Are Google and Facebook fighting the “Cold war” of the Internet Age?

As a child of the Cold War years between the capitalist USA and the socialist USSR, I was struck by how the ultimate internet capitalists Google, are now under attack from a rapidly expanding Facebook Social revolution within the mobile space.

Facebook’s presentation at last week’s PhocusWright conference in Delhi, India, spelled out just how dominant the Facebook group are becoming in the mobile app space.

Although the average smartphone user has 27 apps on their phone, 80% of usage is concentrated within just 4 apps, with the Facebook group owning the top 4 downloaded apps in Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. However, the most prominent platform, Facebook, with its 1.5 billion active users has struggled to prove its commercial benefits to business.

Gaining likes and fans, has simply not delivered a ROI, and even Facebook’s massive remarketing capability is delivering questionable results. Yes, Facebook does provide the fastest remarketing platform, with users dipping in and out of Facebook frequently via their mobile phones.

However, these customers are in a social mode and accessing the internet via a smartphone. Is this an environment likely to drive booking conversion? I personally don’t think so, and would this marketing exist without Google to complement it?

The explosion of Messaging with 60 billion daily messages, which out guns traditional Text SMS messaging three to one, may provide a more commercial tool for business.

Facebook recently announced a set of “Chatbot” tools for business, which could revolutionise how businesses interact with their customers. Just as customers simply look up friends in Messenger to start chatting to them, they can now do the same with businesses. In turn business can use Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to allow electronic “Concierges” to chat with customers in order to answer their questions at incredibly low cost.

Post booking customer service is an obvious area to explore, with FAQ’s being databased and used to answer questions in a semantic language way, where customers can pose free form questions and enter into an extending conversation, until their questions have been fully answered.

However, it’s the contextualisation of the mobile sales process that interests me most. Much of our mobile usage takes place whilst travelling on trains, or in public places where phone conversations are less practical or desirable. However, imagine being able to start a travel enquiry by having a “chat” about potential destinations and dates? Chatbots can engage with customers to refine requirements before queuing the sales lead to a call centre agent, to make a call at an agreed time to run through pre-qualified options using co-browsing technologies. Change is coming fast!

Using 50m users as a benchmark allows us to see the massive acceleration in technology roll out and adoption speeds. Radio took 38 years, TV 13 years, but internet 4 years, Facebook 3.5 years and iPods 3 years. However, in today’s mobile enabled world, games like Temple Run 2 only took 13 days!

Secondly, we are beginning to see the spread of Apps into environments outside of the smartphone space. Shortly we will be seeing car dashboards and smart TV’s in hotel rooms, equipped with apps so that we can simply login to media apps, like Spotify, BBC iPlayer and Sky Go, to allow our music and TV services to be personalised to our specific tastes and requirements. Inevitably, this will lead to apps becoming more integrated into our daily lives, which in turn will drive further use of this ecosystem and, in particular, single login tools such as Facebook’s.

So although, to date, the Socialists at Facebook have lagged behind the massively profitable Google, relying on the potential of their huge reach to fund expansion. But the tide of the war seems to be shifting and massive profits will follow if Facebook can use the rapid migration to mobile to drive transactional revenue via Chatbots and commercial messaging.

The Cold War between the Facebook and Google ecosystems may be just about to really heat up.