A Report on Facebook Social Networking Corporation

Facebook is a multinational company that offers online social networking services. It was founded in 2004 by five Harvard students. Those founders are Mark Zuckerburg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The company began in 2003 and was called Facemash back then, but was shut down two days later by the university. Then, in 2004, it became known as Facebook and was used by the university students and then it spread to other prestigious universities’ students and by the end of 2004 it would reach one million active users. Facebook was announced the largest social network in the world in 2012 with more than one billion users at that time. Now more than 2.5 billion users are on Facebook. The company’s headquarters are in Menlo Park, California.

The Organizational culture of facebook is very important in the development of the company. It is how it maintains its competitiveness and promotes creativity and innovation among the employees. Facebook’s culture is a hacker culture as described by facebook inc.. It’s a culture that pushes the employees to strive for improvement. Among the most important characteristics of Facebook’s organizational culture are creative problem solving and decision making, boldness, openness, speed, and continuous improvement. The creative problem solving and decision making culture pushes employees to come up with unusual ideas. The boldness culture helps improve the company’s flexibility when dealing with issues. For example, it encourages employees to tackle issues right away and on their own instead of waiting for the senior management to solve them. Openness highlights the importance of internal communication between employees and minimizes restrictions on employees’ activities. For example, the company encourages employees to focus on problems they think are most important, thus enhancing the workers’ problem solving ability. The speed feature is what helps facebook be able to respond quickly to trends and changes in the users’ preferences. This feature is implemented through the use of small teams that are flexible and move fast. The facebook company believes that improvement is a never ending process, thus uses the continuous improvement feature to continuously iterate products and to regularly evaluate its websites, apps, and products.

Facebook supports its social media business through its social initiatives that address all its diverse users’ interests and thus requires global standards. For example, it must maintain the privacy that satisfies different standards. A recent social initiative is the caring reaction they added, which enables users with different social standards to show their care and improve the users’ relationship with each other. There are different groups that Facebook takes into consideration when approaching their social initiatives. Those groups are users, advertisers, employees, governments, and communities. Facebook takes the green approach into great consideration. Its carbon emission is relatively small compared to google inc. for example. It’s only 258000 metric tons of co2 annually, while google’s is 1.5 million tons per year. The company is taking many actions to become greener. For example, in 2011, it announced that it will build a green data center in Sweden taking advantage of the country’s temperature to keep the servers cool. Facebook also announced that they are “committed to remove our greenhouse gas footprint by 75% and reaching 100% renewable energy by 2020”.as quoted by the Facebook website “We believe sustainability is about more than operating responsibly. It’s an opportunity to support the communities we’re a part of and make a positive impact on the world.”, it is clear that Facebook green approach is the market approach where facebook responds to the preferences of customers for environmentally friendly products. Facebook is working to minimize their energy, emissions, and water impact and protect their workers and the environment and partner with others to develop and share solutions. The social initiatives have a great impact on facebook. For example, Facebook works very hard every year to develop new features that would help protect the privacy of users more. Facebook also takes other actions such as addressing advertisers’ interest that include effective and efficient advertising services through automated reporting to minimize human intervention. Facebook also meets their employees interests which include high compensation and career development through competitive human resource policies. For example, Facebook gives the highest salaries.

Facebook is operating in basically all the countries except a few where it is banned. Those countries are China, North Korea, Syria, and Iran. Facebook definitely has a geocentric point of view. It believes that it is very important to have a world-oriented view and benefit from the diversity of its employees. The Facebook website states that “Hiring people with different backgrounds and points of view helps us make better decisions, build better products and create better experiences for everyone.”. Facebook finds it very important to hire highly qualified people from underrepresented groups to benefit from their big variety of perspectives and experiences that would help provide the products that are truly designed for everybody. Facebook started only in Harvard university and was available to people with Harvard emails, but by the end of 2004, membership expanded to nearly all US universities and also reached canadian universities. Facebook then continues to expand to universities and high schools in countries such as Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, the UK, and Ireland. It was not until September 2006 that Facebook became open to anyone over 13 with an email address. Facebook had officially gone global by then.

