This month marks my first Facebook-less month. Like more than 35,000 other users who have signed up to do so, I closed my Facebook account on May 31. For someone like me who rarely participates in movements of any kind, Facebook has elicited in me an usually intense negative feeling. This has not always been the case, however. I had started as an early adopter of Facebook, partially due to the privilege of having a .edu email address as a university professor. In those early days, I was an avid advocator of Facebook and marveled at the revolution it would bring to the social landscape. What happened then? In a few years, I had turned from a Facebook lover to a Facebook hater. Reflecting on my own journey, I realized that there are important loyalty lessons here for businesses to learn.
Don’t Forget Your Roots
Like many media companies, one unique aspect of the Facebook business model is that the end users of Facebook are not the same people who pay the bills for Facebook. Facebook started as a social network intended to connect people and eventually grew into a business model deriving revenues from advertisers. Nobody blames Facebook for wanting to make money. After all, it is a business and it has to make money to survive. What Facebook did wrong, however, was to make every business decision based on money AND at the cost of its roots, the millions of end users. Continue reading “How to Lose Loyalty in 10 Days: Lessons from the Facebook Fiasco”
