This is getting beyond ridiculous. Facebook is a stupid company.
Now comes the report that the Coca Cola Company is putting their involvement in Facebook’s Beacon program on hold. With good reason. They thought, with justification, that the program was going to be opt-in. And this was reported on by a reporter for the New York Times who thought, with justification, that the program was going to be opt-in.
Louise Story tells us that she was the one who asked the very first question to Mark Zuckerberg after his major presentation to marketers and advertisers this past November 6th. She asked him as to why he felt that Facebook’s users would be willing to have notices about their online purchasers to their friends on Facebook. His response was that “he made it clear that users would be allowed to choose whether to participate, and he implied that the choice would be explicit, or opt-in.”
Two points. One is obvious. That’s the part that Zuckerberg pointed out that users would be allowed to choose to whether or not to participate. That doesn’t seem to be the case…if you’re on Facebook, you are participating. Period. You can choose to stop a certain ’story’, but you are still participating in the program.
The second point is not as obvious, but is very telling. And it partially explains how Facebook can mislead us all – users, reporters, and corporations. It’s the line “and he IMPLIED that the choice would be explicit, or opt-in”. Notice, he did not DIRECTLY SAY that it would be opt-in. This is how many people in very important positions – from corporate executives to U.S. presidents position things.
But where it gets real interesting is not just that fact that she saw a discrepancy between what Facebook said the program entailed and how it was implemented. The folks at Coca Cola did too.
Said Carol Kruse, Coke’s vice president of global interactive marketing, “I, like you, certainly understood that it would be opt-in. That’s what I heard before as well as what I heard on the 6th.”
Holy crap.
This means that the person who was very likely the key decision maker in Coke’s agreement with Facebook’s was misled. Or, at the very least wasn’t told of this major change of this major marketing initiative. This is unbelievable and shows tremendous incompetence on the part of Facebook. Be it arrogance or ignorance, Facebook is flirting with becoming toast.
Coke has now decided to take a step back and “‘wait and see’ as far as what we are going to do with Beacon because we are not sure how consumers are going to respond.”
That’s what happens when you’re misled. And as Story reports “Coke had been one of Facebook’s ‘Landmark Partners’ because it had made an especially large commitment to use the site’s new features.”
Jaysus, so Facebook screws up its relationship with one of its major partners, a global brand recognizable worldwide. All in the first month.
If they are that incompetent and cavalier in managing their vital business relationships, how incompetent and cavalier will they be in handling our personal information and data?
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