January 30, 2008 | Wednesday

Dinner Report: The Face of Facebook

At this month’s Directors Dinner, Netimperative gave its members the chance to meet one of the biggest dotcom success stories of recent times. Blake Chandlee, UK Sales Director at Facebook, talked about the key to the firm’s success and outlined its plans for the future. Davina Lines, MD at Netimperative, was there to report…

Blake Chandlee began the pre-dinner discussion by giving some background on both himself and the company. He joined Facebook in October 2007 as the UK Sales Director, after a mere 10-minute interview with the 23 year- old billionaire founder.

Facebook developed out of an online network that Mark Zuckerberg set up at Harvard to communicate with his friends, and now he is $4bn richer but apparently still very unassuming and living in a one-bed flat with his roomy. (There is probably a string of gold-diggers lining up outside the door though!)

Blake was very clear that Facebook is not a social media site but a ‘utility’, although the social media site pigeonhole may prove hard to move away from, but we wish him well in his quest!

He explained how Facebook doesn’t actually build any of the site’s applications themselves, or make any revenue from them, and this is how the company sees itself as more as a ‘utility’ for its users. They are doing pretty well, growing at 3% per week and now with 200 million users.

Revenue-wise they are selling ads via their partner Microsoft and Blake and his new sales team are developing a social ad platform that they hope will help advertisers or brands to engage in a dialogue with consumers. The good thing is they are open to all budgets as it’s all-new, and they are keen to test ideas out.

After Blake’s introduction, attendees were invited to take part in a question and answer session. John Moss from Ballz.com began by asking Blake where he thought Facebook would be in five years time. The apparent plan is to enhance, build, and continue to spread into new territories and new languages, which is a big step seeing as Facebook is currently designed around the English language only.

Blake did point out though that it was February last year when Facebook had just a mere 1 million users, so they have proved they can grow quickly. He is also conscious of the fact that Facebook is currently fashionable so they know they need to keep reinventing themselves to keep the audience engaged with them.

Matt Brocklehurst, Marketing Director at Latitude Group, asked how mobile would impact, and will Nokia invest in Facebook. Blake wouldn’t substantiate the Nokia rumour, but does use Facebook on his Blackberry every day along with 600,000 others, although the commercialisation of this will come later. Apparently they are in no rush, as they have plenty of cashflow so can take their time with developing these things.

Kevin Eyres, who is newly appointed at Linkedin, asked about the company culture. Blake said it still reflects the founder’s own background, resembling the structure of an engineering company, although this will likely change. He added that Facebook are recruiting heavily, and expect to double their employees from 400 currently to 800 in six months.

Julie Howell of Fortune Cookie, but also a well known campaigner for disability rights, asked about Facebook’s accessibility policy, as apparently it’s not that disability friendly currently. This is one area that Facebook will need to investigate further, so we’ll let you know what their comments are when Netimperative knows.

I asked about the recent reports of the Bebo suicide cult and whether Facebook had any controls in place for discouraging or actively dealing with this kind of teenage idiocy. The Facebook stance is that it was tragic and they are pretty aggressive with controls and tools but also need to encourage parents to be socially responsible too.

30th January 2008, Net Imperative