How to Lose Power Users in Ten Days – aka strategic lessons from not listening to your customers
I want to talk about what’s happening on the social media platform Threads, but with a strategy and business lens. Here we’ll ignore the US political aspect of social media networks splintering between right and left and all that. We’ll stick to viewing things with the eyes of a business leader running a company. Plus, you know, a bit of business drama is always fun.
This week’s Threads meltdown is a showcase of what happens when you don’t listen to your power users. More than that, it is a showcase of what happens when you don’t really understand well your own new product and its key market and thus your product development decisions are driven by trying to sell it to the customers of your old product. To the old customers who, by the way, don’t understand your new product and aren’t even really suited for it.
It is also a showcase of what it looks like when your “AI employees” go completely crazy and start banning posts that mention the word “cracker” and, even worse, start deleting whole accounts of people who are definitely fully formed adults as underage, even when they submitted a photo ID to prove otherwise. Yes, this has been happening on IG. You can read about it in this Verge piece but here’s a taste:
“On Threads, the topic of “Threads Moderation Failures” is trending. Some users complain their accounts are being deleted or restricted for linking to articles with controversial topics. Instagram and Threads boss Adam Mosseri is directly replying to some complaints and said he’s “looking into it.” And I’m one of many people who’s had their account deleted for allegedly being a child — which I am not.
Moderation is a perennial problem on social media, but based on social media posts and The Verge staff’s own experiences, Meta is currently banning and restricting users on a hair trigger. One of my colleagues was locked out of her account briefly this week after joking that she “wanted to die” because of a heatwave.”
Imagine if you will, using a social network to communicate with your friends or acquaintances about… whatever you like to discuss, or even more importantly, it’s a network where you get clients for your business or sell your product. Now imagine that this network, which perhaps drives a chunk of your livelihood, suddenly and randomly starts banning your posts about completely innocent things. Or, heaven forbid, it suspends your account because it doesn’t understand that you, say, actually sell salted crackers for a living. Things are suddenly more than a silly irritation.
As regular readers know while I’m not an engineer I like to experiment with any AI function and assistant I can get my hands on - I am always looking for the wider business case in different industries. For example, I remain resolutely unimpressed with words written by AI, this time with AI transcription. Today in particular, having spent a good chunk of the past two weeks manually rewriting every line of AI transcriptions of many hours of conversations I had with someone for a project. I tried two well-respected AI assistants for this. (For those interested, Otter’s own and I also ran things through Microsoft Word’s transcription, which was better.) Long way to go for anything reliable that I wouldn’t have to closely “supervise”.
But when you use AI not just for chatbot-level customer service but to run an important part of your business, such as moderation and appeals for your social network, then you really, really have to be certain about that function.
I have to assume that Threads is entirely reliant on Meta AI because I refuse to believe any human being would see an adult’s ID and say no, sorry, you’re still just a child and it’s time to delete your account of ten years. (See Verge article.) Must assume they took the humans out of the process.
And the consequences of letting your AI run amok and destroy user experience for so many people who are perpetually online on your network? At a time when there are multiple credible competitors to your product what happens is whole communities, wholesale, are dipping their toes into the rival network. In this case, BlueSky.
Similar but different was the UK user exodus from Twitter over the summer because of those infamous comments by the owner. Anyway, where was I, right. So, no, LinkedIn does not work and while many people went there after Twitter ceased to function well, it doesn’t work the same way – but BlueSky does. And as small as it is, and as much as Threads was well-populated with power users who rebuilt after leaving Twitter, the truth is that once you’ve been through one “migration and rebuild”, whether it’s about social media or the country where you live, as much as you don’t want to go through it again, you also know it’s a pain but it’s doable.
When it comes to building and growing businesses sometimes simply being in position for when your competitors make huge mistakes is a good enough business strategy. Strategically, sometimes you just have to stay alive long enough.
BlueSky didn’t look like a winner a few months ago. It wasn’t nearly as polished as Threads, which built up a really good product in a relatively short period of time and was even in the habit of properly responding to power user requests.
But when Musk managed to get his network X banned in Brazil, its second-largest market in the world, for weeks, Brazilians flocked to BlueSky. Now that Threads moderation has blown up the way it did and upset Day-1 power communities (not just individual users, Threads has actual strong communities) many are going to BlueSky too. Cheekily, BlueSky set up a Threads account to capitalise on the confusion. What’s the saying, all is fair in love and war?
In any case, Threads went from winner to loser very fast and what has made things even worse is the awful communication from the top. In fact Threads happily announced the launch of reels on Threads (which users don’t want) and a few other features that they are trying to bring over from IG (Threads is built by the IG team, not a separate dedicated team within Meta) while seemingly ignoring all the complaints with only a “looking into it” comment. What is strange is that it would be quite easy to handle this from a business and customer relationship point of view.
Here's what a good crisis communication might have looked like, as articulated brilliantly by Threads power user and federation evangelist Anuj Ahooja
This is really all that needs to be said.
Here’s an important point that I find myself making often:
Things will always go wrong, they just do, but how the leaders at the top handle it, and any necessary remedial actions and the communication around it, will make all the difference between retaining customers or losing them forever.
So what will happen to Threads? Who knows. In a way, it’s not important.
But there are many lessons for business leaders to learn from this debacle, from the unchecked early use of AI to customer and crisis management. I didn’t even have to look hard.
Probably one of the biggest lessons is that if you are big and overconfident in your position – no matter how well-embedded you think you are, the upstarts can still come for you if you alienate one of your biggest stakeholder groups. Who are not necessarily your CEO or your shareholders.
If you have users, customers, clients – they have power. Don’t piss them off.
Following on a conversation with a friend and ex-colleague who is now in charge of a firm and more, I wanted to write about “Why people moving jobs is normal and not bad at all – good for their career, and at least they take charge of it, and good for the employer as you need to keep on top of things plus new employees bring new skills”….
But I love a business drama too much so this didn’t make the cut today. Would you like me to write about it next week??? Let me know.