Facebook’s recent policy change resulted in a revolt that nearly instantaneously spread globally among its 175 million netizens. The accompanying media tsunami forced the company to reverse its revised “terms of service” within just three days.
In this historic defeat, Facebook learned some important lessons about friendship, lessons that public relations practitioners will do well to study closely.
In case you may have missed the brouhaha, on Feb. 6, the company quietly changed its terms of service, to say that users were now granting “Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)” to do whatever it wanted with anything they posted. When the Consumerist blog offered a pithy, however, inaccurate, summary of the terms, “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever,” the revolution was ignited.
On the Barricades
Clearly embarrassed, Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer (the title itself a horribly malignant anachronism in these days when he might more auspiciously be dubbed “Chief of Transparency, which, however, would surely require a 180- degree change of mindset) characterized the event as a misunderstanding that resulted from a clumsy attempt by the company to simplify its user contract.
Further, in a capitulatory message to members, the Palo Alto, CA-based company said it would collaborate with members to create a more easily understandable document. In reversing course, Facebook recognized that it might find that, collectively, its users can help it write a clearer, simpler contract, just as Wikipedia’s collective editors have produced some of the Web’s most frequently cited documents.
Collaboration is Key in a Web 3.0 World
What is the great lesson here for communicators of the corporate and of the PR stripe? We now find ourselves living in a new era that has moved beyond instant conversation to instant constituency building and immediate citizen action. Any corporate misstep will provoke an immediate reaction, which can lay low a company, brand or institution, within days, if not hours.
So what are PR professionals to do? As we stand on the brink of Web 3.0, PR pros must move beyond the web 2.0 model of interactive conversation. In a Web 3.0 world, public relations management must accept responsibility for actively engaging with client management and their constituencies in the brand/institution building process. That requires moving well beyond active listening and the measurement of the consumer conversation to a policy of on-going collaboration with client constituencies.
The collaborative process is inherently transparent and works in two directions. Looking outwards, PR must take a hands-on, town hall approach to soliciting comment and collaboration from key publics on policy and product decisions or risk raising their wrath faster than we can imagine. Looking internally, PR must be privy to clients’ key policy changes, such as that of Facebook’s, and have input as to their potential impact on its public.
In a Web 3.0 world, collaboration provides the key to successfully forging a more democratic approach to community building, online and off. Brands must actively seek the approval of all of their key publics, internal and external, if they hope to gain consumer’s trust and win support in the form of purchasing power.
Len Stein ([email protected]) is president of Visibility Public Relations.
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