Learning and sharing... by Zoe Sands

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones — the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they’re thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small — with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people’s capacity to build and maintain relationships. People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families — creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.

View the original letter and Facebook IPO document.

Last night I attended an event organised and hosted by the Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing themed ”Engineering your Business for Digital” (I was live tweeting at the event, to check out the tweets fro last night go to Twitter and search on #idmdigital). The event consisted of a presentation from Richard Hartigan of Google; where he outlined the changes in digital looking back at the past 10 years to now. None of which was new to me having been working in digital since 1997, I’ve seen and been party to a lot of the significant changes in online marketing. But what stuck accord with me was the panel discussion, which one of my friends Tim Bush, Microsoft was on. The general consensus of the panel was that organisations shouldn’t rely on agencies to deliver digital marketing excellence and that organisations should invest in up skilling their marketing teams with knowledge on how to execute the digital toolbox efficiently and effectively in integrated marketing campaigns. All too often organisations are lead by agencies because marketing teams capabilities lie in project management are inexperienced in leading and driving digital strategies and plans themselves.

In these austere times increasingly marketers and in particular digital marketers are under greater pressure to create and implement effective digital marketing campaigns on little or no budget and without the assistance and support of agencies. Without strong digital skills and knowledge these marketers will find themselves pigeon holed into project management roles and missing out on strategic communication, digital and marketing roles.

Education is key for a successful digital marketing career

As a digital veteran I have always been keen to maintain both my digital and project management skills as I feel it opens up many more career opportunities. Education doesn’t have to mean expensive intensive courses; you can support your learning by attending conferences, exhibitions, open courses, online courses, reading books and blogs all of which should help you keep up to speed on the ever changing world of digital marketing.

Often as a digital marketer your marketing team or other departments will be looking at you to be an educator on digital best practice and be able to implement that knowledge into actual digital campaigns, programmes, processes and procedures. So, I would urge all digital marketers to develop a lifelong learning approach to online marketing. If you’re unsure where or who to study with when it comes to digital education, then check out the following reputable organisations;

The Chartered Institute of Marketing
The Institute of Direct and Digital Marketing
Econsultancy

All of whom have accredited professional short and long digital marketing courses and qualifications.

After 15 years working in digital, I’ve recently started my IDM Diploma in Digital Marketing, which I should finish in December 2012. I decided to undertake this qualification because I wanted my experience professionally validated; you may have other reasons why you want to start your digital education journey, whatever it is good luck with your studies.