我们为何爱看Facebook的笑话？
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我们都喜欢白手起家的故事，但从中产到一夜暴富就没那么吸引眼球了。而那就是Facebook的故事，主角是其创始人兼首席执行官马克•扎克伯格：聪明的小伙想到一个好点子，然后就成为亿万富翁。更令人不爽的是，我们都意识到，他是利用我们（至少是关于我们的数据）发财致富的。 就像有线电视公司一样，Facebook也有竞争者，但其影响力无人能及，以至于用户有时（会因为没有其它选择而）有无助的感觉。也许这就是人们对其虎头蛇尾的IPO幸灾乐祸的原因吧。 包括我们在内，媒体已经对Facebook的上市进行了铺天盖地的报道。实际上，仅仅在过去两个星期之内，Fortune.com的主页就发布了24篇文章，讲述Facebook公司的成长历程。 Facebook最近的失误之所以引起公众的强烈关注，除了其IPO的巨大规模，另一方面也是由于其品牌的知名度。每个公司都对这家社交网络羡慕嫉妒恨：人人都知道它，就算不用的人也一样。某些用户，特别是十几岁或者更小的小孩，已经把Facebook当成其生活的重要部分。 不过每当公司做一些影响用户体验甚至是威胁个人隐私的改变时，用户就会立即跳出来抱怨。现在，公司正面临金融方面的新挑战：其股票在首个交易日堪堪保发（在本文发布时，已经从上市价格下跌了13%），这些糟糕表现引发了股东的怒火，他们甚至向公司提起诉讼。我们还在使用Facebook，但我们能否再“喜欢”上它呢？ 为CEO名声所累 Facebook的品牌问题部分来自于马克•扎克伯格，这个娃娃脸、超群智力和亿万身家的组合。商业人士对他又是嫉妒又是敬畏。电影《社交网络》（The Social Network）助长了这种情绪，该片夸张地描述了公司的源起，那是一个撞大运、尔虞我诈和声名鹊起的故事。你想要痛恨这种生活方式，私底下却又想据为己有。 每当有人像扎克伯格这样一举成名，身家暴涨，我们就等着看他的笑话，就职于加州咨询公司DUNN的高级品牌策略专家迈克尔•邓恩如是说。“Facebook这样的新贵会遇到和卡戴珊家族（因真人秀而走红——译注）同样的问题：我们的文化传统就是这样，如果某人一炮走红，我们也很容易将其赶下神坛。” |
We all love a rags-to-riches story, but a relative-comfort-to-exorbitant wealth story is less enticing. That has been Facebook's story, which, until this point, has been all about its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg: A smart kid with a good idea becomes a billionaire. What's more, he becomes a billionaire, we have all realized, off of us (or at least our data). And like cable companies, Facebook (FB) has competitors, but none that match its reach, which leaves users sometimes feeling a sense of powerlessness. Perhaps that is why, in the whirlwind of its anticlimactic IPO, there has been a sort of glee in watching the company stumble. The media, including this publication, has covered Facebook's public offering to death. Indeed, over the past two weeks, Fortune.com devoted its homepage real estate to a whopping 24 stories on the company's coming of age. Facebook's recent fumbles have drawn so much attention partly because of the sheer size of its IPO, but also because of the enormity of its brand. The social network is recognizable in a way that many companies would kill for: everyone knows what it is, even people who don't use it. Some of the people who use it, especially teenagers and pre-teens, see it as critical to their quality of life. Yet Facebook users are also quick to rail against the company for changes that tweak the experience or threaten privacy. And now, the social network is confronting a hurdle on the finance side – its stock opened flat on its first day of trading (and, at the time of publication, is down by over 13% since its IPO) and it must cope with shareholder anger, coming in hot by way of lawsuits. We all use Facebook, but can the company get us to like it again? Pitfalls of a celebrity CEO Part of Facebook's branding problem has to do with Mark Zuckerberg, with his boyish face, brilliant brain, and billions of dollars. The business world seems to view the founder with a combination of jealousy and awe, fueled perhaps by the portrayal of the company's origins in the movie The Social Network, which glorified a tale of dumb luck, cutthroat cunning, and fast fame. You want to hate that lifestyle, but you can't help but want it for yourself. When someone like Zuckerberg succeeds so quickly and with such a huge monetary payoff, we all wait for him to trip, says Michael Dunn, senior brand strategist at California-based consulting firm DUNN. "An upstart like Facebook has the same problem that the Kardashians have: it's easy to us as a culture to knock people off that pedestal, especially when they got up on the pedestal very rapidly." |
