When Facebook Launched: Marketing In 2004

Facebook celebrates its 10th birthday this week, which made me wonder: What did marketing in 2004 look like?

I was there, of course. Maybe you were, too. But time has a funny way of recasting memories. (Which explains how my siblings and I sometimes have annoyingly different takes on our childhood.)

In marketing and perhaps in life, it’s easy to notice how much things have changed. In February of 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com from his Harvard dorm room, it entered what seemed at the time like a crowded social media world. Friendster, Classmates.com, Habbo, and MySpace all preceded Facebook.

And remember FullCircle? Me, neither.

It seems cute and provincial to think of that time before Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vine, Slideshare, and the rest as “crowded,” doesn’t it? This was before content marketing was a thing; before Big Data was our big daddy; before his first infographic was a twinkle in Joe Chernov‘s eye. But in some respects, the more things change… the more they stay the same.

While we have lots of new tools and new techniques and new tactics and new headlines and new jobs and new complexities and new words and new platforms… at the same time, the broad issues marketers face remain pretty much the same. And some of the strongest voices 10 years ago remain strong voices today.

Take a look:

Top Business Stories of 2004

• Martha Stewart goes to prison
• Oil crosses the $50/barrel mark
• The fall of the value of the dollar ($1.36 to 1 euro)
• Elliot Spitzer scandal
• Google went public for $85/share, marking the first successful IPO by a major internet business since the end of the tech boom
• More than 200 companies went for IPOs (the most since 2000)
• Sprint/Nextel merger, Cingular/AT&T merger
• Airlines filing for bankruptcy: United, US Airways, Aloha Airlines, and more
• Mortgage rates dropped and demand for housing soared

Top Tech Trends and Internet Culture in 2004

• JibJab produces a video that goes viral during the 2004 presidential election featuring George Bush and John Kerry singing This Land Is Your Land
• Bluetooth – keyboards, headsets, PCs with built-in Bluetooth capabilities
• DVR built in to TV boxes (the beginning of the end of TiVo?)
• Early video blogs
• new iPod competition and video iPods
• High megapixel phones

Marketing Books Published in 2004

• Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World by Seth Godin
• Ten Deadly Marketing Sins by Philip Kotler
• The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing by Bill Nussey
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR by Al Ries and Laura Ries

Leading Companies of 2004
(measured by a composite of sales, profits, assets and market value)

• Citigroup
• General Electric
• AIG
• Wal-Mart
• BP

Worst Companies of 2004
(according to Multinational Monitor)

• Wal-Mart (for poor treatment of its workers and general egregious behavior)
• Coca-Cola (for failing to protect its work force in Colombia from paramilitary violence)
• AIG (for financial insurance shenanigans)
• Dow ChemicalGlaxoSmithKline (for marketing antidepressant Paxil to children and allegedly suppressing evidence of the drug’s harm to children)
• Hardee’s (for introducing the 1,420-calorie Monster Thickburger, redefining “whooper”)

Top Google Searches in 2004

1. Britney Spears
2. Paris Hilton
3. Christina Aguilera

2004 Word of the Year: Blog
(according to Merriam-Webster)

Top Stories of 2004 on MarketingProfs

• Internet Marketing Motto: Be Useful by Gerry McGovern
• 1o Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis by Nick Wreden
• How to Host a Successful Webinar by Todd Davison

Marketing Jobs That Didn’t Exist (or Barely Existed) 10 Years Ago

• Social media manager
• Online community manager
• Corporate blogger
• Chief Content Officer (Since I invented this title in the late 1990s when I was President and CCO at ClickZ, I’m pretty sure that makes me the first Chief Content Officer, period.)

Top Marketing and Advertising Blogs
(winners of MarketingSherpa’s 2004 “Reader’s Choice” awards)

• Steve Hall’s Adrants (individual blog)
• AdLand (group blog)
• CanuckFlack (PR)
• Dana’s Blog (B2B) (now MarketingSavant)
• John Jantsch’s Duct Tape Marketing (small business)
• Search Engine Lowdown (online marketing) (now Marketing Pilgrim)

Top Email Mistakes of 2004
(curated from a MarketingSherpa list)

• Thinking CAN-SPAM doesn’t apply to all commercial email.
• Not asking people how often they want to hear from you.
• Launching new newsletters to one list without asking whether subscribers want it.

Top Web Analytics Problems of 2004
(according to Jim Sterne on MarketingProfs)

• So many tools, so  little time.
• Tools (check!), reports (check!), analysts… (ummmm.)
• Putting data to use.

Best Websites of 2004
(among the top 50 ranked by Time magazine)

• National Geographic
• Engadget
• Bloglines
• FreshDirect
• FFFBI

Sources: Merriam-Webster, Forbest Top Tech Trends, BBC, NPR, Time magazine, MarketingProfs, MarketingSherpa, Forbes Leading Companies List, Multinational Monitor.