It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

Is Facebook wrong to discourage people from abandoning their online lives? It has blocked users from taking advantage of Web2.0 Suicide Machine, a Dutch website that provides the means to ‘unfriend’ people. Since December the site says more than 56,000 friends have been unfriended, 200,000 tweets have been removed and 850 people have removed all traces of their activity.

It’s understandable that Facebook should react in this way, as it needs to keep its numbers up in order to maintain momentum and make a successful transfer to public ownership. I guess it calculates that this reverse process could turn into a trend, and wants to stop it before it gets out of hand. But it’s not really in anyone else’s interests for it to do this. There needs to be a mechanism for people to get out of social media if they decide that it’s not for them, or that it’s taking up too much of their lives.

The important thing is that an activity should only engage people who benefit from it. This used to be a huge issue for direct marketers. Many thought that the more people they could reach the better, but the savvier ones realised that actually they only really needed the ones who had an interest in their products and services. The rest just got hacked off with constant irrelevant approaches, which ended up damaging brands.

Direct marketers learned the hard way, as consumers took steps to make their personal data unavailable. I wonder if a similar sort of conflict is going to start developing in the social media space, where as a result of commercial pressures force people find themselves exposed in a way they would rather not be.

Facebook is surely courting unpopularity with this decision, which could end up having negative consequences for its future development. It can’t all be about size and numbers, there has to be integrity as well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 11:31 am and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.