A Customer-Engaged Culture Must Be Believable and Respectful
Facebook’s primary asset is the data you provide—in particular, your personal profile and everything associated with it. It’s not only basic customer data but rich histories of interactions—in fact, every single one of your activities, not only via your internal Facebook page but via Facebook Live, Messenger, and hundreds of other apps and services it provides. This could mean static data like marital status, personal interests, and political affliation. Or it could mean more dynamic activities, like postings, comments, tweets connected to your Facebook account, or pages you’re visiting within Facebook.
Businesses live for this kind of personalized knowledge and are willing to pay for its use.
Facebook has always been acutely aware of this, and in 2009, Facebook did something stupid enough to violate its members’ trust in the use of their information. It added this clause to the terms of service (ToS) in reference to users’ profiles and activities on Facebook: “[we take an] …irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute….”
This sparked a huge outcry because it represented a violation of respect for the rights of Facebook’s members to own their own data. Members expected an equitable use of their information in exchange for their membership. Facebook decided that it could use your data for its own purposes whether you retained your membership with it or not.
The use of your Facebook data is your transactional currency. It’s how you “buy” usage of Facebook’s products, services, tools, experiences, and activities. In exchange for the reasonable use of that data during the life of your membership on Facebook, you are leasing your data for Facebook’s use. The key word is “reasonable.” You have a reduced expectation of privacy because of your participation, but still a real expectation of respect by Facebook for the use of your information. “Reasonable use” of that information for commercial purposes implies trust in the administrator for the “reasonableness” and respect it will exercise with regards to customer data.
But Facebook’s 2009 ToS was an egregious example of how to screw up customer management. Yes, Facebook had to satisfy shareholders, but if it understood that shareholders were not just companies like Microsoft or rich individual investors or venture capitalists but were customers too, it might have had a different perspective.
To Facebook’s credit, it showed respect for members/customers by correcting the problems in unequivocal terms. Here are the 2017 terms of service for sharing information and data:
“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition: For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”
Facebook’s corrections to the ToS are indicative of its maturation as a company struggling toward a customer-engaged culture. It has a long way to go. But it has shown its respect for its members by the changes it has made.
Empathy, trust, believability, and respectfulness—all of them comprise the core of a truly customer-engaged culture. Companies can behave in customer-centric ways, but if their motivation is not mutual customer-company value but shareholder value, it’s not true customer engagement. A customer-engaged culture is one in which that mutual-value exchange is part of its DNA. Is your company ready for that? Prove it by sending me your story at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com and show me you have something to be proud of, and your employees and customers something to love.
Paul Greenberg is the managing principal of The 56 Group, a customer strategy company. He is the author of CRM at the Speed of Light, which is in nine languages and is currently in its fourth edition. He is also the author of the upcoming The Commonwealth of Self Interest: Customer Engagement, Business Benefit (Harvard Business Press, 2018).