Why You Shouldn’t Remember Bebo For How It Failed

AOL has reportedly found a buyer for Bebo, the social network it acquired just over two years ago. AOL is said to be selling Bebo for just $10 million to Criterion Capital Partners, an investment group.

It is unfortunate that Bebo will be remembered not for its social media marketing innovations but for AOL’s inability to capitalize on those innovations ever since it bought the company for $850 million back in March 2008. Current AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has publicly distanced himself from the deal, which took place before he arrived at the company. At the May 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt conference he admitted that “the execution piece of it really fell apart.”

Much will be written in the coming days about how AOL made a mistake by buying Bebo or how Bebo failed to live up to its lofty pricetag. The temptation will be to look at Bebo as a sad footnote in the forward march of social media. In fact, it was among the first social media sites to incorporate marketing into the fabric of the social experience, and it paved the path for MySpace, Facebook and other social media destinations to bring marketers and consumers together in new ways.

Here are just some of the ways it helped change online marketing:

Engagement Marketing: Back in 2006, two years before Facebook launched its Engagement Ads, Bebo offered marketers the opportunity to create a branded page on the site. Sound familiar? Bebo then helped marketers reach users with messaging, games, videos, downloads and more. “If it goes as we’re planning, we can tap into influencers and get messages to spread virally, which is so much more powerful,” Jim Scheinman, then Bebo’s vice president of sales, told me in 2006. The company worked with major brand marketers such as Disney, which promoted the UK launch of the movie “Cars.”

Video: The company was involved in some of the web’s earliest social/video integrations. Bebo hosted KateModern, which was an online video hit. The drama featured brand integration into the storyline; Disney promoted a movie by having one of its stars appear in a storyline, and Toyota and Procter & Gamble also got involved. At the time of the AOL acquisition, the site was also developing other short-form online video content, along with unique ways of integrating marketers into the video storyline. It also found novel ways to allow viewers to participate in the action both online (by interacting with the video’s characters on their profile pages) and offline (producers invited fans to watch the filming).

Widgets: Bebo was one of the first social networks to deploy widgets, which allowed users to add content from third-party sites such as Photobucket or Slide to their profile page. Bebo Widgets preceded the launch of Facebook’s developer platform by several months. Today, applications are an essential part of the social network experience. And when you think of Facebook’s recently launched “Like” button, the concept is the same as Bebo’s widget integration: giving users a way to share something about themselves easily and simply.

Although the company never really took off outside of the UK (though it is still a top 10 Web property in Australia and New Zealand, according to comScore and Nielsen), it played a vital role in allowing marketers to see the possibilities of connecting with consumers in social media. The interactions that Bebo fostered and the marketing programs it created were essential to the development of social media marketing as a business, not to mention the $1.29 billion in revenues driven by social network advertising. For that, Facebook and the other social networks who have “made it” should be thankful.