Facebook?s Rehabilitation - A Month Post-IPO, Baby Steps In Recovery

On May 18, Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), the No. 1 social networking site, closed its first day as a public company at $38.23, valuing itself around $105 billion.

On Monday, a month later, shares of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company closed at $31.41, up $1.40 or 4.71 percent, after climbing as high as 7 percent to $32.08. They closed Tuesday at $31.92, up 51 cents.

Facebook now is valued at only $68.3 billion.

Still, despite the vilification of the IPO, the slumping share price and dozens of class action lawsuits filed in federal courts in New York and California, Facebook, a damaged brand, has followed the advice of New York image guru Clive Chajet who said it should ignore the press and stick to its knitting.

Management's whole emphasis should be on what they're doing, Chajet said. They shouldn't talk about their share price for am minute.

That appears to be what CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team are doing.

On Monday, a week after all the buzz with Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), the world's most valuable technology company and GPS, Facebook said it was devising a location-based advertising product to reach consumers wherever they are.

The company also announced it would acquire private Face.com of San Francisco and Tel Aviv for an undisclosed amount. The company developed a system to enable users to tag a photo and find images online by distinguishing facial features.

That acquisition followed the pre-IPO plans to acquire Instagram, the San Francisco photo app developer, for $1 billion; that deal is under routine scrutiny by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

On the legal front, Facebook agreed to pay $10 million to settle claims by California members that their privacy rights were violated by using their likes in its sponsored stories feature.

Last Friday, Facebook's lawyers asked to consolidate the 40 class action suits against it into a single case in U.S. District Court in New York. It hired New York law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher as well its usual lawyers, Kirkland & Ellis.

In its legal motions, Facebook's lawyers asserted no investors had been misled about its post-IPO prospects, noting that securities laws permit discussions by analysts with clients and blamed Nasdaq OMX Group's (Nasdaq: OMX) mechanical failures for the share price fall on May 18.

There's still another month for shareholders to join the litigation.

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