Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

I love working and living in our ever-evolving Web World – interesting people, cool companies, new opportunities…and we can communicate, keep in touch in all kinds of new and exciting ways, including Facebook (which I’m just now grokin’ and rockin’ even though I find the sponsored postings a tad irritating.)

But then, I read about Facebook’s treatment of Robert Scoble – and realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Ouch! Facebook has lapsed into Big Clueless Company think re its “customers.” Here’s the email they sent to Scoble:

“Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.

“As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our Web site except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.”

Note that the content he “scraped” is his – his contacts, his postings, his everything. Facebook is a repository. This is rather like a bank telling you that you can’t access your safe deposit box any more because you’ve been visiting it a lot.

So, comes back to everything you do is marketing. In this case, Facebook is – um – cutting its nose off to spite its face. Part of their rationale, apparently, is that Scoble received an automated message – but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be polite and – gee, I dunno – send a “hey, we’ve noticed, is that you or…?” email before disabling his account.

P.S. Have you reviewed your customer contact email process and tone lately? Hmmmm…(I got one yesterday re “abuse” from “abuse” at oneshoppingcart. I was not amused, since I wasn’t “abusing” anything.)

Tags: marketing, marketing troubleshooting, Facebook, customer service