Does Facebook Punch Kittens?
Published on 1st March, 2010 by Stephen Lewis
My previous post, about Get Satisfaction’s decision to start charging for previously-free features, instead of providing a compelling reason for users to upgrade (stick, not carrot) started me thinking about one of their previous missteps, when they attracted the ire of Jason Fried, over at 37signals.
That could have been a very damaging piece of negative publicity, but I felt that the Get Satisfaction people handled the situation very well.
They listened, accepted that Fried had made some legitimate points, and promptly addressed many of the issues raised.
Although I haven’t seen a similarly high-profile article about the Get Satisfaction pricing debacle, this latest announcement appears to have been just as widely derided. Once again Get Satisfaction has responded, quietly changing its policy so that existing free customers will not suddenly be deprived of features that many have long since come to rely upon.
All’s well that ends well, some would say. For me, though, this raises certain questions about Get Satisfaction’s company ethos.
What is a “company ethos”?
I define a company ethos as a set of beliefs or principles held by a company’s founders (or directors, or owners, or whoever calls the shots) that direct and dictate the company’s actions.
One of the primary reasons that I don’t like Facebook is my perception of their company ethos; that is, their insatiable desire for world-domination through enforced networking trumps my petty privacy concerns.
If people complain loudly enough, Get Satisfaction or Facebook may change their policy (until the next time), but that’s hardly the point. The point is that both companies appear to put their own interests before those of their customers.
But really, isn’t that what every company does?
Circular saws don’t have a soul
This was David Mitchell’s contention in his Observer column a couple of weeks back.
In a typically entertaining rant, he berated those of us who anthropomorphise large companies. A corporation may legally be considered an individual, but Mitchell asserts that morally judging its actions is an exercise in stupidity:
They’re driven purely by their constitutional requirement to turn as large a profit as possible for their shareholders. People can be good or evil, ambitious or lazy, angry or fearful — plcs are none of these things. They unthinkingly, unswervingly pursue money — that is their programming.
It’s difficult to argue against this, at least for the larger PLCs.
Apple probably isn’t in it for the greater good of humanity, it’s unlikely that Microsoft deliberately makes my life a living hell, and deep down I’m fully aware that Starbucks is no more of a vicious plague on humanity than Caffé Nero.
Don’t be evil, yet
All of which begs the question, if a company’s actions are eventually going to be driven by nothing more than its constitutional obligation to shareholders, is an ethos irrelevant? Are we better off just practising our PR skills, and perfecting our marketing?
Regardless of whether you’re happy to stay small, or are striving to build a business that will one day span the globe, I still believe a clear “moral” stance is important for a fledgling business. Google’s “Don’t be evil” may be looking a bit threadbare these days, but it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a powerful force for good in the early years of the company.
Defining your company’s moral stance doesn’t mean that you won’t make mistakes, but it does mean that those mistakes will be based on your (hopefully) good intentions, and any efforts to rectify those mistakes will be similarly earnest.
The success of Facebook notwithstanding, I still believe that people can tell the difference between genuine intentions and clever marketing, and will instinctively choose the former, every time.
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