I was reading one of those 'clickbait' articles that was talking about the greatest technology failures of the decade. It brought up some interesting examples of things that I had totally forgotten.
One set of examples that stood out for me was about Facebook the company that most of us now love to hate. It's been an interesting decade for Facebook. It's easy to forget that Facebook was only launched in 2004 and only made open to the public from 2006. So this past decade has seen a lot of development for the company and continues to do so!
Facebook is the third largest IPO in the USA raising $16 billion and standing as the forth most valuable brand in the world with a value of some $94.8bn. It has 2.45 billion monthly active users (as of Q3 2019) with 1.62 billion people on average logging onto Facebook daily.
I just mention these statistics to highlight the fact that Facebook's failures are all relative! In spite of its challenging year and its failures over the past decade it still remains a leviathan in social media. All the same let's consider some of the quiet and not-so-quiet failings by Facebook and what we can learn from them.
Facebook Deals and Offers
Who remembers Facebook Deals, its attempt to take on Groupon that lasted a total of four months? I have to say I had forgotten all about it! Even with a user base the size of Facebook's it failed to make this a success and later went on to focus on things like the Facebook Marketplace. Partly its approach to launching Facebook Deals was a knee-jerk response to competition. Groupon and LivingSocial were becoming popular and Google had also launched its Daily Deals service after it failed to purchase Groupon.
Facebook felt it needed to respond although Deals was poorly differentiated in the marketplace and failed to successfully leverage any stickiness within its social user base. Deals worked by offering discounts to its users who checked in at a retailer's location. In a similar space Facebook Offers provided coupons that could be redeemed when making purchases online but this was also closed back in 2013.
Both Deals and Offers show that Facebook saw a competitive gap, moved to respond, but then was quick to pivot and change its approach when its user base didn't follow. Whilst it never took off did allow Facebook to gain experience of connecting businesses with users, a concept which underpins its advertising and commercial strategy on the platform.
Facebook Poke
Facebook's Poke was supposed to be its competitor to Snapchat, that would let users send messages, photos or videos that disappear after ten seconds. Ultimately users stayed loyal to Snapchat and the service was closed 17 months later in 2014. Mark Zuckerberg originally suggested that the Poke app was built by a few coders in just 12 days as part of a hackathon. He also claimed that Poke was "more of a joke" than an actual product. Critics note that it was also trying to prove a point only a couple of months after its unsuccessful bid to buy Snapchat for $3 billion.
Again users saw through the attempt to launch Poke and stayed with Snapchat. Facebook Slingshot followed as another attempt and was launched in June 2014. Slingshot was developed by Facebook Creative Labs, which created standalone apps that experimented with Facebook’s social capabilities beyond the network. The lack of populatrity of Slingshot and other apps from Creative Labs such as Rooms, and Riff indicates a shift in strategy towards improving its flagship app instead of creating other Facebook apps in the ecosystem.
There's a learning here around focusing on your core user community rather than over-stretching into adjacent markets where they might not be ready to make the leap, or where your brand positioning simply doesn't match up to competitors.
Facebook Home
Facebook has tried different ways to become the unified platform for the communication services of its users. Its unified inbox was supposed to replace Gmail but it was closed down in 2014. Facebook Inbox started offering users an @facebook.com email address but wasn't compelling enough for users to switch.
Facebook Home was an Android 'skin' that integrated Facebook with some of the functionality of certain smartphones, integrating Facebook Messenger and putting its News Feed on the lock screen for example.
When it launched on the HTC First, designed for Facebook's software, just one month later the device had been marked down from $99 to $0.99. Facebook's users were unwilling to allow Facebook to control their devices to such an extent and Home ended up being one of Facebook's biggest failures. In the light of later scandals relating to Cambridge Analytica and the sharing of user data, perhaps the community were wise to be distrustful!
Even this kind of failure has its upsides, however. Facebook gained a deeper understanding of Android and in doing so gave the products it wanted to create in future. It also helped the business to gain a better understanding of the acceptable boundaries of its users.
Managing user data
2018 will have to go down as one of Facebook's biggest failures. Mark Zuckerberg admits that Facebook "made mistakes" in allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal data for 50 million of its users. What is clear is that the scandal was a massive loss of trust to Facebook's users and led to a wave of users leaving the platform and removing their personal data. Cambridge Analytica, at one point run by former White House adviser Steve Bannon and linked to Republican donor Robert Mercer, acquired data from an app 'thisisyourdigitallife' that it used to develop "psychographic" profiles from those who had signed up to the app.
Whilst the practice wasn't new in American politics (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama did something similar in previous campaigns) the fact that a third party company was able to gain access to such detailed user information with minimal vetting and without hacking Facebook's systems themselves, has raised major data protection concerns. It raises a concern about the amount of data that Facebook controls and its power in leveraging that data for commercial purposes that aren't transparent. Granted there is a cost to users for accessing a "free" service but this incident really put the tradeoff in the spotlight.
What next?
Facebook's decade of trying, failing and trying again gives interesting learnings on how to understand customers; how to focus on the unique differentiators of your products and services; how to focus on your core proposition rather than over-extending your brand and ultimately how to ensure customers have trust in your digital execution.
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