This weekend hundreds of millions of people will gather in family rooms and around party platters with smartphones in-hand and the Super Bowl on the big screen. And Facebook will be there, too. It will be part of every TV ad and it will be the most used App (Twitter running a close second) on your phone. The game is a magnet for connection. Facebook is magnetic for the social engagement it enables. People are drawn to each because people are drawn to people.
Connection is a human imperative. Any event or technology that enables it thrives. The Super Bowl, an event with national holiday like status, thrives because via television everyone is there. Facebook thrives because via affordable anywhere technologies, everyone is there.
Harvard Business Reviews says, “Facebook enables (connection) better than any other social network.” And it’s found its way into the soul of our mobile devices. (Install the Facebook app on your iPhone, for example, and you'll see its features integrating themselves mysteriously throughout every function of your phone.)
Just look around the den on Super Bowl Sunday and watch the people that you know connect with people you don’t but could via the Facebook friend finder. People simultaneously present and absent courtesy of their smartphone app.
As Facebook has grown it has become less a website and more an extension of ourselves in the same way that the telephone was for our grandparents and cell phones were for the next generation. It’s also changing business in ways that most people can’t get their heads around -- because they see it as a technology or a platform for making announcements and doing transactions.
They miss the listening. They miss the engagement. They miss the inputs and innovation. The business guy wants the metrics for something that can no more be measured than the number of ripples from a pebble thrown in the sea. He fails to see it for what it is; the way we connect.
Speaking of connections, would you please pass the nachos?
Oh, and get back with me on those metrics. There are some and the results are going to blow your mind like a safety's hit on the opposing team's wide receiver.
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