Facebook Is So Big, Summit Can’t Ignore It

By Mike Farrell and Kent Gibbons -- Multichannel News, 3/15/2010 12:19:01 PM

More evidence that Facebook is unavoidable: the social-media giant was a sometimes hot topic of conversation at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek Media Summit in New York last week.

During a panel session on the Economics of Media, participants were asked if media had reached a “crescendo moment” with 400 million Facebook users worldwide. Maybe, but Univision Interactive Media president Kevin Conroy said the types of audience engagement on Facebook and the TV are vastly different.

“Television continues, as a single-reach vehicle, to reach the most people at any given point in time,” Conroy said. “People are not consuming media with Facebook … Social media is a piece of the puzzle, it’s not the puzzle.”

In a keynote on March 10, CNN president Jonathan Klein said he was more afraid of Facebook than of rival Fox News Channel.

Klein said Facebook “friends” are trusted sources of information for many members, which presents new challenges to news networks. “We don’t want the 1,000 people you follow on Twitter to be the most trusted source to you and yet, I mean, face it … you listen to their recommendations,” he said. “You trust them. And that’s a challenge, and we have to rise to that challenge. So I’m far more worried about 500 million people on Facebook than I am about 2 million people watching Fox.”

MediaCom North America CEO Doug Checkeris perhaps put the phenomenon in the best perspective.

“My 17-year-old and my 19-year-old are on Facebook, and I’m their ‘friend,’” Checkeris said. “How long can that last?”