Business hero Mark Zuckerberg set up facebook in the dorm room at Harvard and early use was restricted to other students.  Perfect business hero behaviour.

Next – facebook keeps changing and it can be hard to keep up.  Plus there is a lack of transparency over what is going on and a few legal issues.  His hero status starts to be interrogated.

Finally – facebook is amazingly, popular with users, and financially very successful.  Oops very scary indeed.

Three easy ways to go from hero to villain.

1. In the start up phase (preferably while you are young, poor and working from a bedroom) it can be easy to win hearts and minds.

Your business is probably pitted against more powerful establishment businesses and you look like the attractive new kid on the block.

Think Richard Branson, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs in the early days.  Richard Branson even signed up musicians because he liked them –

even though he hadn’t heard their music demonstrating he was all-heart, plus good instincts.)

2. When the market is dominated any lack of transparency is seen as ominous.

3. Extreme financial success elevates the individual or company to villain status.

Google reaching 80% of search results, Microsoft owning the desktop market and charging for continuous upgrades,  Ipad sales topping 2 m in a few months means the general public (consumers and pundits) can feel threatened.  Apple’s treatment of its Chinese workers, brutal management at Virgin, Google slaps that are difficult to analyse and general We-love-to-hate-Microsoftishness get more air-time.

It is just the tall poppy syndrome.

As fortunes get made more quickly the hero to villain cycle becomes more rapid.  It has been six short years for  Mark Zuckerberg and it is getting more personal.  He is being portrayed as a villain in a new film.   The appealing story of a student developing a way for friends to stay in touch in the dorm at Harvard is being taken into new dimmensions of the tall poppy syndrome.

As facebook now has users totalling  the equivalent of the third biggest country in the world, and they are making a lot of money ($800 m) they have become an extremly tall poppy.

Mark Zuckerberg and facebook may or may not be adversely affected, but as a small business owners it is important to keep our customers, stakeholders and the press on side.  Building an appealing brand at all stages of development is mandatory.