Case 4

Face book News Feed Controversy

The History: Face book launched one of the most revolutionary features in social media during September 2006: the Face book News Feed. Its launch however, did not go so well - within a week, 750,000 users were protesting the feature. Within 11 days, over 1,000,000 users had signed the online petition and Face book rewrote its plans and policies.
One would think that Face book, being one of the key Social Media interaction sites would have known what to expect from the changes, or at least seen the groundswell and been more ready to either alter plans or find ways to ride the wave.

Face book’s Mark Zuckerberg ended up having to eat crow and publish and open letter.
We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

“Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” by Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, September 5, 2006 at 10:45pm

Face book added a new feature without doing any work to prepare their users for the change. One day, they logged in and the world was different. Not better, just different. It seems the Face book design team felt it was much improved, but that feels like it was the result of internal thinking, not an actual assessment of the people who mattered: the users.

The lack of preparation for change is not a new problem. Organizations need to realize that you don’t just have to design the change, you have to design the process of introducing the change and ensuring it’s embraced by the users.  Most companies fall down when it comes to true customer intimacy, think about your own situation.  Is your customer at the centre of your universe?

The Lesson: Prepare users for major changes and be proactive in responding to criticism. Face book launched news feed as a complete surprise, throwing off many users. Now Face book rolls out new features gradually.

Social Canary Value Proposition: Social Canary’s ability to monitor Social Media discussions and generate useful information would have allowed Face book to see the unpopularity of its work immediately.

The ability for organizations to utilize Social Canary’s services for test marketing and to understand feedback on new product initiatives would have saved Face book the need of having to issue another public apology.