Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg released a new statement concerning its debated Terms of Service earlier today. Writing that the main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent, they need to be an example, by running their service in a transparent fashion. To accomplish this, they are basically getting rid of a traditional “Terms of Service” and replacing it with two new documents – the Facebook Principles and the Statements of Rights and Responsibilities. Both of which will be released on new “Facebook Town Hall” groups, where members can post comments and ideas on the proposed documents. Fair enough. (Though I highly doubt companies like this take the time to read such recommendations. Never the less – I’ll give them a gold star for the effort.)
I don’t want to waste your time explaining the specifics when you can just read the statement for yourself. Instead I just want to point out that more companies should run their businesses like Facebook. When people have a concern (having their personal information sold to spammers), whether it is justly founded or not, companies need to make its consumers feel like they genuinely care about the problem. In this case, they no doubt had a deal of pressure because of the media coverage the issue had gotten, but whatever their motive – they worked hard to come to a solution to make us happy.
Was it about money? Yep. Probably. But in this economy, businesses need to start putting the costumer first if they want to grow and help rebuild America. I doubt advertisers would be thrilled if thousands of people stopped using Facebook because of worry over security. The very same principle applies to any other business. I spent twenty minutes last night talking to a Virgin Mobile representative because a button on my phone wouldn’t work. His solution – buy a new phone. That is not cool, dude, and it’s when you fail to serve your costumers that you loose them!
Facebook values its costumers so it spends its time and money to fix problems. Gobbles of other companies don’t. The moral of this story: making your costumers feel good really helps in the end.
Kudos to Facebook!
