Archive for the ‘PR’ Category
Facebook’s PR Becomes More Aggressive
Thursday, February 14th, 2008Earlier this week buzz started spreading immediately that Facebook was making it extremely difficult for users to delete their accounts. Within 24 hours there was an immediate turnaround in their policy and Facebook made it possible for users to delete their account. It appears with more cash in hand, Facebook has expanded their PR force and are now tackling issues as they arise. Even minor statements in our blog have received attention from Facebook PR whereas previously there was no response.
It shows that Facebook is indeed growing up now that their rich uncle (Microsoft) has provided them with some cash to build the company with. Google has been well known for being extremely aggressive with their public relations enlisting the help of multiple agencies to ensure that all negative media is immediately cleaned up. Facebook has an even greater risk of privacy debacles and as such it is in their company’s best interest to invest heavily in public relations.
Over the next twelve months I would look for the increase in Facebook PR to continue as the company launches their online payment system and Beacon becomes a more significant advertising source for them. I’m glad to see Facebook taking proactive measures to prevent against future mishaps. It’s a sign of a maturing company.
BREAKING: Zuckerberg Apologizes for the Mess that was Beacon Rollout
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007Mark Zuckerberg just announced on the Facebook Blog that Beacon was a mistake and more importantly, the way his company handled the situation over the last few weeks was careless. Beacon is now an optional feature for users. His post below:
“About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.
When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn’t on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.
But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.
Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.
This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.
On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we’ve heard about from you.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Mark”
Crisis Communications Gets Simplified With Facebook
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007I previously worked at a PR firm where we had a number of clients who were in need of “dark sites.” For those of you that don’t know what a dark site is, it is simply a website which is set up but not linked to (and is typically protected from the public) so that a company can have a place to disseminate information to the public during a crisis. Then last night I read this interesting article about leveraging Facebook groups as a form of crisis communication. This is brilliant in my opinion. Imagine your company having a major catastrophe such as having a rat running through your fast food chain in a busy store in New York City. A video leaks on to the internet and suddenly you are stuck trying to clean up this negative buzz. This recently happened and the result was to get creative in releasing videos and other forms of media expressing that the store was permanently shut down and reiterating the company’s dedication to sanitation. A useful tool for these situations is Facebook groups. Other people will create groups about how they will never return to your restaurant and you will need to have an effective way of connecting with your constituents. Lee Aase suggests that companies create “secret” groups and invite their constituents for that moment when things go wrong. They can then easily send a message to all their constituents using the group mesaging feature. While this is a debatable tool, I can see some sort of use for it. What do you think?
