Success Award for Facebook Boss Zuckerberg
SUCCESS Magazine believes that Facebook has changed the way people connect worldwide, morphing from college fad to global communication force. And Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has guided the addictive social networking site to incredible heights, more than 600 million subscribers.
By Rakesh Raman
Is this 600 million figure or other data about Facebook correct? With the same unfounded belief about Facebook, in December last year, TIME magazine threw its Person of the Year award on Zuckerberg. And the award raised many eyebrows among the tech’s chattering classes. (Read: Is the TIME Right to Honor Zuckerberg of Facebook?)
In this article, it was estimated that not more than 20% subscribers are actually using Facebook. And out of these users, at least 50% (55 million) enter the network only for chat or for virtual hijinks (games, gifts, etc.) and another 30% (33 million) keep joining all types of weird Groups and Pages, which they hardly visit subsequently.
Most corporate users come just to create their Pages or related Groups and then almost forget about them. Then they keep hanging in different Facebook corners with stale information.
[ Also Read: Will You Join Goby’s Facebook Group? ]Keeping all these factors in view, Facebook has only about 15 million serious users, the article said.
In fact, Facebook has become a hotspot for the idlest people in the world. And a new disorder has emerged – Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD). Now there is a new breed of couch potatoes in the form of Facebook users. Looking at these users, it appears that Facebook is a blatant time-waster.
[ Also Read: 5 Reasons I Love My Facebook Friends ]Then why this award for Facebook boss? Actually, Facebook and its supporters like The Social Network movie makers, TIME magazine, and now this SUCCESS magazine are living in fool’s paradise by assuming that it’s a successful site with over 500 million users.
They are trying to leverage false and cheap popularity that Facebook claims to promote their own products – magazines, movies, etc.
[ Also Read: How to become a Facebook Star: 10 Tips ]The article about the TIME magazine argued: If media companies also start behaving like other crooked commercial, money-minded outfits, who will bring truth to the fore for general public?
This is a highly immoral practice for media companies that are breaking their ethical limits to distribute commercially influenced awards. Your business is to sell news. If you’re not able to create sellable news, you can’t create another shady business under your news activity.
[ Also Read: Are You Suffering from Good News Deficit? ]Let the awards thing be handled by neutral agencies like The Nobel Foundation for Nobel Prizes or Pulitzer Administration for Pulitzer Prizes.
No commercial entity – like TIME, SUCCESS or other media companies – should get into awards business, as these awards are mostly sponsored – covertly or overtly. So, the selection of the awards recipients will – in all probability – be biased.
[ Also Read: How Facebook Saves Data Center Energy ]SUCCESS Magazine says Zuckerberg was voted 2010 Achiever of the Year by readers of the magazine. Moreover, it informs he beat out other leaders of business, media, technology and philanthropy, including Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates.
A cover feature on Zuckerberg appears in the May 2011 issue of SUCCESS. The issue discusses how to effectively integrate new media methods with old-school relationship-building skills.
The announcement was made Friday, April 15. SUCCESS Magazine covers entrepreneurial and small-business markets.
By Rakesh Raman, the managing editor of Raman Media Network.
Photo courtesy: Facebook
