Free Rise

Two weeks later, almost everybody still hates Facebook’s redesign, which tossed aside algorithmic relevance in favor of immediacy. Even Facebook employees reportedly don’t like it. Many of my Facebook contacts have said or implied they’re visiting less.

Relax, says Slate’s Farhad Manjoo. Users hate every site redesign. And then they get used to it. And then they forget how the site used to look.

That’s usually true. But sometimes sites redesign themselves out of relevance. (See UrbanBaby for a recent example.)

I don’t think Facebook’s redesign has doomed them. It’s still a fun and useful utility with impressive network effects, and high switching costs (the prospect of re-setting your network on another service). To their credit, they’ve demonstrated nimble action on user revulsion towards past initiatives (Beacon, or their recent ToS changes). And they’re demonstrating again that they’re going to restore some of what this last redesign destroyed.

But what’s most galling about this Facebook redesign – as well as the Beacon and ToS fiascos – is what it says about the immaturity of Facebook the company. In spite of 175 million users, it acts like a trailer-based startup. It doesn’t understand that its every move has consequences, and recreating its primary product is serious business.

Did they do any bucket testing? Did they get feedback from their power users? Did they revise, re-test, try to make sense of how their changes would impact user behavior? Or did they just feel some Twitter heat and decide they want to be like that?

At this point, the evidence strongly favors the last conclusion above. CEO Zuckerburg now famously told his employees that “disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers,” which is such a wildly false assertion that his board (he has a board, right?) should give him a little ass kicking.

For the record, I don’t hate the new Twitterish look of Facebook, although I find it less useful than the version that preceded it. And Twitter feels clunky and faddish. Nobody should be in a rush to copy it; they should be in a rush to improve it radically. (Wouldn’t be hard.)

Mostly, I’m just shocked how Facebook treats its product like it’s still in alpha, and its customers like they just need to shut up and go along for the ride. This is how you kill the goose before it even goes golden.

Unless you have a private jet and you can avoid the scrutiny of Congress, you probably hate airline travel.

Brand gurus claimed years ago that airlines were in the “happiness business,” because vacations make people happy. But airlines, of course, make their money from business travelers. And business travel always sucks.

So let’s say you’re the agency managing the campaign for Lufthansa Business Class.  In an environment that’s disastrous for travel budgets, it’s hard for a potential business traveler to get an employer to spring for a ticket to Cedar Rapids, much less one to Europe in business class.

To sell business class in this environment, you need to sell the bottom-line benefits:

• Face-to-face contact is important in this economic environment, and will even give you a business advantage over your competitors who have become more “virtual” to lower costs.
• Lufthansa Business Class knows Europe better than anyone, and it will get you to your ultimate destination very quickly and conveniently.
• Lufthansa Business Class will keep you productive while you’re in the air, if that’s what you want
• Lufthansa Business Class will also make your business trip successful by bringing you to your destination relaxed, rested, and prepared

Here’s what you don’t want to do: Remind people why they hate to fly.

And yet that’s what Lufthansa did yesterday morning. As I blearily climbed the BART stairs en route to work, a young street-teamer handed me a paper bag with “Breakfast to go,” courtesy Lufthansa Business Class brand on the bottom. In the bag was a mock boarding pass and this monstrosity:

Yes, a gummy-looking, shrink-wrapped mini-croissant with wholesale packaging labeled “2413 A | Butter Croissant Mini 1.25oz IW.” In other words, exactly the kind of crappy “breakfast” that sours you on flying coach. If you were served this starch-puck on a Lufthansa Business Class flight from SFO to Berlin – which runs in the neighborhood of $3,000/seat on weekends or $10,000/seat on weekdays – you’d probably be rather annoyed. Even furious.

Even for free, I wouldn’t eat this.

Marketing a luxury product in hard times can be tricky. Maybe the street team isn’t always the way to go.

Google announced today that as part of their growing push into display advertising, they’re finally going to target users instead of sites. Google calls this “interest-based” advertising, and they intend to run it as a beta test through AdSense.

Google has been a laggard in behavioral targeting, on one hand because of a simple lack of capability, and on the other because of the deserved scrutiny they’ve received for their dominant market share in both search and display advertising following their DoubleClick acquisition.

Yahoo and others have been doing BT for a while. The skyscraper ad you see embedded to the right (click on it to see the whole thing) is one that rendered for me today on Yahoo’s IM web client. How did they know I wanted to go to Kauai? Because I searched for a vacation to Kauai (from San Francisco) on Orbitz a couple days ago.

The secret sauce, Google claims, is that users will have control over the buckets in which they get placed, once they find the Ad Preferences tool. But how will users know the tool exists? A user can also opt out of targeting, but this requires them to find the Google Ad Privacy Center, or to install a browser plug-in if they clear their cookies frequently.

That said, ad privacy is something that primarily riles people up in theory. Sure, maybe you’re uncomfortable with ad networks tracking your sites, but when you see an ad that interests you, do you really feel violated? Making a user feel okay about being targeted – especially microtargeted – is all in the execution. Transparency looks good in press releases, but most users will never set their preferences, or even know the settings exist. So the targeting must be subtle, the messages must be relevant, without being over-personalized.

If you over-personalize, or if you make the targeting too obvious, you get the in-your-face iris-scan Hell of Minority Report. And nobody wants that.

I’m tweeting like an angry canary these days, mostly with links to the most interesting stuff I’m reading.

Check out my Twitter feed, if you dare.