The most talked about company award this week goes to Facebook (FB), thanks to their IPO which launches on the Nasdaq tomorrow. They’ve set the share price range at between $34 and $38 for 421.2 million shares and it’s oversubscribed by as much as 25 times.

But there are those sceptics who say the price can’t be justified as their current earnings of $3.2bn make the whole thing look like a magic trick. The Wall Street Journal indicates that professional investors are selling their holdings as they don’t feel there’s a lot of upside on the pricing. Here’s some thoughts on its strengths/weaknesses:

On the worrying side
Zuckerberg maybe Mr-Down-to-earth, but what if he leaves? Some fear that the company, as valuable as it is, wouldn’t be as good (whatever that definition is) at scaling and providing ROI without him. It’s Apple without Jobs, Virgin without Branson, The Stones without Jagger. Zuck is trusted at the moment to put the company first – he’s turned down small fortunes to fulfill his dream of a connected world. A market capitalisation of $100billion on one pair of shoulders creates risk.

Trends change. Levi jeans were cool, but when an overweight Jeremy Clarkson wears them every day, the 17-year-old with a nose stud would rather drink creosote than be seen in a pair of 501s. The fear here, is that will kids just skip Facebook for ‘the next big thing.’ When your folks, your grandparents and school teacher are on FB, suddenly it doesn’t feel so cool does it? Its popularity may actually hurt it.

Perhaps there’s social media fatigue coming. I don’t buy that entirely, the social genie has well and truly left the lamp. There may be the need for more personal, more friend-orientated platforms and not the ubiquitous, chase-down-your-ex-boyfriend that is FB, but 900 million users aren’t going to stop engaging en mass. MySpace and Friends Reunited may have shriveled but social contact didn’t die with them.

Ads are where the money guys are thinking but if it’s ‘social’ you’re looking for, a raw advert is arguably out of place. These will become largely ignored like the ubiquitous banner, unlike when you’re Googling for something.

That said, they are growing their ad business: $3.2bn last year up from $272mn in 2008, but GM is an A-lister who’s ditching their paid-for ads on FB. One small hole doesn’t sink the ship but will others be looking at jumping due to a poor ROI and a fear of FB’s need to milk them dry and grow revenue?

Mobile is how we prefer our social lives with over 50% of FB’s daily users using mobile for the platform (80% of UK twitter use is via mobile). Unfortunately for Zuck it’s far more difficult to provide mobile ads that don’t infringe on the user experience on the small screen.

Sponsored stories (i.e. another form of paid adverts) are where you vote for something and FB turn that vote (and your profile photo) and posts it out to your friends. They charge for this and believe there’s growth there.

On the plus side
FB get 30% of revenue from gaming and apps. This is definitely set to increase as popularity grows.

Despite their $3.2mn in sales which are heading north (perhaps towards $6bn this year), I somehow can’t believe that’s where their true growth will come from. Facebook is arguably the web’s barometer. As you browse online, they are collecting your every click, even off Facebook. They know what you really like not just what you tell the world you like by clicking the thumb icon.

This is the ultimate PhD study of humans’ digital habits. Big Data is the understatement of the year. This is where their value lies – in data mining on scales never seen before. Not even the credit card companies could come close to matching this jigsaw of contact, profiles, postings, places and likes. It’s the holy grail of connectivity and insight. How much will Big Co pay for that? Will there be a backlash if they do?

The freemium pricing model works because you get to charge some of your power users. What’s stopping FB charging companies in the future for their pages? If you’re so embedded in the platform, they really would have you by the throat when they hit you with a £99 per year service charge. They would need to price the fee at a sweet spot and not scare off too many organizations with pages and hundreds or thousands of fans.

