Social Media Disappoints Some
July 27, 2010
For the very first time, social media has been rated on the ACSI E-business report that scores customer satisfaction in a number of areas including social media sites as well as search engines and portals and the results are a less than favorable. Is the social media apple harboring an ugly worm?
The report from ForeSee Results scores social media low on the scale but notes at the same time that Web sites like Facebook can still enjoy a monopoly with abysmal customer satisfaction ratings. While a score in the report of lower than 70 is considered poor, Facebook only managed to get a 64. It should be no surprise that customers who inked their concerns about Facebook put privacy and security issues at the forefront. (Keep in mind that the goslings at Beyond Search have some concerns about pop up, in your face surveys. We dismiss these as annoying intrusions. Thus, the samples on which the results are based may contain a bias that makes these data as wacky as the addled goose when he goes without sleep.)
The Daily HaHa nailed the goslings reaction to both the pop up data collection method and the findings reported by ForeSee. Source: http://www.dailyhaha.com/_pics/gift_of_disappointment.jpg
On the other side of that fence was Wikipedia that had a score of 77. As far as the news and information sites went there was a constant mean score of 74. It’s also interesting to note that while Google’s overall score stayed high , it suffered an overall decline of seven per cent. (Keep in mind the nature of the sample and the omission of the margins of error.)
Still, the social media scores are the alleged big story since they entered the rating system for the first time. The ForeSee Results Annual E-Business Report with the ACSI had some interesting assertions based on numbers for social media including:
- The ACSI measured 30 online companies and MySpace and Facebook were the lowest scoring sites. (This is interesting since Facebook recently passed 500 million members and MySpace has been either stable or in decline for years.)
- The customer satisfaction issues with Facebook are generally age related. Older people were generally more critical of the site than younger people. (In the absence of demographic anchor data, perhaps older folks are judging Facebook on factors not queried in the survey questions via the pop up? Perhaps those filling in pop ups were biased to be more critical? Hard to tell because the report seems to have an knife to sharpen in our opinion.)
- Facebook stores people’s videos and pictures. For that reason, they are less likely to switch social media platforms even though the cost is not an issue. (Yep, lock in. Too bad there were no data to probe the issue of data magnetism and repulsion.)
- The biggest complaint about MySpace was that the format was hard to use. (By whom? The demographic data may shed some light on this factor, but with sample issues and the nature of those pop ups, my hunch is that this is just a floating assertion without the weight of data to hold it down.)
Business needs to note that the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a leading indicator of customer satisfaction and a predictor of the kind of financial performance that a firm can expect, according to the buzz about this firm’s reports. There have even been indications that the kind of ACSI rating that a company gets can affect their future stock prices. The US government loves these types of intrusive, low cost data collection methods. Heck, some government executives use these data to bolster their unit’s argument for a “bonus” of one kind or another.
This approach to user behavior information is useful. It is good for some types of analyses and not so good for others. Will these data trigger change at Facebook? Unlikely.
Stephen E Arnold, July 27, 2010
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Funnily enough, I don’t think it matters much either.