MicroStrategy World 2011: Facebook CIO urges enterprises to use its data hub in marketing

Tim Campos argues that social network advocacy is the strongest form of marketing

Facebook CIO Tim Campos urged enterprises to use his firm's dynamic data hub to enhance their marketing strategies, during his keynote at MicroStrategy World in Monte Carlo.

He told IT leaders that Facebook was a "powerful development platform" that should be used to connect with customers.

"The social graph on Facebook allows businesses to work out who the influencers are within any network - who is driving the preferences. It is important for brands and marketers to reach out to these people because they are the ones who are in the best position to propel a company's message," said Campos.

"Facebook is a data hub that can support this. Every time you visit the site, send a message, 'like' something, share content, associate yourself with a brand, check in at an event; these are all different data elements.

"In a day we process 100TB of data, and the system we use to process this is dynamic and constantly evolving," he added.

Campos went on to tell delegates that Facebook is not just a consumer site, and that the development platform for businesses and their marketing strategy is "particularly powerful".

"Marketing today is being built around people. You can categorise marketing into three areas: paid, owned and earned. The most powerful marketing of all is what you earn, it's the word of mouth recommendations, it's customers advocating on your behalf.

"The ideal position to be in is having earned marketing, but on a huge scale. Facebook lets you create this. Starbucks, for example, has over 20 million fans on Facebook. These fans are connected to more than 530 million people. Almost the entire Facebook community is only one step removed from Starbucks," he added.

"Starbucks leveraging its fans can create an incredible amount of advocacy on the Facebook platform."

Business intelligence software vendor MicroStrategy this week launched Gateway for Facebook, a new cloud-based service that can connect enterprise IT environments and enterprise applications using Facebook social graph.

Gateway for Facebook converts the Facebook "social graph", the term for the collective interrelationships between users of the site, into a relational data structure, the aim being to make it easier to develop enterprise applications like CRM, marketing, service, sales, loyalty, and mobile applications.

Gateway offers bidirectional data flow, meaning social intelligence from Facebook can be added to enterprise applications, and enterprise applications can in turn interact with the social network.

"None of us can ignore Facebook and enterprises need to consider their social strategy," said Michael J Saylor, chairman and CEO of MicroStrategy in his keynote this morning.

"Why do we think that this social phenomenon is critical, and why do we think it needs to be linked with an enterprise IT strategy? Well it's where all the people are, it's where all the personal data is and it's where all the connections are," he said.

"It would be too challenging for any one company to collect this amount of information. Facebook has done the job for us by providing a shared platform that we can all synchronise with.

"Social applications make enterprises more personal. I think this is a great opportunity to bridge the gap between the big scary company and the individual," he added.