[UPDATE: The Facebook roadshow video’s been taken down so the following is of archival interest mainly. Went looking to see if someone had saved it to YouTube, and no, but here’s an interesting 60 Minutes story from when they were at 60 million members.]
As a creative guy I’ve sat through a lot of agency capability presentations that made the air slowly leak out of the room before I ever got to speak. So there was a bit of schadenfreude associated with hearing that, after poor reviews in New York, Facebook had withdrawn their video from the IPO investor roadshow before today’s appearance in Boston.
But actually, it’s a pretty good video and you can watch it right here. (No freeze frame to click, sorry, and you have to sit through a long disclosure/disclaimer crawl before you ever see the people.) It’s the clearest statement yet of “who we are and what we’re trying to do” from a company that is usually very opaque about what it’s up to. And their explanations of the Facebook phenomenon make a lot of sense. Eg. At the beginning user profiles were static and the only thing users could easily change was their profile picture so they constantly changing them. Then they let users tag friends they saw in other photos and the whole social network thing took off. (That from Chris Cox, Vice President, Product in tandem with Mark Zuckerberg.)
The investors were apparently pissed off that after the video there wasn’t enough time for questions. So now there’s no video—and also no Zuckerberg. Did he skip Boston because he was disgusted with the reception to the video, which obviously they’d worked hard on? Time will tell, maybe, but meanwhile look at the video before they take it down. It’s about marketing, just like we are.