You get money from customers not users. Apple and Amazon have customers (and their credit cards in the system), FB has users. But there’s the huge opportunity here for payments and banking to go through FB as it’s got the unique user base of consumers plus companies. Add trust and brand equity to that and when I’m logged in via my phone and swipe it across the register in Starbucks, or Top Shop, or Sainsbury’s, money from my Facebook bank account could appear in their Facebook banks (along with a ‘like’, of course). Micro payments between individuals become a simple reality. I predict FB buying a company to give them a jump-start in this space and offering a huge convenience for its users (not the companies trying to sell to those users) whilst clocking up small commissions.

Honestly, I have no real idea about pricing shares but FB looks set to rise initially as the frenzy takes hold. But Zuck is going to have to push development heavily to innovate and generate revenue streams in areas as yet untapped and justify the price.

Side note worth remembering:
When the telephone was introduced in 1876, a Western Union internal memo noted: “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is of no value to us.“

Culture is surely the most nebulous of business concepts. It’s nigh on impossible to quantify accurately and just as difficult to effect. Its perception often looks very different from the reality within.

Steve Jobs’ autobiography pretty much confirms everything we already thought about the much-heralded Apple leader: he was bloody minded, rude, spoilt, obnoxious, argumentative, difficult, exacting, inspirational and perversely brilliant. I’m not sure your average head-hunter would put those attributes together for a great pitch but the semi-volatile culture he fostered (more than once) certainly worked.

Jobs got away with his emotional intelligence hang-ups because his product was first rate and sold, in the main, by the mother load. So instead of being a nasty dilettante, he’s called a visionary and master of artisan.

Greg Smith has spoken out this recently against Goldman Sach’s culture and bravo to him for taking such a whistleblower’s stand. The top execs have clearly fostered a culture of greed and a “decline in the firm’s moral fiber” at the detriment of wider business aspects.

The head of Tesco UK, Richard Brasher, arguably resigned because of Tesco’s culture. Their sales and market share have slid over recent years but their culture is that of trouncing the competition and nothing else will do. So chief exec, Philip Clarke is stepping across and Brasher had nowhere to go inside the retailer.

Sport constantly demonstrates cultural leadership too. Roman Abramovich is seeking his eighth manager in as many years as the owner of Chelsea Football Club. This isn’t the result of a broader strategy or tactics. At its core this is about Abramovich’s culture – be number 1 or go, immediately.

It’s not just the leaders who dictate the culture. That would be too easy. Everyone in the organisation contributes towards its culture. George Bush didn’t go to war on his own, his cabinet and senior teams went along for the ride too.

Given this is every bit as much about what we do as well as what we say, what are you doing for the culture of your organisation? Perhaps, more importantly: is it enough?

I went to a very mediocre business event recently that sold itself as, “A fast-paced, cutting-edge day, tailored to the needs of SMEs.” It was more like a school leaver’s guide to the Internet, at least, that was, until the final talk of the day.

They’d clearly saved the best until last as Penny Power came to the stage and silenced the theatre. She’s the founder of Ecademy.

Penny spoke of her passion for the Internet and how it’d enabled her to run her business from home whilst looking after her children. She listed plenty of personal new found gains and how she can now remain in touch with all her contacts until the day she dies (thanks to social media).

But what struck me most about her business roundup was how she categorised business leaders. People often say there are two types of people in the world, and they’re usually trying to narrow your thinking towards their central argument. As such it’s where I tend to switch off a little. But Penny’s take was refreshingly genuine:

a) the business change maker – is not content with the status quo, have an urge to do something and simply have to scratch it, find it impossible to conform when you know there’s a bigger or better way of things

b) the business trader – buy it, add a mark up and sell it. Find your suspect, prospect and then customer, then find more. Repeat.

If you could subscribe to this polarisation for a moment, which are you, the change maker or the trader? Are you on the side of the coin you want to be?

When someone is in need of a gardener (or a dentist, or plumber, or hair dresser…) and finds a competent practitioner for that role, at a reasonable cost, they tend to stay with that person or organisation for their future needs.

