Microsoft Corporation

Every marketer knows that the negative option is your friend: it increases response, renewals and profits.

As a result, the negative option can turn into a hiding place for the unscrupulous marketer. The technique can be deployed in a technically correct way, but can be so cynical about the energy and intelligence of the average consumer that it violates a basic trust of the pact between a consumer and a brand.

It’s discouraging to see Facebook slipping into the shadows of unscrupulous direct marketers, and its heartening to see Google, despite it’s position as the grand behemoth of the web, work to stay true to its core values of respect and goodness, as subjective and ultimately impossible to deliver on those values are.

First, a little detail on the negative option. A negative option require the consumer of a product to take an action to discontinue some feature or attribute of the product or service. One popular use of the negative option is when a service gets your agreement to charge your credit card automatically for the renewal of a service. I was reminded of the power of this option over the weekend when I saw two renewal charges hit my credit card for cloud software applications that I no longer use. Here’s a good definition of the practice.

Another example is when a function is installed in a software platform and you have the ability to shift to another option. The most commonly recognized example of this negative option is the installation of Microsoft Explorer with each install of Windows. Millions of dollars of lawyers fees and the injection of the Federal legal system created a higher degree of visibility for other browser options. The fact that Firefox can have such substantial market share is a testament to the power creating clarity around consumer choice can have in opening up markets.

As I shared last week, Facebook has dramatically evolved its definition of privacy over the past several years. Over the weekend, Dan Kaplan pointed me to a striking graphic that compares the approach to privacy at Facebook today to different points over the past several years ago.

I spent some time inside Facebook with the goal of looking at all the privacy options from the perspective of a newbie.

The menus were lengthy, the options various, the language specific to the vernacular of Facebook and the process was confusing.

The entire system creates a disincentive to changing your privacy settings at the outset. The more likely outcome for a user is that they will go tackle the privacy settings once the horse is out of the barn and something has happened on their account that makes them angry, frightened, ashamed or embarrassed.

The approach is a far cry from where Facebook started, with an industrial design that was meant to replicate the insularity of social groups by keeping access to information directly within your privileged community.

Of course, Facebook can point to the high degree of control a consumer has over the service and say, That’s what we do. But that isn’t the starting point. The starting point is a much more open and sharing identity.

I was struck by a bit of research recently that canvassed 450 new Facebook users about how they used the system. They identified its benefits more along the line of a search engine than a social networking tool. That is a striking shift in product definition.

Of course, the value to Facebook of more openness, more search and more
databased information is that it creates the opportunity for more advertising activity. Therein lies a revenue strategy that can take advantage of the vast user base the service has created.

Google over the past year has attempted several similar expansions of it’s relationship with its users. The best example was the rollout of Google Buzz, which, we quickly discovered, was sharing activity with other people in our network without our explicit intent.

To Google’s credit, it quickly reworked the system so that we had to choose to share, rather than having a negative option that assumed we wanted to share.

The utility of buzz was diminished, but Google’s integrity reclaimed.

If you wonder why Google and Facebook have such different approaches to privacy, consumer-driven options and product design, the relative revenues of the two companies is a good starting point to unraveling the mystery.

Google has a vast pool of highly profitable revenue to protect. Anything that besmirches its brand and diminishes search traffic will have an immediate impact on their bottom line. Changing their approach to a service like Google Buzz is not just the right thing to do, it is the fiscally prudent thing to do.

Facebook doesn’t have that revenue model unlocked yet. As a result, trying things that will drive a higher revenue per user outcome is of the primary importance; in that matrix, it is unfortunately possible to loose the kind of laser focus on the consumer that ultimately drives the best experience.

Here’s what that focus looks like. In 2001, I sat in the Google offices and tried to sell Page and Brin a self-publishing tool that was a very early form of blogging software. A talented team of former Netscape engineers had developed the tool as part of a special-interest portal called Themestream. We weren’t able to get further funding for the service and were trying to unwind the assets and recover some of the investment for our backers, Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Venture and some individual Investors led by the late Mike Homer.

My pitch to Page and Brin was that the more content there was in the web, the more inventory they would have created. While they didn’t want to compete with the big media brands, our self-publishing tool would give them a platform for consumers to generate more content on the web.

This was early in their commercial evolution. Eventually, they would move into the development of tools and bring the Blogger platform into their fold. But Page articulated their basic premise with clarity and consistency. “We want to organize information for people to find. That’s our one purpose. We’ll work the revenue out around that purpose.”

He was a young guy. I was a seasoned executive. His approach could have seemed immature and inflexible. At the time though it seemed sensible, focused and inspired.

What is Facebook’s singular focus?

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