Rise and Rise of Social media giants; Psychology of Its meteoric success

When in 2003 Mark Zuckerberg a student at Harvard thought of a small intranet for his fellow students to share their pictures he could possibly never have realized what he was getting into. This innocent idea called facemash was to connect fellow students on a college network where they could not only load their pictures but could share other information like their preferences, clubs, sports, class schedules and hobbies. This was very much like college intranet networks controlled by the faculty to communicate about class schedules, holidays, assignments and reading material etc. Only difference was that now it was student driven and fun filled. Since this flouted the college norms it had to be shut down in two days. Yet within these 48 hours 450 students had joined this small community.

 

 

To circumvent the issue, he registered a company in February 2004 called Thefacebook.com. Very soon students from Yale and Stanford joined the network and within three months it had 250,000 students from more than 30 colleges! Was it a vision- yes a fluked vision till then? Here the feeling must be “Yeh Dill Mange more” Then they opened the network for high school students and other universities too to join in and by end 2004 they had a user base of one million!

 

 

Now you need to convert fluke into providence and that’s what Zuckerberg did. They tweaked the software to give more options and facility to upload multiple pictures to reach out to larger people by creating user walls and tagging facilities.

 

In 2005 high-school students and students at universities outside the United States were allowed to join the service. By year’s end it had six million monthly active users. It was like hitting a jackpot or stumbling upon a gold mine. In 2006 Facebook opened its membership beyond students to anyone over the age of 13 (Teenagers) opening its flood gates to the world at large. This was the time to monitize their baby. Advertisers were able to create new and effective customer relationships. Initially household product manufacturer Procter & Gamble attracted 14,000 people to a promotional effort by “expressing affinity” with a teeth-whitening product. This kind of direct consumer engagement on such a large scale had not been possible before Facebook, and more companies began using the social network for marketing and advertising.

 

 

They could never have imagined what could have been the driving force behind this mad rush of people joining this network. If I have to do a Post-success (not postmortem) analysis of facebook or any other platform like Twitter or Whats app, success I feel the biggest driving force for a human being is the freedom to ‘express and reach out to people about what he feels about something’. That is why every sane constitution in a democratic setup has ‘freedom of speech and expression for every citizen’ enshrined as a fundamental right in it.

 

Writing for an established news paper is extremely difficult for an ordinary person and barriers are pretty high. You may be lucky to have a letter to the editor published in some obscure corner of the paper which may not be even read by anyone. Social media platforms like facebook allow an instant feedback about what you said and what others feel. These are the methods of engagement and ‘venting out your thoughts and feelings’ to people. Suddenly rules of engagement got changed.

 

In today’s world the expectations are so high, materialistically, personally and politically that even a sane person has gone crazy and become unhappy for no reason. Social media is that pressure cooker release mechanism or what in psycho terms is called ‘Catharsis’. Venting out your feeling or vomiting out from your heart and brain. It is like mental detox to your heart’s content. The flip side is that it is the ‘me too’ feeling that is important for all humans and it is like self actualization. Social media takes you to the fifth level of Maslow’s hierarchy so easily and so quickly free of cost that you are bound to be a part of it.

 

Whichever way you look at the glass it is always full- one half positive and another negative and you love both. This is a paradox of human behavior which the founders never realized till the glass got filled and charged up both ways. Most probably even when they reached a magical figure of 6 million active members , Zuckerberg didn’t realize the reason for this success. And yes nothing succeeds like success. Today there are more than 2.85 billion users across the world! World total population is around 7.5 billion people, imagine the reach.

 

 

Now it has moved from personal to organizational. Big product companies are using these sad-happy guys to sell their products. Politicians are selling their dreams and ideologies. And the Sad-Happy guy is happy sucking up to it. Taking another example one could look at publishing industry. Writing a book and getting it published is also a game of the self actualization. It is a dream of the rich and the famous to become an author. There are millions of millionaires who want to call themselves as ‘authors’ because it is the higher order of status.

 

Publishing a book is a mugs game. It is entirely controlled by publishers - big and small. They had a stranglehold on the entire process and could reject any and every manuscript good or bad. So you were entirely at the mercy of a publisher who did you a favor to a would be author by publishing his book. Publishers had their reasons too. They were investing their money on the author. It is like a film producer signing a new comer actor. The entire risk is that of the producer and for book it is of the publisher. On this basic premise came along self publishing- you pay for the production and they create a book for you ready to launch.

 

 

As long as human craving to remain relevant in this mad mad world exists social media will keep flourishing and becoming bigger and bigger till the entire 8 billion people on our planet get connected with each other. No wonder the creators are heady and a bit arrogant as they within ten years started influencing almost half the world population. They have started dictating terms, deactivating accounts of heads of states at will without giving any reason. Today they have become the law, judge and the jury.

 

“What neither he nor Mark had known when they started the damn thing was how addictive Facebook was. You didn't just visit the site once. You visited it every day. You came back again and again, adding to your site, your profile, changing your pictures, your interests, and most of all, updating your friends. It really had moved a large portion of college life onto the Internet. And it really had changed Harvard's social scene.” American Idol

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