What Do Facebook and the Major Airlines Have in Common?

What do the major social networks and the major airlines have in common? Hint: The answer is not that they are both "flying high" right now. It is not even that they’re both global (granted, this is technically true, but it is not the answer to the question).

What the major social networks and major airlines, in fact, share is lagging customer satisfaction.

According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s July report, customer satisfaction for social media continues to lag behind that of other forms of e-business, particularly the major search engines. With an industry score also below that of restaurants, hotels, network TV news, cell phones and computer software, social media is situated just above newspapers and the oft-criticized airline industry.

Scoring on a scale to 100, customers rated satisfaction with Internet Social Media at 70. Worse, the average was held up by Wikipedia, which was classified as social media (but is not truly a "social network") and scored a 78. Leading social network Facebook registered at just 66, compared to a 74 for YouTube and a 67 for "all others."

MySpace did not register separately in 2011 due to its shrinking customer base, but as it only scored a 63 in 2010, its inclusion likely would have hurt the industry average. The ACSI, meanwhile, opts not to track Twitter because "a disproportionate number of users access Twitter through third party applications."

Search engine satisfaction, meanwhile, climbed to 80 points, with Google, Bing, "all others" and Ask.com all netting customer satisfaction equal to or in excess of that average. Even AOL, the lowest-scoring search engine at 75, topped every social media company but Wikipedia as a source of customer satisfaction.

Particularly-troublesome about the disappointing social media satisfaction score is the fact that it did not grow from last year’s inaugural measurement. Despite becoming even more ingrained in culture and more connected to the makeup of its audience, social media actually failed to build on the 2010 study, entitled "Facebook Flops in ACSI E-Business Report."

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Facebook, in fact, only advanced 2 points from last year’s "flop" score. Wikipedia and YouTube each improved by one point, but the "all others" category fell by five.

At 66, Facebook barely outpaces the airline industry average, which clocked in at 65 in the ACSI’s June survey. At 64, 63, 61 and 61, respectively, Continental, American, US Airways and United, four major airlines notoriously criticized for customer service, barely trailed a social network that was designed on the basis of promoting end-user engagement and interaction.

Whereas a significant degree of airline dissatisfaction can be attributed to rising costs (notably baggage fees), some of which are inevitable for airlines that are largely in the red as it is, a key source of Facebook dissatisfaction is controllable.

That factor, user concern about privacy and how profile information is used in advertising, has been on the radar for years and thus represents a failure on the part of Facebook to resolve a lingering concern. And while the apparent customer preference for non-commercial social media like Wikipedia definitely works against the for-profit Facebook in general, the higher score for Google’s commercial video site YouTube—not to mention those scores of many commercialized search engines and news websites—suggests even a commercialized-Facebook has significant room for customer satisfaction improvement.

In recapping the results, the ACSI contends that Facebook’s disappointing customer satisfaction score could render its market share vulnerable to the competition. Since the company has stronger feedback for its main portal (83) and YouTube social media site (74), Google’s Google Plus platform, in particular, is identified as a compelling threat.

"For companies that provide low levels of customer satisfaction, repeat business is always a challenge unless customers lack adequate choices," the ACSI explains.

Correctly, the ACSI does acknowledge that Facebook’s vast user share might be tantamount to its "monopoly" exemption for poor customer satisfaction. Social media is all about interacting with other users, so its success is heavily predicated on adoption levels. As long as Facebook represents the best alternative for communicating with desired points of contact, it will remain the key player in the market.

The ACSI findings, however, suggest that the e-businesses that can adapt to customer demand and new market trends and technologies are going to garner customer support. With a known web powerhouse like Google making what is at least an acknowledgeable play for social media leadership, the pressure remains on Facebook to resolve ongoing customer concerns.

Customers may want or even need to be on social media, but as the fall of MySpace indicates, loyalty to specific social networks is far from unbreakable. Competitive entry is not barred, so while high adoption and industry inertia give the surveyed social networks breathing room, customer satisfaction indeed matters.