What I Learned from the Facebook Debacle

Like many on the Internet I have had a love hate relationship with Facebook since I joined in 2006. I've courted the idea of deleting my account on many occasions but never pulled the trigger. I hesitated primarily because I was the admin for our Facebook page, which is not particularly active but active enough that removing it would be one less channel for our customers to reach out to us. I finally pulled the trigger about a month before the Cambridge Analytica revelations and before #DeleteFacebook was a trending hashtag. That's not saying I have some kind of sixth sense for these things but rather that, like many on Facebook, I was done with it. My timing was more coincidence than anything.

What has emerged as a result of Facebook's woes is an opportunity for me to learn and hopefully avoid a similar situation with our customers.

One of the first things I have learned (although I have known this forever) is that trust is paramount. All relationships, not just personal ones, are built on trust. To build trust, you need to have open communication between all parties and a clear understanding of shared expectations. In the case of Facebook, what they told their community and what they actually did, were very different. In many ways, Facebook and its users have a codependent relationship. Facebook uses all kinds of emotionally manipulative tactics to keep its users engaged and at the same time, exploits the relationship for financial gain. Once the truth of what Facebook was actually doing was revealed, in the case of the Cambridge Analytica incident, users began to realize that their privacy and the privacy of their friends and family, is worth more than being a member of the Facebook community. For me it was not just my trust in the business, it was also my trust of the service the business provides. The news feed which I relied upon for updates about friends, family, and news they found important was dominated by vitriol, hate, conflict, and arguments from all sides of the political spectrum that clearly was not coming from people I know. For me, Facebook was no longer a place to catch up on what my friends and family were doing but a place where I was constantly inundated with advertising, sponsored posts, inane quizzes, and controversial news posts that contained deplorable comments from people I don't know or would care to know. I simply couldn't trust that what I was seeing was the truth. Now that I've lost trust in the platform and the service it provides, there is very little chance I'll go back to it.

Secondly, it is so important to stay ahead of disaster. I know this is easier said than done. For days, Mark Zuckerberg remained silent on the issue of Cambridge Analytica. In Zuckerberg's absence, critics and pundits filled the void with their own speculation and analysis which, for ratings purposes, was generally much more sensational than the truth.

Chances are you'll experience similar disasters in your business. Granted they may not be as dramatic as the Facebook issue, but it will feel just as catastrophic when it does happen. What you do in the light of that disaster will define how your customers and potentially the public judge you moving forward. I've had to deal with many disasters over the years. Luckily most have been minor but they have still impacted our customers to some degree. What I have learned is that customers will respect and appreciate you more during a disaster if you take responsibility for the situation, work on finding a solution, communicate on a regular basis, and put processes or structures in place to avoid a repeat of the disaster. Customers understand that these things happen sometimes and for the most part, they will work with you if you are open about the issue and how you plan to resolve it. What customers don't abide is continued issues because of a lack of follow-through. This will erode their trust in your company.

Thirdly, if you screw up, own your mistakes. Although Mark Zuckerberg was lambasted for being absent when the Facebook issue emerged, I think he has done a good job of owning the problems that resulted in the issue in the first place. As the face of the company, he had two (maybe more) choices he could have made in dealing with the press and the public outcry. Zuckerberg could have pointed fingers and blamed someone, anyone, for the problems his company was now facing or he could take ownership of the problem and move forward. Thankfully for him, and for Facebook, he chose the latter. The result is that he is being perceived as someone who takes responsibility for things and will do whatever he can to make things right. Whether or not he is successful is another question, but only time will tell.

The final thing I learned from this whole Facebook/Cambridge Analytica situation is that most businesses just don't give a crap about privacy. When it comes to protecting your privacy or, on a lesser scale, just respecting your privacy, there is just no incentive to do it. With the GDPR coming in May 2018, I have watched businesses, primarily those in the ad space, continue to flagrantly ignore the privacy provisions laid out in the regulations or assume that they can continue to do business as usual. As the full impact of GDPR is felt across the globe, I think companies like Facebook, Google, and the myriad agencies that use customer data for the purposes of targeted marketing and advertising are going to be in for a rude awakening. The winners will be the businesses who step up and do the work to strengthen privacy for their customers and their customers' customers.

As far as I'm concerned, not having to update Facebook, or more recently Instagram, has reduced my dependence on my devices and given me back some sense of privacy. As a skeptic, I doubt my data has actually been removed from either platform, but at least I don't have to look at all those ads anymore. Although I am not sharing as much as I used to, I don't feel the same pressure to update my feeds with photos of where I'm traveling or what I'm eating as I used to. As much I would like to think that people really care about my latest business trip to wherever, I'm pretty sure my sudden departure from the vastness of Instragram will not be missed in the slightest. If you really want to know about what I've been up to, message me directly and maybe we can meet up and grab a coffee.

What did you take away from the Facebook debacle, I'd love to read your thoughts?