Taking the Licks
Tech bloggers, reporters, pundits and armchair quarterbacks worked overtime this past weekend with news of Microsoft’s withdrawal of their bid for Yahoo!. It’s anathema to blog rhetoric to say, but I have no opinion on who was right or wrong, won or lost, or who’s stunned and who’s sly.
As Monday closed, the commentary had shifted to Jerry Yang’s role in the collapsed bid and his future. As with the bigger picture, I have no opinion on Jerry’s actions. What has struck me as worth commenting is the blog post under his own name that appeared Sunday night.
More precisely, it’s what follows the blog post. Comments. Quite a few comments, at that: 125 as I write. While some comments offer encouragement and ideas, many are personal and none too flattering. Old school PR would have hit the kill switch on most, if not all of those comments, in a heartbeat.
Now, jump back in time to December with me, and recall if you will, Facebook’s Beacon fiasco. After a month or so spent stonewalling calls for some kind of dialog with members, founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote a mea culpa on the company blog, also announcing a change in the sharing model for Beacon. As a blog, there is a form for posting comments. With hot-button (and legitimate) issues like privacy, data ownership and proper disclosure in play, one can imagine that the comments would be on fire.
Not so much. In fact, there are precisely zero comments posted. There’s a form for submitting, but those comments aren’t seen by others. Old school PR rules here, because we can’t be expected to believe that exactly zero Facebook members had nothing to say here, yet that’s the line being held there. Months later (which would be now), there’s barely an ember of the firestorm over Beacon to be found. The ads that do appear look like clutter, and the focus as a business development technology seems to have shifted, I am guessing, to background aggregation of members’ purchasing activity across participating sites.
However history remembers the business savvy of these two personalities, there’s a kind of respect that I have for Jerry’s blog post showing comments in all their often-ugly glory. As much as I find Facebook innovative and interesting, I can’t find that same respect for their willingness to hook up anything and anyone within its walls, as long as it’s not the opinions of its members with its own statements on controversial policies.
But, I’m an idealist about these sorts of things, and believe that conversation with customers should happen in the open. I’m interested in hearing other takes on these polarized approaches to member feedback and conversations about problematic issues in an online community. What example is the right model? Yahoo!, Facebook, or something in between?
Leave a Comment
It’s easy to say companies should be completely open with their feedback and in dealing with (non-personal) customer issues – and I do – but I’d guess the line gets harder to draw as everything gets bigger.
The more I deal with *large* companies the more I realise that they live in constant grey areas and that it’s incredibly difficult to find *any* method of defining a consistent approach, particularly when it involves exposure. So it’s very impressive that Yahoo! manage that to a certain degree, and Jerry Yang is obviously a big part of that.
I’d love to see more companies with that kind of consistent message of openness throughout their communications with their customers.
I agree that the game starts to change when size increases, and that the cost of maintaining communications increases with the degree of openness if communication is locked up with a select number of representatives.
In Cluetrain, we read about Saturn’s early days where any employee could represent the company and talk with people publicly. This distributed approach reduces the cost by spreading it out, but the lack of control isn’t a comfortable thing for many corporations.
The key problem, to me, is that the format of the comment thread doesn’t lend to discussion and would have brought out some big nasty, so I understand why Facebook isn’t letting those comments go through, but an interface suggesting that the comments will appear in the public view is a crappy bait and switch move. It would have been better and more honest to have no comment form at all, or even just a note to say that comments will be read and not posted.
I’ve never heard it mentioned as formally at Atlassian, but it seems pretty accepted that anybody can and does represent the company when they talk publicly about things related to the company. The problem there being that the company is big enough now that there are plenty of areas/initiatives/decisions that anyone could easily know nothing about. So it’s up to the individual to work out when to shut up.
I completely agree with your point about the Facebook comments, but I wonder how much of it is deliberate and how much is simply lack of consideration. Blogs have comments, because that’s what blogs have, right? Just because somebody identified that they didn’t want those comments to be public then and there, in that format, doesn’t mean anybody sat down to think about a way to solve that issue properly.
In a way, Jerry Yang’s post has the same issue. There are better ways to have that discussion with customers, but nobody solved the interaction issue (or perhaps even thought about it). It could have been done better, but they’re just using a relatively standard WordPress install.
I haven’t seen innovation in the format of blogs in a long time. And sometimes I think people just use their hammer on something that looks like a nail.
> I haven’t seen innovation in the format of blogs in a long time. And sometimes I think people just use their hammer on something that looks like a nail.
I think you’re totally right about that. The blog is taken for granted as a design pattern that goes where you need something blog-ish, without thinking about how it’s going to be used.
We did some work in Ma.gnolia to build in a custom blog tool, partly because Rails would hurt when running more than one application, but also to bake in some integration with the context of the blog, which is the service. To that end, we made it possible to drop in references to bookmarks for auto-formatting and linking, and allowed only members to add comments, and pulled their avatar in and linked their names to their profiles, to bring the activity from the blog back into the reason we had a blog at all.
I’ve always liked those customisations. This is why I’m interested in the [Enki](http://enkiblog.com/) and [Menki](http://github.com/toolmantim/menki/tree/master) projects. I want a solid base to build up from and I really like the philosophy espoused there:
“Preferences are for the masses. Any real coder knows the easiest and best way to customize something is by hacking code. Because you want your blog to be you, not bog standard install #4958″
I don’t want a blog like everybody has a blog. I want to innovate on the format and build it specifically for *my* use.
If both Facebook and Yahoo! had custom-purposed blog-like functionality, maybe they’d have handled things better?
Maybe a better reaction could have been prompted for the tools, but I suspect the mindset needs to precede the custom-purposed tools for it to really foster dialog. Without the will, just the tech is not a way