The CEO of Facebook answers its customers with a great apology. Recent college student and Facebook customer Theresa Klein, over on the Blog Business Summit blog, says she approves.
Notice how different this is from how HP is handling things? Where’s the HP’s CEO’s blog?
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Robert Scoble works at Fast Company.TV (title: Managing Director). Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.
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September 8th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
This all started because of the new News Feeds. The kids, they move on. They just helped a guy (Ruckus) have a threesome by joining the “If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome” group. And you know how it was possible? The News feeds. They could see their friends joining the group and so they joined too. At the end there were several hundred joins a minute. It was pretty amazing. And facebook almost broke under the constant refreshes.
A new group was started something like “Ruckus’ threesome changed my mind about news feeds.” Ha.
September 8th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
I jumped on facebook this morning and read the letter of apology or was it the righting of wrongs? Either way, I work in the library of a private university and when I got to work here, I could see every student reading this letter on Facebook. So even though the students were revolting against the Feeds by joining various groups, they were very willing to read the letter of apology from the CEO!!
September 8th, 2006 at 1:53 pm
Facebook did the right thing, with that letter of apology.
With third party apps, it’s rather easy to stalk someone. So the world stayes as (un)safe as she was before.
September 8th, 2006 at 2:22 pm
[...] When students and users on facebook saw that all of their friends would now be notified that they had just joined the “coming out of the closet” group, or some other revealing, but private information, they were furious, and revolted. And I mean, FAST. The very next day, TechCrunch posted the new article, telling about what happened, and how the feature was… ill-received. The 3rd step in this story is the one that I’d like to focus on. What FaceBook did next was awesome. But it’s what they DIDN’T do that I am so impressed by. [...]
September 8th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
I was interested to note that, even before the apology, friends who’d earlier joined the mass protest group were leaving again.
The new Feeds has added an interesting new dynamic to Facebook - almost a herding instict! As Zuckerberg himself said, without the new Feed the protest group would never have grown so quickly…
BTW Mr WaxJelly, as I’m sure everyone is tired of hearing, anyone could’ve seen your hypothetical friend “coming out of the closet” without the feed - no privacy settings were changed.
September 8th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Still not convinced it wasn’t all a big publicity stunt either - I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but this one looked all a bit too neat… click me name to read my blog post.
September 8th, 2006 at 5:45 pm
[...] In case you missed it, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook apologized to its users on its blog early (2:48 am) this morning. Great step toward building trust with their users…but seriously, why have they not turned comments back on their blog? Instead of being afraid of what users might write, they should welcome the comments and respond to people- whether they submit positive or negative feedback. « Rod Run | [...]
September 8th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
They might have forgotten to turn the comments back on… in the crux of everything, they may not have been thinking about that. I know I might have forgotten to do that!
September 8th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
Not at all impressive after the arrogant “Calmd down. Breathe. We hear you.”
September 9th, 2006 at 9:09 am
[...] Robert Scoble notes that the CEO of Facebook has used this blog entry to great effect, but wonders where the HP CEO’s blog is. [...]
September 9th, 2006 at 10:41 am
Sometimes apologizes are not sufficient responses when technical oversights cause pain to an already loyal community, or worse, a new community.
I am not inferring that an item of monetary value must be handed out each time a technical glitch occurs; however, sometimes leaders of online communities need to make that extra effort to “Really” show their appreciation.
For instance, my new favorite, on-line community - Cambrian House experienced a technical glitch yesterday. Some of the community’s members received some “spam”, basically an e-mail was sent multiple times.
But guess what? Cambrian House not only apologized, but is also giving away FREE T-SHIRTS to anyone that reported this problem.
The t-shirts are actually funny - “I got spammed by Cambrian House”.
Anyway, this is just one example of an online community handling an issue with the utmost respect for its members.
- Isiah
September 9th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
“Notice how different this is from how HP is handling things? Where’s the HP’s CEO’s blog?”
That’s useful to point out. However, there is an apples-and-oranges problem here. In one case, there is the question of a crime having been committed as well as possible breach of regulatory requirements. Until that is sorted out, I am sure that blogging would be high on the list of no-nos by the Corporate Counsel at Hewlett-Packard.
Also, the presumably-injured parties are quite different in the two situations. So the recipients for possible apologies are also quite different.
Now, whether HP needs more transparency in its corporate governance, and the form that could take, is certainly an important conversation. I’m not so sure that blogging is the answer or even the most-appropriate means for that kind of transparency. But those seem like useful questions and I hope those inside the situation look at them.
September 9th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
[...] People, and companies, are going to make mistakes. That’s a fact. While fessing up your mistakes should be a requirement, it’s not. Robert Scoble pretty much sums it up: From scobleizer.wordpress.com: Notice how different this is from how HP is handling things? Where’s the HP’s CEO’s blog? [...]
September 18th, 2006 at 4:48 am
[...] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your ownsite. [...]
September 20th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Personally, I have no idea why people would not understand how to do this.
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Personally, I am so glad to have found such an easy system that I can work
at home effortlessly.
I have been working at home for over 21 years, and finally this vehicle has
come along and has changed my life for the better! It’s about time.
…and I don’t have to Speak-2-no-1 …ever