Joel Ewanick announced this weekend that he was resigning as head of global marketing for General Motors. The marketing chief's immediate departure comes as GM is struggling with falling market share after some controversial changes to its advertising strategy, including the automaker's surprising decision to not advertise in this year's Super Bowl, as well as its high-profile move to abandon its Facebook advertising program during the same week that the social giant launched its notorious IPO. "Joel failed to meet the expectations the company has of its employees,...
The damage keeps piling up on Facebook. The social giant's stock hit a new low late last week after it reported second-quarter results that disappointed investors. The stock fell nearly 15 percent in morning trading Friday. The stock is now about 39 percent below its IPO price. Facebook issued its first financial report as a public company after the market closed Thursday. Facebook reported stronger-than-expected revenue and a gain in user numbers, but investors weren't impressed. Although revenue grew 32 percent in the second quarter, growth has slowed from earlier this year and from previous years. That's a concern for a...
Facebook's advertising platform has lately been the subject of much scrutiny, especially in the wake of the social giant's IPO fiasco — and the linchpin behind the company's fall from grace might have been General Motors' IPO-day announcement that its Facebook advertising wasn't working, and the consequential public falling-out between the two companies. For much of the time since, Facebook has struggled to keep its appeal to marketers — and hence its share values — up. This week's news that GM and Facebook are in talks to rekindle their marketing relationship could be the spark that the...
It's been a month since Facebook's IPO fell flat and in that time, the market for initial public offerings has collapsed — not a single company has gone public since May 18, compared with 19 in the same period a year ago. Fourteen offerings have been withdrawn or delayed, according to Dealogic. Of course, thanks to the European debt crisis, financial markets haven't been terribly conducive to IPOs. Still, venture capitalists say the fallout from Facebook's rocky IPO is making companies — especially those in the technology sector — cautious about going public. "It pretty much wiped the...
Facebook's growth appears to be slowing, particularly in the U.S., according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Unique U.S. visitors to the wildly popular social media site rose 5 percent in April to 158 million, according to data attributed to comScore — the slowest growth rate since comScore started tracking data in 2008. Users spent more than six hours a month on the site in April, up 16 percent from the prior year. Still, that's a slower growth rate than the 23 percent increase in 2011, according to comScore data cited in the report. Investors are concerned about Facebook's ability to...
Not long ago, Facebook was a juggernaut hurtling through cyberspace without a care in the world, except protecting the privacy of its users (a concern that some say it never treated with much urgency anyway). Well, the site is still a juggernaut, except now it's plodding along (rather than hurtling) because of all the heavy baggage it's carrying in its post-IPO phase. And according to a new poll from Reuters and Ipsos, privacy is no longer the company's chief worry — it's obsolescence. The new survey of users found that 34 percent of them spend less time on the site than they did half...
By Dan Janal, Author, "Reporters Are Looking for YOU!"; President, PRLEADSPLUS.com
Facebook's shares are not climbing the stratosphere and everyone is wondering why. Here are 12 reasons.
- The public is not as dumb as Wall Street thinks. They've been through numerous tulip bulb fantasies before and have seen them blow up in their faces. Maybe the small investor is becoming risk averse.
- Where's the money? Every day we read that people don't have money to pay their mortgages and...
Posted on The Flack blog on May 29th by Peter Himler
I've been meaning to pen a follow-up to my post from a week ago on Facebook's advertising strategy, but the company's now infamous IPO quickly suffocated any opening for a fresh take from a PR (and personal) POV. Yes, readers, I too believed Mark, Sheryl and the bubblicious hyperbole that streamed from the tech, media and marketing pundits I've blindly chosen to follow on Twitter.
To say that Facebook's debut as a public company was bungled is something like saying Facebook is a website you might have heard of — either way, a colossal understatement. The response from small-time investors has been equal parts frustration, confusion and bitterness. Fed up, some are dumping their shares and accepting the losses. Others, while miffed, are holding on and hoping to ride the stock's eventual success. Some blame themselves for embracing the hype over a company whose underlying value likely didn't merit the price at which it went public. But many accuse Facebook and its underwriting banks of setting the...
Even as investors watched their Facebook shares drop over the last week, Morgan Stanley and other underwriters of the company's IPO likely racked up big profits trading the social media company's shares — in fact, those banks were positioned to make more money the lower Facebook's shares went, according to a Fortune report. Of course, in Wall Street's special way, no rules appear to have been broken — IPO experts say what Morgan and Facebook's other underwriters likely did is a common practice on Wall Street, though little understood outside of IPO circles. It was even disclosed in...
