing it.
What’s the answer? Special social networking immersion courses for all those cursed by advanced age?
There again, you need to be very careful what the message is.
You wouldn’t want to put too much marketing weight behind a Bebo, or indeed the next contender to drift into powerful centrifugal forces.