PR/marketing gurus can take a leaf from the new social networking platform Ello, which went viral last week as a self-proclaimed 'anti-advertisement' social networking platform.The branding of Ello as anti-advertisement and 'anti-Facebook' has generated impressive media buzz for the San Francisco based start-up. Ello has capitalised on the bad publicity Facebook has received over the past year; from manipulating over 700, 000 user's emotions via their newsfeeds, forcing users onto their standalone Messenger app, and the LGBTIQ community's recent vocal objections to Facebook's strict 'real name' policy.
This in itself is very telling, the media buzz Ello received over the past fortnight has less to do with the longevity of the platform itself, but more a growing consensus that people are tired of Facebook treating users like 'products', through selling user data and paid ads spamming people's newsfeeds.
What is Ello?
Ello is a new social network that promises to be fast, fun and ad free- their emphasis on no advertisements and user data mining helped to quickly define their brand, dubbed by many as the 'anti-Facebook.' The concept for the platform was born out of a dissatisfaction with the paid ads cluttering the current social media platforms at play, and the company explained, "we began to feel manipulated by the networks themselves- many of our posts were never seen by our friends at all, because ads had taken priority." If Facebook has taken all the fun out of social networking, Ello has promised to inject it back in.
Paul Budnitz, founder of Ello, says Facebook is not their competition, making the observation that Facebook has largely become an advertising platform. With Facebook's increased push for paid advertising and its newsfeed algorithm designed to prioritise paid content, it's hard to dispute this observation. It is still too early to make a call on how Ello will permanently slot itself in the social media landscape, and there is nothing in the beta features that is remarkably different from what you see on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. Indeed Ello can be seen as a convergence of the basic features from existing social networking platforms, tied together with the attractive strictly 'no ads' policy.
Facebook continues to dominate the social media landscape, with 1.32bn active monthly users as of June 2014. People are not necessarily leaving Facebook for Ello, but with the impressive 40,000 requests per hour for an Ello account as of this week, it would suggest users are no longer brand loyal to the company. Princeton researchers predicted in January that Facebook would lose 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017. If the brand continues to be perceived as untrustworthy and out of touch with user's needs, emerging new platforms such as Ello may very well prove to be fatal to the social media behemoth.