The main growth strategy of Facebook is diversification, both related and unrelated. For example, Facebook allied with the company Oculus VR to offer virtual reality technology in the social networks. Another example is that Facebook coordinates with governments to allow their citizens to have access to Facebook. Moreover, Facebook makes alliances with telecommunications companies to increase the number of users who access Facebook through the mobile app. For example, in Vodafone, there are offers and packages only made for accessing Facebook. When doing a SWOT analysis on Facebook we find that it has many strengths that makes it one of (if not) the biggest social networks platform. The main strengths of Facebook are strong band image, large consumer base, high revenues, and innovative workforce. Those strengths bring a lot of benefits to the company. For example, the large consumer base encourages more people to join Facebook and attracts more advertisers. On the other hand, Facebook suffers from a few weaknesses such as imitable products and services, negative impacts on advertisements on users’ experiences, and low diversification in business. Facebook’s websites, mobile apps, and other services are imitable in terms of basic features, which makes the company vulnerable to competition. Facebook has a number of opportunities that will help it grow more. Those opportunities include business diversification, product innovation, and market penetration and development. There are several threats that Facebook faces including imitation, cyber crime, and market saturation. Imitation is a big threat because there are other companies that can develop social networks similar to Facebook and that adapt Facebook’s features. Those weaknesses can limit Facebook’s growth and market share.

One of the most important roles that Mark Zuckerberg played in 2020 is the decisional role. During the events of 2020 and the covid-19 crisis it was important to decide the plan of the next months to ensure safety of the employees while staying productive. Zuckerberg decided that employees will be allowed to work from home throughout the summer and that all major events will be cancelled such as the annual software developer conference. Those actions make Zuckerberg a disturbance handler. He was also a resource allocator in 2020 when providing the employees with portal video-calling devices. He also gave 1,000$ bonuses to the employees for working from home. Although Zuckerberg can sometimes be an autocratic leader by sometimes making decisions on his own and not consulting his subordinates, he is considered a democratic leader. That is because he is very open to suggestions from subordinates and gives them the opportunities to speak and share their ideas. His leading style promotes better job satisfaction and higher productivity based on innovation and creativity.

Overall, I approve of the way the company operates and its leading style. I think it’s very important to be open to diversity and new ideas that lead to innovation, which is very clear in the company’s culture. Also, i like the leading style which is aggressive and firm, but also encouraging and enables employees to perform at their best and be competitive. Grace S., an employee says 'At orientation, they tell you, ‘This is your company now.’ Those words are quite literally painted on the walls. It’s a pretty amazing thing — from day one, your voice matters.', which proves how friendly the work environment is. I also like the way the company respects the users’ culture and differences and does its best to ensure all the customers are satisfied and feel that they are in a safe environment.

References

1. “Facebook Inc.’s Generic Strategy & Intensive Growth Strategies”,Roberta Greenspan, May 23 2018, http://panmore.com/facebook-inc-generic-strategy-intensive-growth-strategies
2. “Facebook Inc.’s Organizational Culture (An Analysis)”, Jessica Lombardo, 6 June 2018, http://panmore.com/facebook-inc-organizational-culture-characteristics-analysis
3. “Facebook Inc. SWOT Analysis & Recommendations”, JUNE 14, 2018, JUSTIN YOUNG, http://panmore.com/facebook-inc-swot-analysis-recommendations
4. “Facebook Inc. Corporate Social Responsibility & Stakeholder Analysis”, JUNE 20, 2018, DANIEL KISSINGER, http://panmore.com/facebook-inc-stakeholders-corporate-social-responsibilities
5. 'A study of the management style of Mark Zuckerberg.' GradesFixer, 11 Dec. 2018, https://gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/a-study-of-the-management-style-of-mark-zuckerberg/. Accessed 26 May 2020.
6. “Zuckerberg: Facebook canceling large events through June 2021, will allow employees to work from home through the summer”, 16 April 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/16/zuckerberg-facebook-canceling-large-events-through-june-2021.html
7. https://about.fb.com/company-info/
8. “The History of Facebook: From BASIC to Global Giant”, Joshua Boyd, 25 Jan. 2019, https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/history-of-facebook/
9. “Mark Zuckerberg leadership style”, Universitas Gadjah Mada, 2017, https://www.studocu.com/id/document/universitas-gadjah-mada/manajemen/lecture-notes/mark-zuckerberg-leadership-style/2954304/view
10. “Facebook reveals its carbon footprint”, Adam Vaughan, 12 Aug. 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/01/facebook-google-carbon-footprint
11. “Facebook”, Mark Hall, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Facebook