Tuesday, 21 February 2012

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Facebook is wholly embracing the buzz created by its coming IPO and resulting media storm with its eye on the social network. Keeping with Facebook tradition, the site is preparing to mandate the "Timeline" profile page for all users despite their preferences. Along with the update come interactive tags for photos allowing links to audio, video, outside sources, and anything else that might be embedded. Dissenting opinions on the forced updates are being drowned out by the overall social media hype. Who cares, when we can talk about Zuckerberg's ultimate control over the 'public' entity? Despite even admitting they bypass P3P security settings, press regarding Facebook remains positive. Focus circles around affiliated graffiti artists and cooks, to-be-millionaires and new office space, and excitement over The Offering continues to grow. 

On the fringes of the storm, other social media sites are benefiting from the whirl of interest around Facebook. LinkedIn, Renren, and Quepasa are being met with a surge of new interest. Shares of Renren, Inc. alone increased by more than 8% following Facebook's IPO announcement as investors look to get ahead in the Chinese social media king. Quepasa, the Latin American social media site, is fully exploiting the wave of interest generated. Last week, it announced the launch of "Quepasa Media," a combined report detailing the company's entire value for eager investors. 

LinkedIn and Zynga, however, are the big [not-Facebook] winners in the American social media frenzy. After Facebook's IPO was announced and their revenue sources revealed, Zynga stock rocketed about 35% nearing $14.00 per share. Valentine's Day did not shine brightly on Zynga, as earnings during its first quarter as a publicly traded company, the fourth quarter of 2011, fell short of many expectations. Despite this reality check, the gaming company announced a planned deal with Hasboro toys to produce game-related merchandise and has regained footing thanks in large part to the social media frenzy.

If Zynga's recent activity is the result of successfully weathering a storm, LinkedIn rode the tornado to Oz. Not only was the site able to produce better-than-anticipated quarterly results and a rosy outlook for 2012, the company is stable after its 90-day lockup expired last week. With promising growth, solid foundations, and positive revenue, LinkedIn is the overall champion of 2011's tech IPOs. The social media attention coming its way from the Facebook craze is only resulting in better and better valuations. 

Twitter, meanwhile, has been skirting questions about a possible IPO and moved to forestall a possible offering by limiting any individual's stock sales to 20% of total ownership. This move came on Valentine's Day, just a week before the media site announced a deal with Yandex which will allow the Russian search engine to display Tweets in its results. 

Almost every article whose subject is remotely related to social media, Facebook is the comparison. How does Renren compare to Facebook? What about Quepasa? Bloggers, magazines, and newspapers will be sure to tell you. What does Zynga's relative struggle and LinkedIn's relative success tell you? There's an infographic for that. How does Twitter fit in the picture? What about Groupon? Google? Pinterest? Pandora? Some say Facebook is the end-all, be-all of public offerings, some say it's over valued and destined to fail. The world, however, waits on baited breath for the coming of the IPO.

Tuesday, 14 February 2012

Perhaps the best love story to emerge from the Facebook romance is the relationship between the social media site and the state of California. Facebook's IPO will thrust hundreds, potentially thousands into the stratosphere of wealth, and at least one - Mark Zuckerberg - into the ionosphere.