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I don’t even want to talk about what you’ve done. The world is the scariest place it’s been in my lifetime, and knowing you had a hand in it — I can’t even look at you right now. Just the thought of your stupid blue face makes me furious. I expected better from you. Despite everything, deep down I really thought you gave a fuck.
Don’t tell me you didn’t know it was happening! Don’t you dare. If you can’t do better than that, just sit quiet and shut up. Don’t treat us like we’re stupid. We all know that users are the crop you’re selling so don’t sit there and tell us you didn’t know someone would harvest like this. You built the farm. You know what you planted and you know what tools you put in the shed.
This is hard. It’s really hard. We’ve been at this long enough that I owe it to you to be honest and the truth is that you no longer mean to me what you once did. And yet, you’re the centre of so many connections. The web of relationships we’ve all built online may not hold without your strands. And, right now, there’s nowhere else to go. So I’m not leaving, yet.
Maybe some therapy would help. For you, I mean.
I want to be clear that I take some responsibility for where we’ve ended up. So here’s what I’m going to be doing in the hopes that you’ll be able to meet us halfway and we’ll be able to move forward together.
- I’ll be removing the permissions for most of the 144 applications that currently have access to varying amounts of my Facebook data. It’s been great to be able to use you to sign in to so many programs, but, to be honest, some of them are so old that I don’t even remember what they were for and some of them I can log into the hard way.
- I’ll be redoubling my efforts to build my email lists. For years, marketers have been reminding ourselves that we don’t own the land FB is built on, we tell each other horror stories about communities and businesses that collapsed when MySpace started to fail, we remind each other that our email lists matter, that we own them and that they aren’t subject to the whims of the social media landscape. And yet you’ve been with us for so long, it’s been easy to become complacent. Well, let’s take this as a warning of what might be coming our way and put our efforts where we can trust the results.
- I’m going to be pulling a lot of my ad buys and recommending that others do the same. You’ve lost the trust of your customers and that taints anyone who continues to work with you. And it’s probably not going to hurt you. Headlines aside, it doesn’t look like this last year has hurt you one bit. It’ll be a drop in the bucket, but maybe I won’t be the only one.
Facebook Stock March 22, 2018
I’m not breaking up with you, even though I should. I can’t. I don’t think there are marketers who can. You’ve made yourself so integral to the way we do business, to the way we reach out, to our web of connectivity, that leaving you now would create disarray. But I am building an exit strategy. And I’m not the only one.
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