Facebook is the perfect example of a strategy based on paranoia, with its obsessive attention to what is going on in the environment around it. For any company, developing its activity within the highly competitive social networks is extremely complex: changes in trends are constant, as are changes in tastes and preferences, along with new entrants … today you’re on the crest of the wave, tomorrow you’ve been forgotten.
This is pretty much what happened to MySpace, which went from being considered the symbol of an entire generation and generating more page views than Google to being sidelined in a matter of months; it was the same story with Friendster or Orkut, which found themselves unprepared for popularity in Malaysia and Brazil, and whose efforts to create a global strategy were stymied because they were perceived as local phenomena associated with one language and culture.
Not understanding these kinds of phenomena, and especially the speed they unfold at, led companies like News Corp. or AOL to lose several hundred million dollars when, after acquiring networks like MySpace or Bebo respectively for $580 million and $850 million, they ended up selling them for $35 million and $10 million just a few years later. As Rupert Murdoch commented on Twitter after announcing the sale in 2012,
“Many questions and jokes about My…
