Inside Facebook’s Campaign to Convince You It Cares

At the Q&A session, Mr. Zuckerberg defended the new “welcome message” features and said that collecting a bevy of user sentiment data was challenging but crucial, according to multiple employees who heard the exchange. A Facebook spokeswoman declined to comment.

Facebook executives hold the weekly meeting as a way to encourage employees to discuss the company’s direction, so a tough question of the CEO isn’t unusual. But the exchange highlighted just how much weight employees and top management put on the CAU score—and any steps the company takes to boost it. While the company in public highlights its number of daily active users and the amount of time people collectively spend on its apps, Facebook keeps an eye on its CAU numbers almost as much, employees say. It’s also closely tracking two separate but similar scores related whether the company is viewed by users as innovative and a force for good.

The CAU metric in particular helps executives think about the tradeoffs the company must make as part of its product and revenue decisions. If the company has a goal to increase the CAU score in a particular quarter, it might decide not to inundate users with too many ads, for instance. Or if it does decide to boost revenue, people at the company will be able to measure in some way how user sentiment was negatively impacted by that.

People at Facebook say that overall, the CAU metric has risen since the company started measuring it. But new challenges constantly crop up in keeping users feeling warm. In India, Facebook is fighting a public relations battle with net neutrality activists over the company’s efforts to give poor residents cheaper access to Facebook. In the U.S., the company has faced criticism from LGBT advocates for policies over gender identity and profile names in recent years. Facebook also got in hot water with users in 2014 when it tested how users respond to different News Feed algorithms that include more positive or negative posts.

Those kinds of external issues sometimes affect CAU negatively, says one person familiar with such examples.

Facebook’s tracking of “cares about us” evolved from external surveys Facebook had done for years in order to measure the perception of its brand. (Many Silicon Valley companies, including Google, have used external survey companies for such purposes.) At some point, Mr. Zuckerberg’s lieutenants in the non-technical side of Facebook became more concerned about the public’s perception of the company and wanted a better way to track it. Why not ask people about their views on Facebook while they were using Facebook?

These executives wanted to translate Facebook’s brand perception in a way that the rest of the Facebook organization would understand, hence the scores. Before CAU, the metric was known as “cares about me.” As reported to employees, the CAU metric is a relative number reflecting a change in user sentiment (either positive or negative) over time, not a hard score like eight out of 10.

While Mr. Zuckerberg wasn’t the initial driving force behind CAU, he fully got behind it during the course of 2014 after he recognized its usefulness, one person says.

Science and Sentiment

While it’s easy to laugh at, one employee says the CAU program is considered to be the “most amount of science poured into sentiments at such a scale.” The wording of the questions in the CAU surveys differ depending on the country; Facebook adjusts the language to the local vernacular, one person says.

Along with asking people whether they think Facebook cares about them, surveys have also asked questions like what parts of the mobile or web experience they would improve. The company also tracks whether people think the company is innovative and whether they think it is “doing good.”

“If you look at their mission—to share and make the world open and connected—you cannot do that without trust,” says Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with Altimeter Group who focuses on data intelligence, analytics and strategy. “Facebook has gotten to the point where, as a publicly traded company, with business around the world that’s become an international platform for human expression, they need people to trust them and for people to feel safe on the platform.”

“There’s a subtle difference between good influencing and biasing” consumer sentiment.

The company already can tell how new features will affect the measure. In recent years, one of the biggest temporary CAU score boosts came from the introduction of animated stickers in Facebook’s Messenger service as well as from something Facebook didn’t create, the Ice Bucket Challenge viral video trend.

Last year, Facebook launched the regular “On This Day” feature after the its occasional automatically-generated look-back videos and year-in-review features—which stitched together some of people’s most popular posts and photos—also got positive user feedback.

Other new features have been introduced that aim to both keep users engaged and make them feel like Facebook is a force for good. The company received praise for releasing features like a “safety check” for users to let others know if they’re OK after a natural disaster like Nepal’s earthquake or a terrorist incident and allowing people to put a French flag on top of their profile photo.

New features to boost the score are likely. The company has been searching for months for a project management leader to run teams that focus on specific features like birthdays that affect CAU, according to one person briefed on the search last year.

Sometimes, efforts to improve CAU backfired. One person says that in the past, some people who were greeted with “good evening” when they logged on to Facebook viewed it as weird or disingenuous, like a cashier at a big box store asking “how are you?” Facebook saying “good morning” doesn’t appear to cause the same problems.

But employees are sensitive about whether the company can overdo efforts to engender goodwill, a concern highlighted by the question at the recent employee session. Some employees say they see their friends outside the company roll their eyes at goodwill messages, expanded birthday notifications and prompts to share friendship anniversaries.

Influence v. Bias

The employee criticism of Facebook’s approach to measuring user sentiment has merit, said David VanAmburg, managing director at the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

“There’s a subtle difference between good influencing and biasing” consumer sentiment, he said. “In a good sense, ‘we want to give them a better experience, so here are new features and new privacy policy.’ The bad way is like when an auto dealer sells you the car and then sits with you and asks you how your kids are doing while you’re rating him on a survey.”

In outside surveys done by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook has made a major comeback with the strongest gains on the last survey after finishing last among social media companies in 2012. The survey uses a sample of 70,000 people to benchmark customer satisfaction about brands each year. Internet companies like Pinterest and Wikipedia have slightly higher scores.

“Users are happier with their experience than they were a few years ago,” Mr. VanAmburg said. “It’s a different Facebook.”