Fishburn Hedges

26.05.2011

Three FH consultants walk into a bar. 

One is English, one is Scottish, and the other one certainly looks a little bit Irish.  

Ok - there were more than three of us…and the bar was actually a lecture theatre…but anyway, joking aside, last night a gang of FHers trooped down to the LSE to hear Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg speak about poking, revolutions, tagging and all things Facebook.  

I think we all had roughly the same reaction: an immediate intellectual crush. As the WSJ reported, by the end she ‘had everyone eating out of the palm of her hand’ – not least because the evening was quite a funny, humorous affair.  

And that’s Facebook’s problem. We laughed too much.  

We laughed, on-cue, at the joke about her crashing Harvard’s computer system long before Mark Zuckerberg did – without ever having a film made about her. We cooed happily at the feel-good cockle-warming high-fiving stories about Facebook helping blood transfusions and organ donations.  

And there were a few FH smiles when she mentioned a great use of Facebook - BT’s Adam and Jane campaign, which had 480,000 votes cast on Facebook thanks to, er, us…

So we were most amused. 

But we also laughed cynically.

Take two reactions to audience questions, for example.

One student asked a classic activist question, about Sandberg’s role on the Disney board, which is facing criticism over its worker healthcare policies. The question was so obviously planted, pre-scripted and unrelated to Facebook that the audience were openly giggling – at the questioner – before the poor guy had even finished.

Then there was a question that enthusiastically managed to fit every buzz-word of the past year into one verbose mini-speech. Think of a catchprase from the past 5 years – semantic web, filter bubble, social graph – you name it, it was mentioned. And guess what – we laughed! How amusing. A wordy question from a coiffed chap in a 3-piece charcoal suit.

And here is Facebook’s problem: we also laughed at what Sandberg had to say about privacy.  

When she claimed that ‘the communication challenge is real’ on the issue, I don’t think she was joking; but the audience certainly found it pretty funny. When she aimed to disarm a journalist by arguing Facebook are better than most web companies on data storage, there was an distinct tittering to be heard. Slick answers to tricky questions won snorts of derision.  

She claimed ‘on Facebook, people become truly human’ – which was entertainingly hubristic  - and one questioner asked ‘do I own my photos, or does Facebook?’. Her answer was that ‘we store it for you.’ At which, of course, we had a good little chuckle.  

These are telling reactions. This is what we Brits do. We joke at the over-enthusiastic. We see irony in every word. The bigger threat to credibility in this country for any brand, company, or individual isn’t being feared or hated – it’s being ridiculed. Our instinct is to sneer, in a sort-of good-natured way, at anything that sounds daft.  

Last night, that included Facebook’s attempts to reassure on privacy.  

Sandberg was witty and warm. But just like the off-topic question about Disney, and the earnest question about the semantic web, the laughs about privacy were ironic. Sandberg’s sincerity was amusing, because the audience didn’t really buy it.  

For Facebook, that’s not a very funny punchline.     

Posted by Gordon Hector