Every organization should work any data available to harvest business improvement. That is the nature of doing business, to find a way to get customers to enjoy what they are doing, spend more, come back, tell their friends, create a buzz that says “we like doing business with these guys.” No business works to make the experience worse and drive potential users away. You want them their reaction to be good, their emotions to be positive, the result to be good for them and good for you as a company.

Facebook is a data company. They are in the business of putting people with data together with other people with data. Their customers share information freely about themselves, with anyone and everyone who will read it. Personally, that is a little more information and data points than many of us really want to know about each other. There is some sense of maintaining a little mystery that is good and that only those really, really close are privy — however, that is a digression toward a different subject.

Facebook, in publishing its own study results, did not alter or manipulate the personal content of anyone’s personal data. Their data scientists changed the emotional content of news feeds. Understand that this is not changing the substance of the news, simply the way the content was presented. From a practical perspective, this is the same thing that Mad Men on 5th Ave get paid big marketing bucks to do for their clients. It is what the spin doctors inside the White House do with every news conference. It is what the news teams at your local television station accomplish every night and what the ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and every other network does as it massages the information you receive about what happened in the Supreme Court, or in SW Asia, or on Wall Street, or in an aviation accident, or in your neighborhood.

This is also akin to other data or media companies analyzing what shows you watch immediately around another event, such as the World Cup or Super Bowl. When it’s over, do you end up watching NCIS, or Downton Abbey, or the WWC? And just prior to the event, were you tuned in to all the pre-game, or were you watching National Geographic or Family Feud or Phineas & Ferb? And from that analysis, what are the likely marketing opportunities for you to buy a car or some hot wings or go on a vacation cruise. There is a lot to be learned from the data, both in terms of how to make it better for the consumer and to make it valuable for the provider (and their business partners).

The Facebook data team is given the task of finding ways to make their customer experience better. That also means analyzing and understanding what is not well received so they can change it or avoid that result. From a business perspective, organizations don’t look for ways to make their service or products worse (really, they don’t). If they’re smart, they do lots of analysis to better understand what works and what doesn’t in order to continually provide a better result for their customers and better business result for the company.

The media hype on Facebook is spun as “altering behavior” to make it appear their business analysis is a bad thing. But think about it — altering behavior occurs when any business wants to improve their customers’ experience and the result. That is what we all do when we’re trying to improve our business — tweak out the things that don’t work so well and replace it with products or designs or services that work better. Good data analysts learn to fail fast and move on to what succeeds.

In a socially correct and responsible world it is good and necessary to include a process review to ensure the “what-if” test passes both a company sanity check and a “what if this ended up on the front page of the Washington Post” check. But, in the end, it is what businesses (smart businesses) do to improve their business, their product, and their customer experience.