Facebook backed down today to a storm of protest over its new terms of service that granted the social networking site ownership of all network content forever. Founder Mark Zuckerberg said in his blog that the site was going back to the drawing board and rewriting the terms. In the meantime, the old terms will prevail.

A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Discontent and complaints erupted over the weekend when Consumerist revealed the new terms of service and questioned whether Facebook should be able to own all the rights to all the content that users post on its site.

Part of the issue, I believe, is the way Facebook went about changing its terms of service. They did it very quietly, making no public mention of it other than updating the terms on its site. Nothing leads to a swarm of negative attention on the Internet like the appearance of deceipt and abuse of power.

Now Facebook seems to have learned that the old rules of public relations have plenty of application in social media. I’d argue they’re even more important. With Facebook, we’re dealing with the biggest community relations experiment in human history.The key is to win credibility by acting with consistency, integrity and honesty. You need to be prepared to consult broadly, which means you need to be prepared to not like what you hear.

The process can be messy. It can take longer. It might lead to imperfect solutions. But if done well, it should leave you with your organizational reputation (and market share) in tact or strengthened.

Facebook says today that it will consult with its users as it redrafts its terms of service. That process will be more difficult for it today than if they had started with that strategy two weeks ago before posting the new terms unilaterally.  Instead Zuckerberg and his posse violated one of the most sancrosanct rules of public communications: don’t bully communities.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Credibility, Social media and blogging, Crisis communications, old media vs new media, Blogroll, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.