December 03, 2007 | Monday
Facebook, Coke, and what “opt-in” really means
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Marketing |News |Search Engines |Google |Microsoft
I blogged last week about the user backlash against Facebook Beacon, the social networking site’s new targeted ad offering. The backlash has quickly progressed from users to advertisers, and Facebook’s PR team has only managed to pour petrol on this particular fire.
On the heels of user protests over Beacon’s encroachment on their personal privacy, New York Times journalist Louise Story published a response that all but called Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg a liar.
At Facebook’s Nov. 6 extravaganza to introduce its new social advertising features, I asked the first question after the speech of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 23-year-old chief executive. I asked why he thought lots of users would want to have information about their purchases sent to their Facebook friends through the company’s new system called Beacon. 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…
I was surprised then when I saw the first version of Beacon, because it automatically sent your friends information on your purchases on participating sites, unless you acted to prevent it. It was an opt-out program.
Story also spoke to Coke, one of the flagship advertisers on Beacon, whose recollection of Facebook’s promises matched hers. Even worse for Facebook, Coke decided to pull out of Beacon completely over the fact that it was not an opt-in program. Coke’s marketing chief told Story:
“We have adopted a bit of a ‘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,” 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.”
So how did Facebook PR respond? In perhaps the worst way imaginable:
Matt Hicks, a Facebook spokesman, said Mr. Zuckerberg had meant that users would be given the opportunity to opt out of having information sent out by Beacon, and the company had assumed that anyone who didn’t say no meant yes.
In which case, either Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t know what opt-in means (unlikely), or he was being blatantly dishonest to both advertisers and the media (also, I have to say, unlikely).
Pundits are guessing that Beacon was supposed to be opt-in, but was changed to opt-out at the 11th hour. They probably correctly calculated that most users simply would not opt in...which means they made a pro-active choice to deceive their customers.
Umair Haque remarks on Coke’s withdrawal:
Think about that for a second. A business built on a century of domination games refuses to play Facebook’s game.
There is more to this story, and we can expect it to be told, spun, and served up as a case study of how not to get users on-side in targeted advertising. But will it be the beginning of the downfall of Facebook? One thing’s for sure: Google is certainly enjoying the show from their vantage point. Microsoft, as a Facebook investor, probably is not.
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