Facebook’s bad case of not loving you
// February 17th, 2009 // Advertising, Communication, Social Media
Crap, can't Facebook get privacy right? (photo: Merkley)
This isn’t a ‘worst case’ but it’s certainly not a ‘best case’ so i’m calling it a ‘bad case’ of marketing driving the exploitation of the customer relationship in social media.
Facebook has touched off a lot of pro- and anti-sentiment in the news this week about amendments it recently made to its Terms of Service (TOS), particularly around amending its rights to retain all of a user’s data even after the user has deleted their account. First, a quick summary of what happened:
- Original Facebook blog post from Feb 4 – hey, how you bin? We just made a tiny, teensy change, no need to bother even looking at it, really.
- The new TOS – all your bases are belong to us, and all the data that resides therein.
- Example of initial negative reaction – our privacy was an illusion! Facebook wants to sell us to Coke/Pepsi/Reebok/GoDaddy.com!
- Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg responds – hey, it wasn’t a big deal, it’s all a bit too complicated for you to understand
- Zuckerberg rebutted – customers aren’t ready to forgive him yet, and experts still have axes to grind.
- Argh! Now really knowledgeable people are comparing Facebook’s TOS to its competitors! Noooo!
Clearly a raw nerve has been brushed, and this is not the first time Facebook has underestimated how important users believe their data rights to be, even if not actually under threat and even if never actually exercised. How could this have been made less painful?
Don’t enact such big, clumsy changes to your TOS!
Do you really need the right to everything in perpetuity? Almost certainly not. Must it pertain to every kind of data? In every situation? Definitely not. This is an example of “just in case” thinking by legal and marketing teams under pressure to safeguard future revenues from this data, leading to bad contract law being drafted. The amendments could have been more specific, less wide-ranging and less open to interpretation and much of this would have never happened.
Engage the customer in drafting the changes
Users only heard about this after it had been enacted. You can defuse the backlash before it even swells if you call for contributions to some new amendments to the TOS, get users collaborating on drafting amendments based around the intent of the changes you want to make.
Communicate the changes one-to-one
90% of the outraged Facebook users never saw the blog post, they first heard about this in one of the more sensational early news stories that broke. And the probably never stuck around to read the more balanced, considered follow-up articles. They’ve read a headline and the first paragraph of an early story and stormed off, their worst fears confirmed. It’s going to take a lot of dialogue to bring that user back to the discussion, much less change their opinion. These changes should have been communicated directly to users first, using the very !^%$# tools that all Facebook’s audiences sees every time they login – the news feed and inbox. Do most Facebook users even know there’s a Facebook blog? I very much doubt it.
The customer is always right, so let the customer win
Users weren’t given the option of opting-in to the new TOS, they were just informed it had changed. Instead, Facebook should prove to its users that they have control by offering them the option of opting-out of the TOS changes and either leaving Facebook for good or continuing in some kind of diminished user state subject to the previous TOS until they choose to accept the new TOS.
No, really, the customer is always right
Customers have spoken loud-and-clear – they don’t like these new changes. They REALLY don’t. Take note of that. Rewrite the TOS again to take account of what your customers have told you. All around the world, Facebook users are beginning to think twice about what they post to their social network – that’s exactly the kind of consciously mediated interaction that Facebook cannot afford its audience to do if it’s to monetize. It totally buggers your marketing insights and your responses to advertising.
Nothing is worth that risk.
