Getting away with it

25th September 2007

Man at conference from big international agency: “Facebook’s great. We use it for loads of our corporate communications. We market our events and our blogs through it. We have loads of groups on it. It’s the best way to communicate with the network around the world.”

Me: “So Facebook is almost as important as your intranet?”

MACFBIA: “Yes. Better in fact”

Me: “So how much would you pay for that? If they turned round and said they could see your firm was a massive business user of Facebook and said they were going to charge you Â£100k for enterprise class access.”

MACFBIA: “Oh, they could never do that. Think of the backlash. Their brand would really get trashed. It’s the sort of thing a web firm like that would get really hammered for. I can’t them getting away it.”

“Getting away with it”. This really surprised me. In what other situation would a multi-million pound business expect to get a big part of its communications infrastructure for free?