Who is Facebook’s Customer?
Business is simple. You create a concept for a product. You build the product. You sell the product. The people who buy your product are called customers. If your customers complain, you fix the product to keep them happy so they will buy more. If the improvements cost you a lot of money and improve the product dramatically, you might even be able to charge more for the product.
Time goes by and your product becomes more and more popular. You decide that in this capitalistic society, you can charge more for your product due to the laws of supply and demand. You make more, you sell more, your business grows.
Sometimes, as in the case of Facebook, your product is so overwhelmingly popular that it grows rapidly to the point that the press labels it a phenomenon. You have more customers than any other company in the history of the world. You become the world’s youngest billionaire in only 4 short years. To make a perfect ending to the story, you become very rich and very successful and you sell the business and retire to a private island in the South Pacific.
HANG ON A SECOND!
Go back up to sentences 4 and 5: You sell the product. The people who buy your product are called customers. In Facebook’s case, who is the customer? Who is buying the product? Certainly not you. Certainly not me. It is free for you and me to use all we want. Let’s re-evaluate the situation.
In Facebook’s case, the product isn’t the software. Facebook’s product is you and your personal information. And the customer is not you and me, it is advertisers. How valuable is tight demographics on 500 million people? I’ll tell you how valuable. More valuable than any software program every written. More valuable than any manufactured good ever produced. Is there any wonder why Facebook is constantly under the gun for privacy violations?
Remember that Facebook’s primary product is your private information. There are more frequent changes and improvements made in the area of privacy than any other area. Why? Because that is their product. Their customers (advertisers) are demanding more and better product features. In this case, the product is your private data so they are constantly adding and improving ways for your personal information to be gathered, stored and shared.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. And remember that Facebook can only provide the product that YOU provide them. Scan your profile and anything that isn’t absolutely necessary, remove it. Don’t ‘Like’ pages just for the sake of it. Every page you ‘Like’ has access to your entire profile, your friends and all of your preferences.
The bottom line is Facebook’s product is you. And if you don’t want to be bought and sold at every turn, then consider how you use Facebook and make some adjustments.
