In another example of the new tyranny of direct customer interaction, US social networking site Facebook has outraged members of its community with some site enhancements that have been interpreted as threatening the privacy of users - see adaywithoutfacebook.

I don't know Facebook well enough to judge the merits of the issues involved. But I was impressed by their speed of reaction. Clearly Facebook are still small and nimble enough to react rapidly - a matter of hours in this case - and to do their best to damp down the fire. They also live squarely in the new world, so they know where expectation levels have been set.

My thought was how many of my own clients - mostly biggish corporate technology vendors - would have been capable of this speed of response? I suspect the answer is very few. In most there is no defined escalation process I know of for this type of issue, or at best the assumption of a very ad hoc or informal route known only to those 'in the know'.

In most, I reckon they'd still be CCing in enough of the decision makers to try and get a decent conf call together long after the fire was raging out of control. Certainly bridging customer service and/or PR functions, with the business or product decision makers necessary to 'make it right' would be a significant organizational challenge.

On the other hand they have crisis management manuals to cover every traditional style of crisis eventuality. Updating these processes is clearly a requirement and doubtless on many a 'to do list', deciding how to streamline decision making authority will be the most interesting internal issue to address.

Tags: Facebook, Customer Advocacy, PR