To:   Mark Zuckerberg
From:  Jack Flack
Subject: The Artificial Mea Culpa

I grimaced when I read your apology for Beacon.  

Why?  

Not because it's not well crafted.  Indeed, whoever wrote it did an artful job.  It expresses clear contrition using simple, direct statements, and the tone could not be more appealing.   

The same was true when you apologized last year for the mini-feeds transgression.  

So why did I cringe?  

Because you did not apologize for what you did, but instead for simply how you did it.   And that leads me to believe that you underestimate the problem, and that you are setting yourself up for significant pain.   

I know that you have big ambitions and that you see the Beacon flap as a speed-bump.  But the calls for adult supervision have already started, and mishandling the privacy issue is the single easiest way for you to strangle Facebook as quickly as you created it.  

Because of your mea culpa, you have avoided a sudden catastrophe. But you are still dealing with a rupture of faith that has rattled your most influential members and that threatens to eat away at your business.

To get your ambitions back on track, here are four things you need to understand, and four things you need to do.  

Four Things to Understand

1. Life has changed. Until now, life has worked in an extraordinary way for you, and the obstacles you are suddenly seeing reflect the fact that you are entering a new day. To many, your persona changed the day you took a quarter of a billion dollars from Microsoft. You were no longer the smart kid who wouldn't sell out.  You are now just another ambitious geek who wants control of everybody's data.  

2. You sell vibe. The social network model depends on critical mass of participants.  Critical mass is created by the vibe of the brand, and that vibe depends on trust.  Thus, your brand is everything.  In a little more than a year, you have shot a big hole in that brand twice with the same privacy shotgun, presenting a pattern that seems to reveal an incorrigible intention to peddle your members' data.  The majority of social network flockers don't really care about their privacy, but your smartest, savviest bell-cow members do.  And if they leave, watch the others eventually follow.

3. You lost perspective.  In fact, you got greedy, not for money, but for driving change.  You remade how people connect, and then you could not be satisfied with monetizing it within today's accepted conventions.  You felt compelled to remake advertising, and you put yourself on the edge.  The world has lavished so much praise on you so fast that you assumed you could actually tell your members that Beacon is a "service."

4.  The competitive barriers are low.  Thus, you are vulnerable.  Even so, despite the widespread predictions that you will now fall like MySpace,  Friendster, and others, no obvious alternatives are currently poised to shove you over the edge of the cliff.  But assume Google has already decided to exploit your weakness on privacy.   They are real business people who know how to compete, and the "Don't be evil" shtick does not preclude them from slicing in half the net worth of a 23-year-old paper-billionaire.  

Four Things to Do

1. Kill the application.  Do it in public, and make sure the name Beacon burns on a huge funeral pyre.  Acknowledge the approach was wrong.   This may seem like an overreaction, but it will be the most efficient way to secure your brand as the place where everyone knows they are safe.  History needs to say, "Zuckerberg overstepped, got burned, and learned his lesson."

2.  Move incrementally.  In replacing Beacon, start with models that are already considered fair and reasonable within the web world.  Add new wrinkles one layer at time, and do it with unabashed transparency.   Give the new approach a name like Daylight.

3.  Refocus your passion and language.  Yes, you offer people a service they value, and you should expect fair commercial compensation in return.  But you must always make sure that 98 percent of your public statements are championing what value Facebook delivers.  So stop talking about what's good for advertisers, and start talking again about all the good things you deliver your members.  

4. Grow up, but not in public.  Stop forecasting radical change, particularly before it's happened.  In fact, make a conscious effort to learn the fine art of understatement and expectation-management that every seasoned chief executive masters.  Either that, or hire one of those seasoned chief executives to run the business for you… before such a move is widely perceived as essential. 

Good luck.