Providing cost doesn’t inflate massively or become prohibitive for other reasons (like losing your job) then things are set – AA Gardening can continue their gig, and Acme Hairdressing will get your business next month. If the service is good and the price is acceptable, why would you go elsewhere? Changing would only risk an inferior service and the added hassle of breaking new ground, so why do it to yourself?

I’m stretching a simple analogy, but is your service that of a competent gardener? It strikes me that we might want to reiterate this more often to our teams.

A former chairman of Marks & Spencer observed, “Customers are not loyal nor should they be. We have to earn their loyalty every day.”

The first email I read in the day is Chris Brogan’s and it’s usually before breakfast. He’s very revealing in a business sense and within that honesty you’ll often find gems of practical advice. His advice can be a little left field as he expounds about far more than just marketing per se by getting into some life and well-being thoughts, but it’s all very well received.

He wrote recently, Doing the Work is Sexy. From it, “I was an owner long before I was the boss. I owned my desk at my telephone company job, and that got me better opportunities, because I owned everything I could and make it my responsibility to do even more than the role required on paper. When I moved to my wireless telecom roles, I owned every one of them. I worked harder on projects that weren’t my assigned work while completing the job they paid me for as well.” This hit me squarely between the eyes.

I’ve been trying to articulate ‘ownership’ to my teams for over a decade with varying success. It’s surely the perennial problem of having others take responsibility for their world at work.

Owning and being responsible for projects, tasks, duties, etc means digging in and not pushing things back onto others. It’s seeing things through rather than dreaming up reasons and excuses why they didn’t float. It’s a buck-stops-here mentality, even though you may be well down the pecking order of the organisation chart.

Saying, “this is above my pay grade,” isn’t taking ownership. Neither are, “I don’t know why I didn’t complete X,” or, “sorry, I simply forgot,” or, “I never seem to find the time.”

The noun manager implies even more ownership. So synonymous is the relationship that you could actually switch job titles from Manager of X to Owner of X, but that would invoke a HR heart attack.

From what I’ve observed I’d say ownership is a mindset, albeit a difficult one to sustain. It comes at a personal cost as you invest more of yourself than your raw job description prescribes. Too few are willing to shoulder the commitment and resilience that owning your role demands. Yet, without blind luck and stumbling on good fortune, only through ownership can you ever become the boss. They go hand in hand, with ownership the first to be outstretched.

Side note:
Heston Blumenthal worked 120+ hours a week for 5 years. He took himself and his one employee to a huge team of chefs and three Michelin stars. He went from self-taught nobody to being mentioned in more or less every good restaurant guide in the world. That’s an awful lot of ownership.

When staff, especially service staff, say that customers where okay, it’s often not the case. “But they didn’t stay, they didn’t buy, they didn’t engage,” you reply.

Disgruntled, dissatisfied, unhappy customers don’t scream and shout or spill blood. They leave. Simple as that. They might moan to their partner in the car or once the phone is put down, but they’ll very rarely feedback constructively to your team and offer suggestions (unless they’re from New York!).

I’m never happy to receive a complaint from a customer because we’ve obviously caused a problem, but I welcome the chance to rectify the situation. Personally, I’d vote my with feet rather than write you an email, so I’m chuffed that people can try and help us improve and win them back as a customer.

But given that we know the majority simply walk, what are we doing to spot those signals and what comes next?

It’s easy to gush more wonderful adulation to Steve Jobs, but there’s a far better tribute to be made: start something.

A friend said tonight that it’d been a moving day. But he was also inspired when he thought of Jobs and the founding of Apple and Pixar. So inspired in fact that he registered two companies that he and his team had been talking about for months. These companies will move from mothballed thoughts to job-creating realism.

This is what our dire economy needs: innovation, inspiration and action (and perhaps that £75 billion in Q.E.).

Thanks for the virtuoso performance, Steve.

Amazon has shown itself as the first true competitor to Apple in the tablet war. The launch of the Kindle Fire this week is an audacious move to out-price the iPad with a dumbed-down system costing just $199.

