Imitate, hyperventilate, apologize, repeat

By Gonzalo López Martí    Creative director, etc. / lmmiami.com/

• Imitation is the best form of flattery.
• It seems to be a great form of strategy too.
• Why innovate when you can simply mimic your competitors and stunt their growth?
• Mark Zuckerberg has been applying this for years with pretty profitable results.
• Take a pre-existing idea, tweak it a bit, give it a facelift and bingo.
• Haters will hate regardless.
• Let them hyperventilate for a while.
• Eventually the storm in a teapot will fuel your growth.
• Doesn’t matter what they say about you etc etc etc.
• Let me give you an example:
• In the mid 00s, When Facebook redesigned its interface with the addition of the so-called News Feed (a thinly veiled attempt at imitating Twitter and thus stealing its thunder) a massive outcry ensued.
• Facebook users seemed to hate it at first.
• Here’s an excerpt from a recent article appeared on Wired Magazine*:
• “… News Feed launched in September 2006. The rollout was a disaster, and the flash point was privacy (…) Every one of your “friends” now knew instantly if you made an ass of yourself at a party or your girlfriend dumped you. All because Facebook was shoving the information in their faces! Over 100,000 people joined just one of many Facebook groups urging the product’s retraction. There was a demonstration outside (Facebook’s) headquarters.
• Inside Facebook there were calls to pull the product, but when employees analyzed the data, they discovered something amazing. Even as hundreds of thousands of users expressed their disapproval of News Feed, their behavior indicated the opposite. People were spending more time on Facebook. Even the anger against News Feed was being fueled by News Feed, as the groups organizing against it went viral because Facebook told you when your friends joined the uprising.
• Zuckerberg did not panic. Instead (…) he acknowledged their complaints, albeit in a condescendingly titled blog post: “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” (…) The rage was quelled, and in a breathtakingly short period of time, people got used to the new Facebook. News Feed turned out to be crucial to Facebook’s continued rise.
• Zuckerberg seemed to take a lesson from his first public crisis (…). He had pushed out a product with serious privacy issues—issues his own people had identified. Yes, a crisis did erupt, but quick action and a dry-eyed apology defused the situation. People wound up loving the product…”
• Indignation might be a great form of marketing.
• In fact, many a nerd claims bad reviews are actually good for your search engine footprint.
• It seems that in the age of fleeting attention spans, criticism is ok, indifference is the problem.

*Full article here: https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-lost-notebook/