It’s Called Social for a Reason

Of the many advantages that social networking offers to business, customer relationship management is counted as one of the top benefits.  Yet, first Facebook and now Twitter have utterly failed to capitalize on the strengths of their platforms and alienated their customer base by introducing “features” that have upset their users.

Helloooo! Bad PR lasts longer and carries farther than good PR.  This is  business 101.

Facebook and Twitter are two of the top social networks yet both failed to use their strengths - communication between people - to alienate their client base.  In the case of Facebook, they changed their format making familiar features difficult to find and making previously private information public.  To their credit, they responded quickly to customer outrage by making it easier for customers to change their format.  The next time they planned to make a change the solicited customer input with a notice at the top of the page.  (Guess what.  I didn’t take the time to respond to that notice so I don’t have any right to complain if I don’t like the changes.)

In Twitter’s case, they removed the ability to see @replies for posters you aren’t following without any input from their users.  No input causes outrage and outrage in the Twitterverse means a new hashtag: #fixreplies.

I don’t really care what Twitter’s reason for making the change was (you can read more about it at mashable.com).  What matters is they handled the change badly.  They failed to give adequate notice of the change and, more importantly, failed to solicite customer input.  They compounded their error by giving a reason (supposedly a customer benefit) that didn’t fly.

If their initial reason was correct -  they were creating a customer benefit - then soliciting customer input would have set them right or at least let them know they needed to provide an alternative mechanism for people to find interesting posters.  If their second explanation - technical issues - is correct, then the truth would have assuaged a lot of anger.  People have seen enough fail whales to accept that a feature might have to be pulled for the sake of system stability.  They might not be happy but they’d probably understand.

The problem with the Facebook and Twitter incidents is that their management act like big businesses when their products feel like small businesses.  Changing features in a social network I use without consulting me feels like they let themselves into my house and rearranged the furniture.  (Even big business can’t always do whatever they want: think New Coke.)

I’m left wondering whether the reason Facebook and Twitter are having trouble monetizing their platforms is that they don’t really understand what they’ve created.  Facebook tries to make money by selling advertising when many businesses are on Facebook to develop relationships because relationships are stronger than advertising.  A business has a much better opportunity to sell to a person they already have a realtionship with than a stranger.

My guess is that Twitter and Facebook users would like these platforms to make money because they want them to stay around.  But they also feel proprietary about these platforms.  Maybe these social networking companies should treat their platforms as an open commons and develop a business model similar to open source companies.  Using the platform is free, but have we got some great extensions for you.

I’m willing to bet that Twitter and Facebook have far more data available to them than can be garnered through their APIs.  Google makes money from it’s analytics package. Where’s Twitter Analytics or Facebook Analytics?