Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

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Disclosure And Facebook’s Social Plugin

11.03.22

A few weeks ago Facebook introduced its new Comment Box plugin, allowing companies and individuals to connect comments on their owned properties to their Facebook presences.

At the time, while reviewing the business implications of the new Facebook plugin, I wrote:

“There’s lots of potential for confusion, and controversy, when people realize their comments don’t just reside within the protective, search-resistant walls of Facebook. It’s just a matter of time before people start complaining as their comments start unexpectedly showing up on third party websites, or attracting responses from company advocates over on a Facebook Page…

Companies using the plugin on their owned properties would be well advised to make it very clear to users that their comments may be shared over on Facebook”

My colleague Suzanne Marlatt flagged the way the National Post is addressing the issue on its site. Here’s the notice they include on every story (screen cap below):

“Learn more about the new Facebook comments here or tell us what you think: website@nationalpost.com.

If you are commenting using a Facebook account your profile information (job/employer/location) may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the ‘Post to Facebook’ box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to Financialpost.com.”

The first line links to a full page of information on the commenting system.

I think this is a great way of communicating the implications of using the plugin. What other examples have you seen?

National Post - Facebook Disclosure

 

Posted in: facebook, social media

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How To Engage On Sites Using Facebook’s New Commenting Plugin

11.03.08

Facebook recently introduced a new version of its Facebook Comment Box Plugin, allowing website owners to integrate their commenting functionality with their Facebook presence.

We’ve already looked at the pros and cons of the Facebook commenting plugin for businesses considering implementing the plugin on their sites. Today, let’s take a look at what the implications are for companies running engagement programs.

The new plugin poses a conundrum to those working in engagement programs – specifically, around how they engage in the comment streams on sites using the plugin:

  • Do they comment as a Facebook Page, assuming they have one (and deal with the lower personalization and effect on Page content)?
  • Do they personalize responses more by using commenters’ own Facebook accounts (does that cross a work/life boundary)?
  • Do they just avoid commenting on sites using this plugin?

Here’s my take on five clear options for people running social media response programs. What’s yours? Let us all know what you think in the comments below.

Option 1: Individual employees comment using their own profiles

Have company employees log in and comment using their own Facebook profiles.

  • Pros:
    • Transparency of person’s identity
    • Avoids potentially negative comment streams being pushed to the company’s Facebook page
  • Cons:
    • Requires employee to use a personal account for business purposes. Could be considered to cross a work/life divide
    • Company-related conversation aggregated on employee Facebook profile
    • Possible that some company spokespeople may not have Facebook pages
  • Conclusion:
    • As transparent as this option is, the cons and the risk of violating work/life boundaries outweigh the benefits
    • Lost opportunity to aggregate relevant conversation and to activate advocates on page

Option 2: Comment as company-owned Facebook page

Company employees log in to their own accounts, but use the new person-like features of Facebook Pages to leave comments as the company’s Facebook page.

  • Pros:
    • Clear that responses come from company’s official presence
    • Avoids using personal accounts for business purposes
    • Drive additional traffic to appropriate Facebook pages
    • Aggregated conversations provide additional content for Facebook pages
  • Cons:
    • Potential lower transparency, as company name shows as the comment author (although can be mitigated via comment content)
    • Conversations aggregated on company page may not be positive in tone
    • Dilutes official content on the company’s Facebook page
    • Requires wider group of employees to have admin access to the company’s Facebook page, meaning less control over activity on the page
    • Potential for accidental comments as Facebook Pages on non company-related conversations, if employees forget to change their commenting profile back to their personal accounts
  • Conclusion:
    • Clear benefits over using personal profiles, but increases the level of risk on company pages via increased admin access and unpredictable content. Depending on the company, this approach may be viable.

Option 3: Create new, business-only Facebook profiles for commenters

Company employees engage in the comment streams under their own names, but via  profiles created purely for company use.

  • Pros:
    • Separation of personal and business profiles
    • Avoid additional admins on Facebook pages
    • Maintains engagement on sites with Facebook commenting plugin installed
    • Avoids diluting content on Facebook pages
  • Cons:
    • Violates Facebook terms and conditions – risk of accounts being deleted by Facebook.
    • Lost opportunity to aggregate relevant conversation and to activate advocates on page
  • Conclusion:
    • Risk incurred from violating Facebook terms and conditions is not advisable.

Option 4: Create Yahoo! accounts for commenters

Company employees comment on posts themselves, but do so through a new integration in the plugin – a Yahoo! login.