Tablets are a future cornerstone for the world’s data consumption. As ever, Jobs lifted the curtain on that future and then he charged us a fortune to let us walk behind it. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has had the hindsight of not being the first mover – he’s seen others throw pebbles at the armour of Apple with their tablet efforts (HP’s TouchPad was surely the most ham-fisted go at it).

I agree with Jason Calacanis that price is the key here, as you need to flood the market to gain traction and lock out competitors. Of course the product needs to be sellable in the first instance. Free may convert latent demand but it doesn’t create demand. No price reduction is enough if the product is tat – you could stand on every street corner in the country selling Betamax recorders for 1p. If you’d raised a whole £1 after a year I’d be stunned.

Amazon also had the gumption to go big. To double down as the yanks would say. And it needs to be so audacious because the scale of winning in this tech war is simply stratospheric. It’s not just about a few million bucks on the hardware, that’s just the entry fee to the club. The real win is at the bar. Consumers are paying for data that the world thought would be free for all time until the App Store showed us otherwise.

And nowhere is content more available than Amazon. Books, music, movies and TV shows are there. And of course, physical products from the deepest marketplace imaginable. Regardless of whether Amazon want to outgun the iPad, they are undoubtedly set to sell a whole tonne of content.

This is a killer strategy that doesn’t work in a cash strapped start-up with very little runway money and time. It’s the epitome of a loss leader, but it comes with the double whammy of providing a huge content channel as well as seeing off hardware competitors. Advantage Amazon.

This is a great move and a business test case for millions of students in years to come. What can Microsoft come back with?

Evan Davis on the brilliant Bottom Line asked his guests what the business world will look like in 2020. Justin King of Sainsbury’s commented that it’s difficult enough looking at 2013 and 2020 is impossible. Laura Tenison of JoJo Maman Bebe claimed M-commerce would be commonplace, and Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo said connectivity to the cloud would be the biggest difference.

Such forecasting always reminds me of the BBC’s Tomorrow’s World show where their predictions of robots in every home and self-replenishing fridges proved unrealistic, but here’s my take on the question:

Curators – there’s far too much data content now as people play with media as much as they consume it. Flipboard, Twitter lists and Google+ Circles are starting points but they’re nowhere near what we need to successfully plug in this fire hose. Some uber-smart MIT dropout will leap this forward soon.

Social commerce – some would argue all commerce is social as people often tell friends about their latest purchases; I don’t fully agree. But following trends will be much easier and integrating recommendations, likes and opinions of friends and peers will influence decisions like never before.

One click buying – as you read about an item in a social network or an article, a right click and ‘Buy Now’ will apply your normal shopping preferences (vendor preferences, sizing, card and delivery details) without anything like a mundane checkout process.

M-commerce – this is surely the tsunami that won’t be held back. I think conversion on tablets will outclass phones in most categories but phones will be great for repetitive purchases (e.g. simply scanning at the tube station), micropayments and voucher delivery.

Phones – data married with location is a winning formula. Searching will provide different results based on your geography. “Cross-channel retail,” will be commonplace as customers in store actually research online via their smartphones. Shopping searches will point you to the local retailer who told Google they have it in stock, not the guy around the corner who is simply listing the catalogue. Your phone’s camera will be able to populate the search, rather than the keyboard (upload a photo of a mate’s watch rather than type Casio G-shock, Google/eBay/Amazon finds it).

Multichannel – retailers are hungrier than ever for sales and they’ll take them any way they can get them. All and sundry will look to improve their transactional websites to compliment their physical stores. Pureplay retailers will encroach on the high street and the smartest will hook paper, web and bricks and motor into a seamless integrated purchasing system (tri-tail, even). Argos and Ikea probably lead this fight in 2011.

Marketplace – this will be the buzzword as the bigger sites aim to carve ever larger slices of retailing web. Amazon don’t just want to sell to you, they’re happy for you to list items on their site and take a percentage as you sell them to me. Why? Proximity: the more items they get next to themselves, the better. If we’re all on there selling cheaper than each other, the site wins as it gets more customers. If the site wins, Amazon win through commissions. There’ll be half a dozen big name players that dominate this next year.

