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September 07, 2006
The Facebook Lesson
As we were settling in for a chat earlier this year with Threadless co-founder Jake Nickell so we could profile his company for Citizen Marketers, Jake said something that stopped us cold: "Our community could destroy us if they wanted to."
Threadless is a Chicago t-shirt manufacturer that relies on its community for almost every aspect of its product development and marketing. The community designs t-shirts, it votes on which t-shirts should be manufactured, and it votes on which ones Threadless should restock. Nickell and his business partner, Jacob DeHart, have devised a remarkable business model: Their community has eliminated most, if not all of the inherent risk in creating and releasing new products. Threadless has never had a flop. The community ensures success to the the tune of about $20 million in revenue this year.
During our chat, Jake was still a bit shaken from what had happened several days earlier. While redesigning the site, he accidentally deleted a good part of the content created by the community. Poof, it was gone and unrecoverable. Jake feared the worst: a community so angry that it would harm the company. He needn't have worried. Based on the company's elaborate efforts to encourage the community's participation and ownership in decision-making, some members wrote scripts to recover content from Google's cache servers. Some said the content dump was for the best. A fresh start. There were no swells of anger. That doesn't mean Jake and Jacob took the Threadless community's acquiescence for granted. They said that if they made major decisions without the community's input, it could backfire in unpleasantly powerful ways.
That's an instructive story for Facebook. The social networking site is facing nothing short of a community revolt for introducing new features that made keeping track of friends much easier. Too easy is what members said, making it more like stalking. Angry members flooded the company with several hundred thousand protest emails. That's not an unhappy few, even among 9 million members.
"Relax. Breathe. We hear you," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded on the company's blog, suggesting the protests were misplaced since "we didn't take away any privacy options." The real problem, as the Journal discovered, is that Facebook doesn't involve the community in creating and launching new features. They use an opaque, developer-centric model for launching features. Based on the flood of email, protest petitions and bad press (which makes advertisers skittish), Facebook is paying the price for hubris. What Zuckerberg may not appreciate is that he is something of a big-city mayor. Mayors who act unilaterally without the support of key community supporters, without the necessary political cover, risk backlash. Communities are powerful forces and have made millionaires out of the MySpace founders, and may one day make millions for the founders of YouTube and Digg. Any organization intent on building a community, especially one of content creators, should take the Facebook lesson to heart: A community that contributes content or vast amounts of attention inherently demands that the principles of democracy shape its future; many member-citizens will demand a voice and a vote that determine their collective future.
With a dismissive wave-off of "we appreciate the feedback," Facebook has a long way to go to learning the art of diplomacy.
Update: From the comments, Rob notes that Mark Zuckerberg posted a mea culpa about 3 a.m. Friday: "We really messed this one up... we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it."
This is a very strategic moment for the talented Mr. Zuckerberg. The community ably demonstrated the passion it has for Facebook but in the bigger picture, it was an awesome demonstration of organizational power. The community claimed ownership of Facebook. It was a Holy Grail moment. It's what some brand managers, product developers, service companies and an array of grassroots-minded organizations pray for. It was a powerful Web 2.0 moment, too, illustrating how quickly a connected membership base can mobilize and take action.
I think this strategic moment now creates a decision fork for Facebook:
1) Acknowledge the community ownership by taking the eBay route and giving the community a voice and a vote in future development of tools and features or
2) Maintain the wheel of control like the captain of a ship and ask everyone to return to their quarters.
Facebook seems intent on following Fork Number Two. "About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with," Zuckerberg writes, embracing the notion of information transparency. But then he declares the demarcation point the community is expected to remain behind: "I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook."
Other blogs that reference The Facebook Lesson:
» The Facebook Lesson - Church of the Customer article from Transparent Start-Up
Ben McConnell Jackie Huba run the Church of the Customer
blog here. Theyve written an article that highlites the need to listen and discuss changes with your community in order not to upset them or cause members to leave the flock... [Read More]
Mark just posted a new blog late last night.
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208562130
"We really messed this one up."
""Relax. Breathe. We hear you,""
I'm sure what the community heard was 'Calm down, you're overreacting', and that Facebook didn't take their concerns as seriously as they did.
Not good.
The really stupid thing about this facebook business is that people are able to create feeds of ANY page on the internet regardless if RSS is available or not.
Using: http://www.feedyes.com/
One can create a feed in a few point clicks of any page on the internet. So this isn't new and if someone was stalking people as many facebook users were worried about, I'm sure they'd have found feedyes before and already setup their RSS feed. Of course, it isn't a 'hot item' until you realize it's being done. Facebook should have partnered with feedyes and then all the heat could have went on feedyes :D
I also thought the first post from Mark was meh but Fred (A VC) thought otherwise.
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/09/facebooks_feeds.html
If people only let their real friends onto their friend list, would it still be stalking? One problem is that most people view having a big friend list as a factor of how cool you are so people will add people they don't know.
It is possible that most facebook devs only have their real friends on their list and didn't think about the other side of it.
On the Om & Niall podsessions podcast posted this morning they note that Mark doesn't even post that much on the blog and comments aren’t allowed on the blog post either. Not a very open system.
Plus facebook didn't even blog up until August 15th. New FB features were only blogged about by various FB devs or product managers on their personal blogs or if TC or another tech blog noticed it.
I am sure FB learned many things over the past 4 days about PR, understanding users better, and improving their communication.
One more thing. I just logged onto my Fb account to see if their was any more drama and the last blog post I noted to earlier this morning is actually on the front welcome page after a person logins to their account.
I don't think the http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2208197130
previous blog post was there when someone logged in.
+1 for Mark since I am guessing most FB folks don't read the FB blog and this puts the letter in front of everyone.
Rob -- Great observations. Since I'm not a student or a member of a company with access to the Facebook network, it's helpful to have your insider's view.
Thanks a lot for turning me on to Threadless. Their site is brilliant in so many ways. Very fun.
My pleasure, Chris. I've bought a half-dozen or so shirts from the site; as I've worn them, each one has been a conversation starter somewhere.
Jake said something that stopped us cold: "Our community could destroy us if they wanted to."
I never really believe it can be done, in a large community, too people have too different opinons on issues. If something bad does happened, I believe you will end up losing some customers but destroy them.. I doubt so... especially if they are doing all the right things.
Interesting... very interesting read.
- Steven Burda - Facebook Profile # 34206791
Feedity ( www.feedity.com ) also provides a simple yet powerful way to build a RSS web feed.
Face book is cool but we still use myspace to promote our band. Whats cool is the automation software out there like http://www.myfriendbuilder.com/ it automates adding friends and emails. Probably not for what you are useing myspace for but it is great for bars and bands.
