While I was waiting for the facebook username to launch (note to facebook: could you have picked a better time than 5 a.m. in the UK?), I was watching reruns of The Sopranos. Now, not only do I think Sopranos is the greatest artistic achievement in the last 10 years (ok, im slightly exaggerating) but also Tony soprano is one of my favourite television characters in recent times (along with Ari Gold from Entourage).
One of the reasons I like Tony is because he never misses a business opportunity and if he was the head of facebook sales he would never have let a potential million dollar plus deal slip through his fingers. What was the million dollar plus deal? The potential sponsorship of the username launch.
Sponsorship opportunities will be a huge revenue stream for social media sites and if done correctly, can be very beneficial for the sponsoring brand as it can engage the users and add value. Facebook finding a sponsor for the username launch could have been the most successful online sponsorship since X-Men 3 and MySpace. If you do not know about the deal, you had to befriend the X-Men profile and then you had the ability to increase your friends from 8 to 16. At the time this was a big deal and everyone got involved. Years later, MySpace applied roughly the same principle with Intel by increasing your music player from four songs to six (if you were a band). Now these deals generated MySpace huge revenues and, as you can see by some of my posts in this site, I really believe in not reinventing the wheel, so facebook could have done something similar with their username launch. Here is a brief example:
Now this is a very brief example but shows how Nokia sponsoring this would make people believe that the N97 powered or created the username experience and shows how a brand and a social network can partner together for sponsorship. The attraction of getting a new username would be so strong, I can imagine most people still following this procedure.
As i said before this is just an example, I have not spoken about the length of time, t & c’s and everything else that comes with a deal of this magnitude as this is something that the two companies need to sort out between them, but deals like this happen all the time with product launches and I am surprised facebook did not capitalise on it….. especially as it seems like a sure moneymaking opportunity.
Now this is all hypothetical and facebook may have decided they didn’t want to get sponsorship for it…. but let’s hope they don’t have someone like Tony Soprano as their head of sales as to see a business opportunity like this slip through their fingers would definitely give him more than a panic attack. (If you’re not seen the Sopranos, it’s worth taking three months out of your busy schedule to watch it).
Whats your thoughts on this? Do you think they were right to not monitise this? Or do you think they should have potentially sponsored this and cut down on some of the ad banners on the side? Let us know.
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