Customisation – thanks to my surfing history and click rates, as well as my stated preferences, sites will know what content to serve me. My Times Online homepage will differ from yours. Ditto for Play.com and the like. Amazon do this very well now. Soon, the level of intuition will be mind blowing.

Cloud computing – we’re currently thinking about storage and remote access as data and photos are backed up online. But more than that, you’ll hook up many, many things to the net: cars (for servicing and sharing), houses (to monitor and trade energy supplies), even pets. Your dog or cat will have a chip that pings the web and checks their health, their dietary requirements, how far they’ve walked etc. Think Nike+, meets Crufts, meets Bupa.

Direct retail – supply chains are shortening. Wrangler has just opened its first store in the US. They’re very late to the party as big name brands want to showcase their wares without the middleman and follow the over-used, but absolutely true example of Apple. There’s an obvious knock-on here for small retailers who carry those brands and helped establish the business.

Regardless of the specifics of the cloud, or what car you’ll be driving in ten years, if our technology is going to reach anything like its potential, we need much better wi-fi access. This isn’t Korea and ubiquitous and free are unrealistic in the UK, but better pricing policies, simpler access and more connectivity are surely overdue/the starting points.

I attended Doug Richard’s School for Startups recently. The title is a bit of a misnomer as the day had nothing specifically to do with starting a business, but it did have plenty of action points for marketing.

The day was fast-paced with lecture-style talks from Mr Richard and three colleagues. Let’s be honest, you go to see the formidable Doug Richard in action and he opened the sessions with a broad talk about business and how little we actually control. See him in action here.

I was immediately stunned about how intelligent this [former] Dragon is. He reminded me of an economics lecturer I had who could tell what day of the week you were born on within about three seconds of knowing your date of birth (he’d run a cunning formula in his head).

The 120 or so business folk were scared to answer DR’s open questions for fear of engaging this razor sharp mind. You really do need your A game if you’re going to talk business with this guy, even your own business. A chap in the audience volunteered to describe his own organisation. Big mistake. DR took his ‘elevator pitch,’ highlighted several inadequacies and spat it back at the business owner with such flare that everyone else was writing it down thinking they’d plagiarise it for themselves.

But Richard’s cohort found that uber-sharp standard a tough act to follow. They gave us a social media-is-great talk with the obligatory Will it Blend video. We had a pay per click is-the-quickest-win talk complete with incomprehensibly small screen shots. Finally we had an ecommerce-is-the-place-to-be talk from an ex-Amazon exec.

I’m sure these chaps are great in their own right, but they’d been asked to cut their usual one day training sessions down to an hour or so and you felt they’d done it on the train that morning. Then again, it was government funded social enterprise (free entry) so I certainly couldn’t say I’d overpaid.

They had 120 or so small and micro businesses in the room and they broad stroked most areas. Granted, there is never going to be time in such bootcamps for massive details, but not one of the team had researched a company in attendance and come with examples of how they could improve what they were already doing online.

For me, social media is about authenticity and credibility and I don’t think SMEs new to the arena would’ve heard that message. They could’ve demonstrated more of the beauty of listening; of how to monitor the conversation and engage without stalking.

They could’ve run us through existing clients and demonstrated how their real-world social, PPC and on-page ecommerce work had resulted in X% growth this year for their architect, or bakery, or gym (you get the idea).

The standard for these online training sessions/bootcamps is rarely going to catapult your marketing endeavours, but I have to say these guys did let out several nuggets amongst some pretty awful PowerPoint.

Bravo to Doug Richard for undertaking this philanthropic project. Bravo to his team for willing to give away insight (without charge). And bravo to the local authorities for saying yes.

If you get the chance, please do go – I promise seeing DR’s business mind in action is as an inspiring an afternoon as you can get without involving an Olympic athlete or a war hero.