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Measuring the customer experience of social media
The success of Facebook - and, by extension, the entire social media landscape - is often measured by the rate of new accounts being created. Facebook is reportedly adding 10 million or more new accounts per month (though the rate may be dropping) and announced that it just passed the 500 million user mark. Those are some big numbers. However, I wonder if a better metric would be the ongoing engagement of members of these various services. For example, if a typical Facebook user shows an initial spike of usage - searching for friends, posting on walls, etc. - and then trails off to "rare or never," can we call that a successful customer experience?
Not too far from the five stages of Facebook grief, here's the story I've heard from a number of Facebook users: they log on for the first time and try it out... then they're excited to look up all their old high school friends to see how everyone looks now, and who's married, and send notes to a couple of them... then they experiment with posting some pictures and links... then they, well, just sort of lose interest and figure that they have more important things to spend time on.
Facebook has a number of customer experience challenges - their groups functionality is hard to use and poorly documented (brings back memories of AOL's Rain Man system in the mid-90s, anyone remember that?) ... the email client, a supremely important feature, has the features of an email program circa 1992 ... fundamental items like the News Feed and privacy settings and incoming bitstream filters have confused users for years. To date Facebook hasn't seemed to plant a stake in the ground to say "we will obsess over the customer experience" like, say, Amazon or Apple... and the results are telling.
More generally to the entire social media landscape, what does it say about the future of services like Facebook if the customer experience isn't a ramp (of increasing engagement) but an arc (showing initial interest and then trailing off)?
It's only the beginning. It will be years before these tools balance out. It will then be even more years before most people understand and best use that balance. For example, even the geeks don't always know why they post to Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Tumblr. Maybe in five years they'll know, once those services have better differentiated and understand their own value proposition. Until then, we're still finding our way.
All good points but it's hard to argue with success :)