The Internet is taking a snow day

Image Source: @ASKAARONLEE

Tough Week for facebook

You really have to feel for anyone at Facebook who spent the weekend off the grid. What they walked into this morning was, first, a damning 60 Minutes interview from a high-level employee, which Gizmodo summarized in the following way: "You knew Facebook was making the world shittier, but it's so much worse than you realized."

Then, just as they were absorbing the impact of the media fallout, the worst happened: The entire platform collapsed. Some people on Twitter are describing an overwhelming sense of relief, and the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, even described Monday as a snow day.

As of the time that this is being written (roughly 10 am PST) there's no end in sight as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and other Facebook-controlled properties scramble to get their services back up and running.

All of this drama reminds me of a particularly relevant scene in the movie The Social Network where the fictional Zuckerberg character loudly reminds his co-founder, "Let me tell you the difference between Facebook and everyone else: We don't crash EVER! If those servers are down for even a day, our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed!"

It seems that the markets agree because so far the company has lost roughly $50 Billion in value or 5% of its stock price.

The question for those of us who don't work at the Death Star of the Internet, what do we do with all of this information? Besides, if the whistleblower is accurate when she says that Facebook knows it's causing depression, and worse, with the way it has configured its algorithm, and if the net effect has been that more advertisers are running more negative ads, then who would feel good about giving them our ad budgets?

What we've seen is that the answer is not an advertiser walkout. Unfortunately, we tried that and it didn't work. In July of 2020 #StopHateForProfit rallied more than 1,000 companies to boycott or reduce their spending with Facebook, and by the end of the year, Facebook's revenues had actually increased.

What we can do is pay close attention to our customers and look to move quickly to show up where they are shifting their attention. Screen time on Facebook has plateaued and is down significantly in many major markets. User behaviour is going to drive change; people are the trendsetters. No matter how good our intentions are, no advertiser can cause a shift, but we can support it.

A few simple opportunities: Take some of the budgets that would have typically gone to Facebook and use it to add live chat to your website, sponsor a local event, invest in high-quality content that will drive email subscribers, or partner with a creator to tell a story.

Monday may be a dark day for our Facebook-employed friends, but it's a hopeful one for creativity and for digital budgets that aim to create high-value experiences rather than ROAS at all costs.

THIS JUST IN:

An unconfirmed report is making the rounds on Twitter claiming that data from 1.5 Billion Facebook accounts is being sold on a hacking-related forum. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, of course, but this could confirm some suspicions that there's foul play involved in this week’s Facebook outage.

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting