Mark Zuckerberg scored a coup on Tuesday by recruiting one of Google’s top stars to take the number two spot at Facebook, the fast-growing social network.
Among other things, Sheryl Sandberg’s appointment as Facebook COO will bring some adult supervision to a company that, for all the buzz and excitement, manages every so often to remind the world that it is being run mainly by twenty-something computer geeks.
Sandberg, 38, graduated near the top of her class from Harvard College and Harvard Business School before serving as chief of staff to US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers during the Clinton administration. She joined Google in 2001, where she was responsible for developing the search giant’s wildly successful ad sales programmes. She also played an important role in launching Google.org, the internet group’s philanthropic arm.
Having captured the attention of millions of internet users, Facebook’s biggest challenge over the next year will be to deliver its own equivalent of AdWords - a technology capable of turning all those eyeballs into a reliable revenue stream.
Facebook tried to do just that last year with the launch of several new ’social’ ad technologies, including Beacon, a messaging service that broadcasts purchases made by users on outside web sites to their Facebook friends. Mr Zuckerberg hailed the new technologies as a once-in-a-hundred-years innovation in advertising, only to see them overshadowed by a user revolt over privacy.
With Ms Sandberg on board, Facebook has an opportunity to move beyond this somewhat ham-fisted attempt and find a sustainable revenue model that takes advantage of the social connections between the site’s millions of users. There is no doubt that the raw materials are there. It may just take an experienced hand like Ms Sandberg to make things fall in line.
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