I’ve been given the task of writing a piece on Meta Verified for a publication and coming at it from a strategy and branding POV.
To help wrap my head around it, I wanted to take a few moments to lay down some of my thinking here.
Like a lot of Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas, it feels half baked: Good marketers usually have some form of hypothesis when they bring a product to market. In B-School language, it is called “Market Orientation” and when you put it to use you talk to the market, get a grasp for what’s viable or valuable, take that the market and get feedback.
What Zuckerberg is doing is the opposite approach. Meta seems to be pulling a product out of thin air and taking to the market to see what happens and “figure out” everything as they go.
This is called “Product Orientation” and it is expensive and rarely works.
Typically, we only seem to remember the episodes that work like Post-It Notes.
This isn’t about security and safety, but revenue: Facebook and Meta haven’t cared about safety and security ever…
Don’t believe me, look at their track record in Myanmar, with Cambridge Analytica, or the other many scandals that the company has dealt with over the last few years.
This move to subscriptions is a me too move to try and win some new revenue at a time when the Meta stock is down over 14% in the last year.
As I type of these thoughts, the stock is up due to Wall Street’s hope for the verified program.
Besides, if Meta were really worried about security, they’ve have been able to deal with it at any point over the last decade when people were calling out for more security, safety, and concern for individuals and the communities the platforms serve.
Meta’s verified program highlights the lack of innovation at Meta: This is another me-too product copying Twitter’s verified program and Snap’s.
It comes on the back of more antitrust scrutiny in the States that has made acquisitions much more difficult for Meta to consider right now.
And, it comes on the back of the metaverse idea that has cost a lot of money and has little advancement to show for it.