By Glen Gardner/Branding Consultant
Scanning my Google News feed this morning, I was struck by one of the headlines. It read, “Facebook Draws User Ire with email Switcheroo.” The story was about media giant Facebook changing the email addresses of all its users without telling anyone. The new address displayed on your Facebook page now carries a Facebook.com ending.
The reaction was swift and almost universally negative. This comes on the heels of several other blunders by Facebook, from not communicating security changes to the botched IPO several weeks ago.
No matter if you’re big or small; not communicating with your customer base can kill you. The most important part of communication in these cases is the listening part. That’s Marketing 101, and failing to do it will almost always hurt your business.
Companies as large as Facebook get it wrong as do small businesses. If Facebook asked their customers what they thought in advance of this latest news, they would have discovered it was not popular. That doesn’t mean it’s a mistake to do it, but they could have given people choice on the front-end and avoided the negative barrage. Now they have had to back-track.
After the attention-grabbing recall election in Wisconsin in June, Governor Scott Walker said something that struck a chord with me. After millions of dollars and a brutal campaign, he was asked if he would have done anything different in retrospect. He said he would have taken more time to listen, explain his positions and build consensus before taking action.
It’s Marketing 101 in both cases. Listen before you act and the result is almost always better.
