Loud and Clear?

“What the people in the business think they know about customer and market is more likely to be wrong than right. There is only one person who really knows: the customer.”

–Peter Drucker, Managing for Results

This week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company had “missed the mark” by failing to provide adequate privacy measures for the social networking site’s nearly 500 million users. Facebook then set out to correct the problem by introducing a host of newly simplified controls. “We don’t pretend that we are perfect,” Zuckerberg said. “We try to build new things, hear feedback and respond with changes to that feedback all the time.”

Peter Drucker certainly would have applauded the sentiment. “Only by asking the customer, by watching him, by trying to understand his behavior,” Drucker wrote, “can one find out who he is, what he does, how he buys, how he uses what he buys, what he expects, what he values, and so on.” In Facebook’s case, though, some are questioning whether the company has done enough.

In this edition of Drucker Apps, we invite you to join our conversation about Facebook’s responsiveness—or lack thereof—to the customer. Weighing in will be tech blogger Robert Scoble and Blackplanet.com co-founder Omar Wasow, with additional insights on listening to the customer from bestselling author Ken Blanchard.

We open things up with this question: Has Facebook really listened to the customer, as Drucker prescribed, or has it fallen short?