Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research

Facebook Stole My Money and My Data!

When Facebook first released its polling tool I was among the first to give it a try. It was like a one question omnibus that you could field to thousands of GenX2Z respondents and get responses in a couple of hours.

I used it cautiously of course, more as an exploratory tool prior to writing proposals or designing more serious studies. Still, I racked up a bill of over a thousand dollars on polls alone (I have also been an advertiser spending thousands of dollars on Facebook).

It’s been quite a while since I used Facebook Polling. But today a need came up which I thought would be appropriate for the tool. I was looking for the Facebook Polls application and couldn’t find it. So I did a search on “What happened to Facebook Polls” and came upon this article in the WashingtonPost/TechCruch.

Apparently one of the many quick and quiet rule game changes common on social networks these days. At the end of the article Robin Wauters  from TechCrunch asks “Anyone care to take a wild guess why they decided to pull the service? I have contacted Facebook PR and will update this post if and when I get word back.”

I have a pretty good idea of what might have happened, and I had the data to prove it as well (till Facebook deleted it from my account).

I ran several tests asking the exact same questions just one hour apart and got widely different answers (much more than statistically significant differences). In the process I discovered some of the reasons for the variability. For instance, simply asking a question like, “what continent or country do you live in?” would get you totally different answers just a few hours apart. Naturally this may be partly expected due to geographic userbase of the network changing by time/time zone. But the differences were more dramatic than that, and Facebook did not provide options to control for more than 1-2 variables.

Now, I can understand that a tool like this will not be perfect. I also don’t mind paying to use an imperfect tool as long as I can understand its limitations. But what I have a big problem with is CGM/SNS companies changing the rules at a moment’s notice like this, and then deleting information which someone has invested time (and in this case considerable money).

This is part of the reasons marketers are wary of web2.0. Trust is something you build with your B-C or B-B customers. It’s more than about data privacy issues. It’s also about clearly communicating and agreeing to a set of rules with your customers that are not changed at a moment’s notice. Without trust you will not have customers, neither in the brick & mortar world nor online.

Facebook, I want my data or my money back!