Planet Abell

One of the oldest tropes in marketing is that the consumer owns the brand. It's nice shorthand for customer passion: It's why New Coke had to go, why the Gap had to reverse course on their logo change and why the Twinkie may actually last forever after all. Companies own their brands, of course, in every literal and legal sense. But most of them know that if they act imperiously with their property they risk losing customers, and worse — their best customers can turn into motivated, evangelical enemies overnight. But what if the product is a service that treats you like a product? Where are your alliances — and what are your rights — in that mind-exploding scenario? ( Full Post )

Facebook's decision to eliminate member voting on policy changes is coming down to what could be the last member vote ever on the world's largest social network. The good news is that it could still be reversed. The bad news? The only thing that can stop disenfranchisement is if the number of votes cast are equal to nearly the entire population of the United States.  Facebook's pesky democracy problem? Members can vote to reverse a policy change if a) 7,000 people comment on it, and b) one-third of the total membership casts a ballot in an election Facebook is required to schedule.  Facebook is addressing a legitimate problem with the voting protocol — the infinitesimal percentage of its one billion members that can make a vote happen. But rather than fix that, Facebook has decided to scrap the entire member-empowering initiative. By ending it entirely it has set off a nuclear bomb when a grenade would have done. Talk about voter suppression. ( Full Post )

A funny thing happened on the way to Facebook's second lockup expiration Wednesday — it sent the bears running for cover, unlike lockup expiration version 1.0 back in August. This is good news — but it's not all good. The good news is obvious enough: Facebook shares not only held their own but rallied — more than on  any other day  of the company's brief, rocky existence as a public company. Shares  shot up about 13% , to close at $23.23. And to emphasize that wasn't some kind of irrationally exuberant fluke, $FB was essentially flat and in line with a slightly down NASDAQ in early Thursday trading. The bad news is not as obvious: Insider holders of Facebook stock saw the prospect of dumping as many as  800 million shares  on the market all at once as a holding opportunity — not a chance to cash in on a windfall that is a significant part of their compensation package. The "maybe good, maybe bad" news? Strong, counterintuitive performances like this...

My very first appearance on Reuters television. VICTORY IS MINE!!!

Facebook blogged that it had gone "cash flow positive" in the previous quarter, achieving a target it had set for itself sometime next year. We didn't touch upon it in this CNBC Power Lunch interview, but I wonder what all the public companies that have a $10 billion market cap ( Facebook's imputed value ) think of the strict SEC rules about disclosure they must abide by, when a guy who is basically a grad student can get away with doing a post and no analyst telecons?

Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla in the social media space, with some 200 million members, a valuation of perhaps $5 billion and a base that has expanded well beyond its early roots as a private hangout for bored Ivy League students. But, like the ad says, life comes at you fast — and there is nothing more unforgiving than internet time. So, are the best years ahead for Facebook, or is the finicky mob of cool kids — and now their parents and grandparents — already peering down the road for another Next Great Thing? One thing is for sure: Nothing lasts forever. Continue reading 'Facebook, shmacebook: What’s the next great thing?' on the Reuters 'Great Debate' Blog .

R euters was a bit late to embrace the Internet for its core franchises and now wants it known that it gets it. Loud and clear. Sure, Reuters lagged Bloomberg on instant messaging and failed to gain traction with "Reuters Mail" but, as CEO Tom Glocer recently asserted, Reuters invented the UGC phenomenon 50 years ago by getting contributed data from some of its customers and selling it to others. Now Reuters is talking about creating a financial MySpace. "It won't have the latest hot videos and the 'why I am into Metallica and the Arctic Monkeys' blogs," Glocer tells the Guardian. "Instead we are going to give our financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models." And then there was this other money quote: "People don't want to have 100 friend requests from teenage girls in Florida if they are trading the credit derivatives market, but they probably are interested in b...