Survey: For Facebook, Critical Mass Doesn’t Equal Satisfaction

Facebook is a social networking behemoth, with 750 million active users who spend about 700 billion minutes per month on the site. In a sector where users’ ability to connect and share with friends is crucial to success, critical mass equals power, and Facebook has that in spades.

But just because users are active doesn’t mean they are entirely happy with the service. In a newly released satisfaction survey of online news, search and social media sites, Facebook garnered the lowest overall score — 66%. The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) e-business report was conducted in partnership with market research firm ForeSee Results.

Facebook’s satisfaction score was up three percentage points over 2010, but came out last in the social media category and last in the e-business sector overall. And the survey’s organizers suggest that the results show that the company might be vulnerable to competitors — namely to a push by Google to promote its new Google+ social networking service, which was introduced after the survey was conducted. “We don’t know yet how Google+ will fare, but what we do know is that Google is one of the highest-scoring companies in the ACSI, and Facebook is one of the lowest,” ForeSee Results CEO Larry Freed said in a news release. “An existing dominance of market share … is no longer a safety net for a company that is not providing superior customer service.”

Indeed, in a 2010 Knowledge@Wharton story about the introduction of, and privacy concerns related to, the Facebook Connect service — which links users to other parts of the web by sharing their “likes” and other activities across a number of different sites — Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Andrea Matwyshyn warned that “people stay with Facebook because they feel locked in, but they may lose trust over time. It could be an ideal time for a competitor to come in and harness that trust deficit.”

With Google+, the search company (which received an 83% satisfaction score in the ASCI, topping its category) is attempting to address some of the most-talked about user frustrations with Facebook — privacy and contacts management. For example, the new service allows users to group friends into different “circles” and to choose which information and updates are shared with each one.

In a KnowledgeToday post about Google+, Wharton marketing professor David Reibstein said that Facebook “ought to be able to very easily respond” to the Google+ “circle” feature, if not others. “The question is how sustainable is any advantage coming out of Google+, which means something not easily replicable.” Facebook has already introduced a video calling service in partnership with Skype in response to the Google+ “hangout” application, which allows for multi-user video chats.

It will be a year before we know how Google+ fares in the ASCI, but this year’s report included one other notable result in the social media category:  Once-hot MySpace, which had the lowest satisfaction score in 2010 (63%), was dropped this year because there were not enough users to create a statistically significant sample. The ASCI is compiled with data from interviews with approximately 70,000 consumers annually.

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Wash. tribe unhappy with Microsoft project name

TULALIP, Wash. —

Washington’s Tulalip (too-LAY’-lihp) Tribes are unhappy that Microsoft has decided to use their name as the internal label for a new social media project.

Tribal officials are discussing the issue with company officials, and Microsoft Corp. said the name was never intended to leak outside the Redmond software company.

“Tulalip is an internal project code name for the online site Socl.com, which is an internal design project from one of Microsoft’s research teams that was mistakenly published to the Web,” a Microsoft spokesman said in an email to The Daily Herald. “We have no more information at this time.”

Democratic state Rep. John McCoy, a Tulalip tribal member, heard that some Microsoft employees involved in the project live on or near the Tulalip reservation.

“By all accounts, it’s an internal project at Microsoft and not a public thing. But in reality they should not have named it Tulalip,” McCoy said. “I have no idea what our tribal officials plan to do, but technically these Microsoft employees infringed on the Tulalip name.”

John Echohawk, the executive director of the Native American Rights Fund, agrees. The Colorado-based nonprofit law firm he oversees is dedicated to defending the rights of American Indian tribes and individuals.

“It’s really a matter of common courtesy, not to say anything of the legalities,” Echohawk said. “It’s the tribes’ name and nobody should run off and use the name without permission.”

McCoy laughed when a reporter floated the idea of a new casino game called “Microsoft.”

“Well, they take plenty of people to court over intellectual property rights,” McCoy said.

Last week, bloggers from around the world speculated that perhaps Microsoft launched “Tulalip” as a social networking service to compete with Facebook and Google+.

The introductory page at Socl.com said, “With Tulalip, you can Find what you want and Share what you know easier than ever.”

Also shown were nonworking links for “See how it works,” “Privacy Statement,” and “Terms of Service.”

The page was replaced the same day it appeared with a message acknowledging the error: “Thanks for stopping by. Socl.com is an internal design project from a team in Microsoft Research which was mistakenly published to the web. We didn’t mean to, honest.”

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Information from: The Daily Herald, http://www.heraldnet.com

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