FACEBOOK........UGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

Among some of the things I learned teaching business courses at two universities for the past fifteen years, is that nine out of ten customers will not complain about your product or service. If they are unhappy, they will simply go somewhere else. Another and more important thing in business is that humans are very resistant to change, and if they do not like a product or service, they also will go somewhere else.

Yes, there are many progressive people who embrace change, but they do not represent the mainstream, who only embrace change when there is a reason to do so. People are creatures of habit. They like for things to stay the same. They resist efforts that force them to exert energy to try new things, and to do things differently than the way they are use to. So with that in mind, FACEBOOK now has an obligation to listen to their users/customers.

However interesting it is that users of a service, (that is provided free of charge, and can only be obtained by subscribing to it) would think that they have any rights to voice opinions to the provider of the service. How dare they object to changes in how the page should look; what the features should be; or when it is available to them. The nerve of them!

But lets face the real facts. Users of FACEBOOK are really customers. Customers who are expected to look at and read the commercials that FACEBOOK puts in front of them, as they use the FACEBOOK social network which is provided to them free of charge. Now keep in mind that FACEBOOK charges those advertisers fees that increase or decrease according to the readership and audience numbers. Not much different than how a newspaper, or television performance generates revenue for their owners. The advertisers are making an investment that those readers or viewers will purchase their products and services.

Now with that in mind, does FACEBOOK have an obligation to its users? It would appear so. Recently FACEBOOK made a drastic change to how users use its service. It was so radical that almost all of the news media made comment on it. It made such an uproar in the user community that it forced its creator, Mark Zukerberg, to make public comments about it. However, as a FACEBOOK user, this morning I did notice some additional changes, changes that addressed some of the users concerns. Such as two additional buttons, one that says "Top Stories Since Your Last Visit" and one that says "More Recent Stories".

Now I question myself......were those buttons there yesterday and I did not notice them, or are they new additions? I simply cannot recall. I certainly did not notice them before. But does it really matter? They are now there, and provide me with some relief in my anger and resentment to the initial changes. Did the people cry out, and the provider respond? I'll never really know the answer to that question, because I simply cannot recall whether those buttons were there or not. But does it really matter? Because it is also a known business fact, that in the IT world when there are changes, resistance to change is initially displayed in the beginning of the change, and as the users get used to those changes their anger subsides, because the user has no choice but to use the new system. Pretty soon the user simply forgets about the changes and proceeds as normal........as if nothing really happened at all.

FACEBOOK is a pretty good predictor to what people will do, react to, and how their subscribers use their service. These changes did not take place overnight, but were more than likely in the planning stages for months. Soon the uproar will be gone, and the users will be plodding along as usual........myself included.....

And then it finally hit me as to the real reason for the change. A simple business reason.....free up more space on the screen. The more free space, the more advertising that can be put in front of the users. The more advertisements, the more revenue for FACEBOOK......hmmmmmmmm, I thought! The rest is simple. Just you wait and see.

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