Facebook's 'Breaking Bad' School of Business Development

Watching Walter White give away a valuable product to generate demand and ultimately make a fortune is a great analogy for many in Silicon Valley.

At this year’s F8 Developers conference in San Francisco, Facebook announced the creation of a new development platform for their Messenger app and previewed "Business on Messenger".

Now, I have no doubt that "Business on Messenger" will become an incredibly useful tool for engaging in real-time conversations with customers. But I also have no idea about how much it’s ultimately going to cost. That worries me, and I think with good reason. If Facebook’s current business model is anything to go by I suspect it’s certainly not going to be free, except maybe at the beginning.

How do I know this? I’m basing my assumption on two things: firstly, what Facebook has done before and secondly, the lessons I’ve learned from watching Breaking Bad.

HEISENBERG

In Breaking Bad, Walter White became Heisenberg, the High Meth Lord of Albuquerque, simply by creating dependency: giving away a great product for free and then jacking up the price once everyone’s hooked — and of course killing and maiming anyone who got in his way, but that’s beside the point.

My point is that I suspect that there are a few Breaking Bad fans at Facebook too, maybe even some in the business development department? Perhaps after binge-watching five seasons of Walter & Jessie’s adventures they realized that having encouraged Facebook’s users to build a following of their Business Pages for free, those same users were now dependent. As a consequence, they could now be gently encouraged to pay just to stay in contact with their followers — and maybe pay even more to get new ones.

Even better, unlike Walter White — who had to deal with scumbags like psychopath Tuco Salamanca and the very neat but utterly ruthless Gustavo Fring to build up his distribution network — Facebook’s users had done all the hard work themselves: they’d built up their own distribution network that Facebook owned and could now monetize in any way it liked.

Up until last year, many of the smaller businesses on Facebook — the micropreneurs building a personal company of one or two employees, or any of the burgeoning "maker movement" of artisanal whiskey distilleries, custom bike shops, bags & accessories manufacturers etc — found that even the huge amount of work it took to build up a loyal fan base on a Facebook Business Page was a great way of bootstrapping their business. In fact it had become one of THE prerequisites of building a new small company in the digital age.

But in 2014, Facebook changed the way organic reach for businesses worked. Shortly afterwards some companies saw engagement with their latest posts plummet to just 1% or 2% of their total number of followers. Unless of course, they were prepared to pay. And many did, albeit reluctantly.

And many users felt used. They were concerned that after building their pages and their following for free, they were now hooked on Facebook’s business platform and would have no choice but to pay. Facebook denied money was the motivation. In a blog post, Brian Boland expressly addressed the question:

Is organic reach dropping because Facebook is trying to make more money?

"No. Our goal is always to provide the best experience for the people that use Facebook. We believe that delivering the best experiences for people also benefits the businesses that use Facebook."

Which in many ways makes complete sense of course: anything that Facebook can do to reduce the plethora of appallingly crass ads that often turn up in a user’s news feed has to be a good thing. But then again, it doesn’t entirely make sense because crass ads will inevitably show up in your news feed if the company behind them is prepared to pay to boost them. Money, as we all know, is no guarantee of taste.

USING A SLEDGEHAMMER TO CRACK A NUT

Now, at this point I should stress that I absolutely believe in any company's right to monetize its services and Facebook is no different; they’re not a charity. These changes are exactly what we all signed up for when we accepted Facebook’s terms & conditions and, unlike Walter White, no-one was holding a gun to our heads.

But even so, it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I feel as though I’ve been hoodwinked by some dodgy 1980’s New York street hustle and that I should have known better. And I am not alone in feeling this way.

In the run up to FBF8, I spoke to many people I know who rely on their Facebook Business Page for a significant portion of their marketing and asked them for their thoughts on Facebook. The overwhelming majority seem to feel a sense of trepidation; that they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some want to leave Facebook altogether, but after working so hard to build up a loyal following by creating great content that people (quite literally) "liked," they don’t want to just abandon it.

Yet if they stay, their biggest concern is that if they don’t pay, many of their followers may never hear from them again. Some of the people I spoke won’t pay on principle; others say they simply can’t afford to pay on a regular basis. But regardless, all grudgingly accept the fact that the Facebook free ride is over.

'FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU; FOOL ME TWICE, SHAME ON ME'

So what’s the solution, is there an alternative? Well, you could take a leaf out of Walter White’s Breaking Bad School of Business Development and find a way, regardless of the challenge, to keep your options open, and diversify your distribution across several networks. That way, if one network becomes compromised (or becomes too expensive), it’s not going to take your whole company down to drop it.

Luckily, there are a number of alternatives to choose from — though some admittedly are better than others. In addition to Facebook, there’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Vine and Instagram (yes, yes, I know it’s owned by Facebook), Medium, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Google+ (for now), Ello, Meerkat and, as of yesterday, Periscope. Yes, there are tons of options, but maybe the best one is to just use all of them.

If this years F8 Developer Conference was anything to go by, it’s clear that Facebook are working on some genuinely new and exciting ways for us to integrate more of our business directly into the Facebook platform.

But as President George W Bush famously misquoted, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Regardless of any new shiny functionality or tantalizing features that Facebook may introduce, I think all of us would be wise to retain a healthy wariness about becoming overly reliant on a technology platform which may limit our options in the future; we need to hedge our bets.

After all, for those of us who also watched all the five seasons of Breaking Bad, we too saw the price Walter White had to pay to get out in the end.