Customers not so satisfied with social media

This recent story sheds some surprising data on the public's satisfaction with social media sites like Facebook. Here's some quotes:

• "A new poll says the site scored 64 on a 100-point scale, which “puts Facebook in the bottom 5 percent” of private sector companies “and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction.”
• “Facebook is a phenomenal success, so we were not expecting to see it score so poorly with consumers,” said Larry Freed, president of ForeSee Results. “At the same time, our research shows that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the website and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience.”  
• “Social media has become too big to ignore, so we added it to our list of e-business measures,” said Claes Fornell, ACSI founder and professor of business at the University of Michigan. “We are quite surprised to find that satisfaction with the category defies its popularity.”
• Facebook has been under fire much of this year for everything from the ways it shares data to changing the site around so frequently that regular users are confused and frustrated, especially when it comes to privacy settings.

• Other prominent social media sites had relatively high rankings. At the top, with a score of 77 was Wikipedia, the encyclopedia site where just about anyone and everyone can and does contribute information."

• Wikipedia is more satisfying than most of the ACSI-measured news and information websites," Fornell wrote. "Like Google, Wikipedia’s user interface has remained very consistent over the years, and its nonprofit standing means that it has not been impacted by commercialization and marketing unlike many other social media sites."