Last month, it was revealed that Facebook had been playing around with its users’ moods by altering what is in the News Feed. The purpose was a study called “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”, conducted in partnership with Cornell University and the University of California in San Francisco.

According to the statement by Adam Kramer, one of the Facebook researchers involved, the purpose was to study the “emotional impact of Facebook [on] the people that use [their] product”.

What we now know is that Facebook manipulated the news feeds of almost 700,000 users by showing either more positive or negative posts in timelines, observing the users’ reactions to these. The social network wanted to know a bit more about data on our emotions, not just interactions. This is something huge for marketers, and very meaningful for brands, especially in marketing automation.

What Facebook deduced, which is something that is well known in the non-internet world, was that moods are contagious. Positivity breeds positivity, and vice versa.

While many observers are focusing on the law and privacy side of the story, Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has presented a completely different view on it: ‘It was an experiment in showing people different things to see how it worked’. According to her, this large scale research should help improve the social network’s service and ultimately, the customers’ experience. Now this is something I buy into.

Campaigns such as ‘99 days of Freedom’ have sprung up in response, or perhaps retaliation. They show us how shocking this news was to the public. While this is understandable, surely it’s also a good idea to start figuring out how to be able to provide better customer service by analysing our moods? Instead of what data is currently used for, targeting offers to public segments.

Put this way, surely using data could be justified from a customer experience, and for marketers, a marketing automation point of view?

We should be aware that by typing something on a search engine, by registering to a newsletter or by posting a piece public content on the web, we are leaving a mood breadcrumb trail for others to learn from.

Indeed, as marketers we know a lot about our customers through the data we gather about them via their digital journey, so why not make use of mood and attitude data to improve our service to them?

Through all the information that we as internet users are providing via our web browsing trends, we are enabling companies to help us out more effectively. In fact, 94% of marketers agree that online personalisation is critical to their business and 91% of them believe that successful brands use customers data to drive marketing decisions.

While digital customer journeys start and end online, the customer journey tends not to, either starting or, more often, finishing offline. For example, when a customer is considering a purchase, 54% of people want the reassurance of some human interaction before deciding, and 64% of people get frustrated when they are only able to interact with a company online. Moods and attitude have a huge part to play here, and the more data we have, surely, the better – imagine if you knew the customer on the other end of the phone was angry, would you deal with the call differently? Would you route the call to a different agent who is better suited?

Marketing automation technologies have a responsibility not just to side with Facebook this one time, but to also start providing some kind of meaningful data on customer journeys, in order to help brands manage their customers better. It is critical that not only moods, but other signals are read and then turned into meaningful data for brands to use to improve the service they provide to customers

So this one time I think Facebook isn’t so evil, and I certainly didn’t feel violated at the mood experiment. I just appreciated that someone out there was thinking of my feelings after all.

 

By Bhavesh Vaghela, CMO of ResponseTap

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