Arnold Waldstein's Blog

The cloud is one of the great equalizers for companies doing global business.

Whether its Amazon’s EC2 or another service, building your offering in the cloud is a game changer. I’m not talking about the obvious upsides of storage, scalability and the beauty of having both without sunk capital on servers and infrastructure. I’m thinking about marketing and the leveling effect that the cloud has across geographies and computer owners.

Facebook’s new plateau of 350M users prompted me to look at this from a distribution and marketing point of view.

Facebook users by country.

1. United States                    94,748,820

2. United Kingdom                22,261,080

3. Turkey                               14,215,880

4. France                                13,396,760

5. Canada                              13, 228,380

6. Italy                                   12,581,060

7. Indonesia                          11,759,980

8. Spain                                    7,313,160

9. Australia                              7,176,640

10. Philippines                         6,991,040

(numbers from “Social Media Matters, Building Brands on Facebook”)

Turkey #3, Indonesia #7 and the Philippines #10 are the ones that catch the marketers and business modeler’s eye. Surprising high user numbers in countries that have low computer penetration.

When you match this list against the top 15 countries for PC and computer penetration per capita, Turkey, Indonesia and the Philippines don’t show on the list at all. These countries, as expected fall into the ‘Have Nots’ as regards to computer ownership. No surprise here but just checking.

The ‘why’ of this is simple actually.

If you stick all the computing power and storage in the cloud, and make your client-side download tiny or nil your market becomes infinite in concept. Yes, this can be costly to initiate, and surprisingly hard to set up and difficult to manage but possible if you are motivated enough to figure it out. Your users have PCs in ‘Have’ countries, phones and netbooks in ‘Have Less’ countries and in places like Turkey, Indonesia and the Philippines, some combo of phones and an Internet Café culture. So putting the weight and smarts in the cloud and little to nothing on the client side, lets your value be found and used regardless of the PC footprint. Likewise, an almost global market.

This is not true Democratization of access as it costs and separates out those without capital, but for Facebook and a host of other services and applications, this creates a one-world flattened marketplace.

I’ve been ranting for a while that marketing in today’s world, is not about add-on campaigns or line items, it’s about thinking through how to discover your market with the product or service itself, from inception. Whether for Facebook this was forethought or afterthought is irrelevant as it is the reality of their success.

Cheaper smart phones and netbooks will drive folks out of the Internet Café’s possibly to park benches and coffee shops across the world but the reality remains the same.

Draw three big circles: Global. Mobile. Social. And where they intersect is one universal market.

The cloud is the glue that can make them work from San Diego to Bangladesh to wherever if the offering is compelling enough. I like this. A flattened world engenders democratic access, at least in concept. As a marketer and businessperson, this is a powerful and empowering realization.