Andrew Roskin, a noted authority from the DealBook fame of NYTimes recently released a book on how the interconnected businesses between banks make them too big to fail. AIG has become the defacto case study for this phenomenon, since the Government was compelled to save the insurance mammoth in lieu of spending the money on creating more jobs or offering them back to the common man.

[Andrew Roskin's book is quite an interesting read. The amazon link is here. The phenomenon is explained here

Of course, too big to fail can also be used in other industry areas too, and notably Google has been often compared to being too big to fail, primarily since the internet is largely indexed by Google, the path to your online experience taps on Google one too many times every day across the internet-o-sphere.

[Google - too big to fail? or actually I think its too evil to fail - its become a necessary devil]

Now, Facebook seems to be slowly becoming a ‘too big to fail’ case study in their niche of connecting people and getting people into the social realm of things. May be, people can live without Facebook once the fad settles in, but still its slowly inching to becoming a great engagement channel for business and marketers alike, not to mention the number of hours spent on Facebook by the millions every day. Some stats from the Facebook universe:

- 400 M: number of active users
- 55 minutes : average time spent by a Facebook user
- 130: average number of friends per user
- 60M: status updates per day
- 3B: photos per month
- 5B: pieces of content shared — news, links, videos etc
- 3.5M: active pages in total

[Twitter is in pursuit too, but still quite far behind, and I think the mainstream quite much do not understand Twitter as much as they like Facebook. A long tail phenomenon where only a small percentage of total twitter users actually use it as the CNN of the new media. The stats of twitter can be found somewhat here]

Below, you will find a diverse set of opinions on what the SIME-sters think about Facebook.

SIME 2009 participants about Facebook from 23tv.de on Vimeo.

Facebook is like a night-club. Once the cool people stop hanging out there, the concept dies. And from the looks of it, Facebook seems to have no such problem. And it’s quite much changing the landscape of the social networking scene. Whether too big to fail or not, its a necessary evil for you as marketers to embrace, engage and connect.

At SIME, we like to always look at such a phenomenon and tap into the heads of marketers, advertisers, app developers think about. And notably there are 2 schools of thought. One, staunch Facebook lovers, albeit a minority. Second, a big majority who are not able to wade their way past the network maze. While, the folks who belong to the minority have become quite famous and rich (Zynga for instance), there is a large minority who are lost on the engagement side. The secret sauce of using Facebook has many ingredients, and we thought we should highlight the basic nuts and bolts of using facebook or any other social media platform.

First and foremost, social Media isn’t the conversation. It’s where the conversation takes place. With that in mind, if you are a CMO of your brand, here are some tidbits for you to think about:

In the thought process:
- Are you communicating or engaging?
- Do you have fans or fanatics? Would they kill for your brand?
- Number of Facebook fans – can you value them. 1$ per fan or 1c per fan? Do they end up visiting your store or site and perform a transaction?
- Do you listen to your audience? Or worse, do they have a mechanism to communicate with you?
- Do you have enough Facebook brand mindshare? That is, do you use it often to shout?
- Are you using Facebook as a mere distribution channel to drive traffic to your blog for instance? Think again on how you can improve
- Have you analyzed when your audience uses Facebook? Are you on the network at the same time as well? Timing can work both ways.

Ideally, if you are in the B2C segment, Facebook presents great ways to engage, interact, communicate and increase your bottomline revenues. If you are a B2B brand, it is more tricky, not quantifiable in hard numbers, and may be a mere presence on Facebook might not do any help at all, and you should avoid the trap.

Nothing beats trying your hand with an open mind. Good luck we say.

Related posts:

1. SIME Talks Season 2 Episode 7: The Mobile Edition – Location Based Services
2. SIME Talks Season 2 Episode 8, The Media Edition: How should media companies position and grow?
3. SIME Talks: Season 2, Episode 1 – an introduction about SIME and plans for SIME 2010
4. SIME Talks Season 2, Episode 2: Young entrepreneurs, listen to this.
5. SIME Talks Episode 6, Season 2: Story Telling is the product of great real time conversations (feat. Steven Overman)