You might not know it to look at them, but one in six people on these shores is a ‘Beboer’. Bebo is now Britain’s foremost social networking site. And the man behind it all is 37-year-old Brit Michael Birch.
He could be sitting on a billion dollar business if he chose to put it on the market. Following a storming summer, the website popular with teenagers has finally swept past Rupert Murdoch-owned MySpace to lead the UK ratings. Bebo boasts 10.7 million UKusers, according to internet tracker Comscore, compared to 10.1 million on MySpace and 7.6 million on Facebook. It has 36 million users worldwide.
Birch, the son of an inventor,launched the site in January 2005 primarily as a photo-sharing site. It’s become a forum for his ideas, the constant metamorphosis showing no sign of slowing. Success wasn’t immediate though. In 1999 he left his job in insurance to set up in business. His first ventures, a self-updating address book and a programmers’ tool, didn’t take off. But in 2001, with brother Paul and wife Xochi, he set up e-card business, Birthday Alarm, which now has 47 million users although Birch is no longer directly involved. In 2003, he and Xochi set up social networking site Ringo.com, which they sold six months after launch to “get out of the financial hole I had been digging for the past few years”. By January 2005 the couple knew a thing or two about the online world and established what was to be their dream business.
Bebo, like its rivals, allows users to set up personalised web pages containing their own pictures and lists of favourite films, books and TV shows. It also offers the chance to hook up with friends who are also registered users. The site’s popularity spread like wildfire through schools and colleges by word of mouth. It has captured the English-speaking teenage market easily, making it an ad man’s dream. “We didn’t set out to capture the teenage market,” admits Birch. “I pretty much designed the website that I wanted to use. So I designed it for people in their thirties, but it took off with
younger people. I am very glad that it took off with teenagers rather than not taking off at all.”
TEENAGER TROUBLES
But social networking is bigger among teens than any other demographic and Bebo’s features made the site friendly to a vulnerable age group. However, this was to place Bebo under heavy scrutiny early in the company’s development. The availability of information on individuals and the ease with which users can interact has led to abuse. The press has been keen to highlight stories of bullying and harassment and even suicide linked with the site. Also, paedophiles posing as children are known to frequent social networks as a means of finding prey. Some have claimed the site should be held responsible for such outrages, but this is a charge that Birch denies and one he was ready for.
“We are a young social network in terms of entering the market. In the US, they all went through the negative media attention that comes with this market so we had the benefi t of hindsight. We designed the site with a lot of that in mind,” he says. Default privacy settings on web pages are tight, with only friends able to view one another’s pages. A ‘report abuse’ button was there from the outset. “The problems we have seen occur in life, they aren’t unique to social networking. Bullying in the playground has always been there. When cell phones came out there was a lot of press about
the effects they could have and the same happened with email.”
Following criticism of the site, Birch defended his company at a live debate on breakfast TV and went head to head with Dr Rachel O’Connell, a renowned psychologist who advises the Home Office on child behaviour. “We were meant to be coming from different sides of the fence where she was the good guy and I was the bad guy but we realised that we were trying to achieve the same thing.” Birch offered O’Connor a job on Bebo’s board advising the company on ways to ensure that the site is safe and beneficial for its users. She accepted. “I think we are the first social network to employ a chief safety officer,” he says. “We wanted to employ someone who could make a difference. So we gave her a senior position in the company.” Bebo has recently launched a set of safety tools designed to help kids who are suffering from abuse or bullying on the site, with the backing of a Home Office internet taskforce.
PULLING NOT PUSHING
Teenagers don’t much like advertising. They are aghast at how older generations can patiently sit through TV commercials and appear almost immune to traditional promotions. But they are also effectively walking, talking billboards for many promotions. They proudly wear clothes with labels and slogans, and a Bebo web page is reminiscent of teenage bedrooms. Its users’ pages are awash with pictures, posters and the names of things which define their personalities.
Bebo has tapped into this by allowing users to choose their own skins to use as background for web pages and emails. They can choose skins showing celebrities, musicians, sports personalities or even drinks brands. Or they can ‘roll their own’ using Photoshop – giving it an edge over rival MySpace, which uses complex coding. These skins are a potent advertising tool.
