How Facebook Privacy Settings could become a killer feature
Posted by Adam Beizsley-Pycroft at 5:11 pm
Recently in the blogosphere, on Twitter and within traditional “dead tree” media there has been a great deal of controversy around Facebook’s attitude to privacy settings. Digital advocacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation believe that the recent changes to simplify them haven’t gone far enough. Meanwhile, Facebook have stated that the instant personalization program is “widely misunderstood” and “the only information the three partners currently in the program receive from Facebook is users’ public information.”. Whilst this debate is likely to rage on for the foreseeable future I’ve been considering how a further tweak to Facebook’s privacy settings could turn it into a full blown CRM solution.
One of the main barriers to using Facebook for account management is that the vast majority of professionals have a personal and business “persona”. In certain industries, various quotes, opinions and photographs that users may post in a personal context would be considered completely inappropriate.
One solution, which Facebook have already developed is pages, usually branded as an organisation or product rather than an individual (celebrity Facebook pages are the obvious exception). However, conventional wisdom on the subject dictates that it’s best to have an employee “personify” a company rather than appear as a monolithic corporate entity. Furthermore, whilst pages are OK for reaching a wider audience they’re inappropriate for customer relationship management of key individuals.
At present, people tend to use LinkedIn to communicate in a business context. However, LinkedIn has several barriers including the subscription and the fact that the userbase is only 60 million versus Facebook’s 400 million. Facebook is clearly more feature rich and has the money to invest in research, development and design which should result in a better platform.
Facebook currently allows users to tailor the audience for statuses and restrict access to various profile sections. However, the killer feature that they’re missing is the ability to present different profile information by audience. In order to do this at present a user would have to create one Facebook account per audience. This would create confusion (the user would appear multiple times in the search) and demonstrate that the customer wasn’t dealing with the “real” person. Whilst the vast majority understand that people behave differently in a personal and professional setting this isn’t something usually discussed. By introducing this feature there would be a more seamless user experience as the recipient of the “Friend Request” could determine whether a user would be presented with their personal or business information or indeed both.