  • Pros:
    • Works within Facebook’s rules
    • Avoid additional admins on Facebook pages
    • Avoids diluting content on Facebook pages
    • Maintains engagement on sites with Facebook commenting plugin installed
  • Cons:
    • Less credibility of commenter profiles – Facebook profiles perceived as more credible than Yahoo! accounts
    • Lost opportunity to aggregate relevant conversation and to activate advocates on page
    • Could be perceived as easy for anyone to claim to be a company employee
  • Conclusion:
    • This option minimizes risk to the company and maintains the ability to engage. However, this option also loses the opportunity to curate conversations on the Facebook page, and the lack of identity verification that Facebook provides may reduce spokesperson credibility (although no more than via other commenting systems).All-in-all, this provides a viable option for companies looking to engage on these sites.

Option 5: Avoid commenting where Facebook Commenting Plugin is used

Avoid the pros and cons of all of the other options by refraining from engagement on sites using the new Facebook commenting plugin.

  • Pros:
    • Avoids risk of accidental cross-posting
    • Avoids diluting Facebook page content
  • Cons:
    • Lose opportunity to participate in relevant conversations via comment streams
    • If adoption of Facebook pages increases, lose broader opportunity to engage
  • Conclusion:
    • This is the “do nothing” approach. Frankly, it’s a last-resort if a company is already engaging in conversations on third-party sites.

Conclusion: It depends on your culture

Facebook has thrown a bit of a wrench in the works for companies engaging in social media response programs. None of these options is ideal from a company perspective – each comes with draw-backs in terms of risk, transparency and credibility.

Many companies may want to use Facebook’s new ‘company as a page’ functionality (option #2) to benefit from the ability to aggregate conversations on their own Facebook pages, and to do so credibly while providing interesting conversations for fans of their pages to participate in – and a way to leverage the advocates on your page to weigh-in on relevant topics.

However, for those carefully tailoring the volume and type of content posted on their pages, this makes life difficult. Dan Zarrella, for example, has shown that if you post too often to your page, you may lose fans. By throwing comment replies into the mix, companies may run the risk of saturating their page with content, to the detriment of people on the page. What’s more, your comments are unlikely to always be positive, so you may end up aggregating negative conversations on your page.

Meanwhile, logging-in via a Yahoo ID (option #4) offers a good balance of maintaining work/life separation for empoyees, influence over Facebook Page content, and risk mitigation from avoiding additional page admins and reducing the risk of accidental comments “by the company”. The downside of this, though, is the lost opportunity to bring these conversations to your fans, and the lack of identity verification that Yahoo IDs provide.

Ultimately, this is likely to come down to company culture. Is your culture more risk averse? Then you may want to go with Yahoo IDs. Are you more accepting of slightly higher risk? Then commenting as your company’s Facebook page may provide the greatest benefits without usurping employees’ personal accounts.

What do you think? Would you come to the same conclusion? What would you add to the mix?

Posted in: blogging, communications, facebook, social media

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Facebook Commenting Platform: Pros and Cons For Businesses

11.03.02

Facebook has announced a new version of its Comments Box plugin – its social plugin that enables Facebook-connected commenting on a website. In this post we’ll take a look at some of the apparent benefits and risks of this new feature for businesses.

Facebook’s Comment Box plugin

Among the features Facebook has revealed:

  • Social relevance – the new plugin uses what Facebook calls “social signals” to prioritize comments on posts. Comments from people in your social graph, highly-liked comments and active threads rise to the top; those flagged as spam fall to the bottom
  • Comment syndication and aggregation – commenters can push their comments to Facebook; comments left as a reply over there are aggregated back on the original site. Comments then stay sync’d between the two sites.
  • Moderation - Facebook has included a robust set of moderation tools, including visibility settings (comments can be set to be visible to everyone or set so that people only see those from people in their social graph), blacklisting words and banning users. People can also self-moderate, hiding comments that they don’t want to see
    (For more on the actual features, check out this write-up over on TechCrunch)

What does this mean for my business?

So, what might this mean for businesses? There are a number of potential pros and cons at play here:

Pros

1. Ability to comment as a Page

Core to the pros (and the cons) of the new plugin from a brand perspective is the combination of this new feature with the recent change to allow people to use Facebook “as a Page” – commenting throughout the site under the banner of a Page rather than a person. This carries over to the new plugin, meaning that a company’s Facebook Page can engage in conversations on third-party sites.

2. Broader reach of business and user comments

Commenting on third-party sites is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, companies can significantly affect the tone and course of a discussion by participating in it and giving their side of things. On the other hand, it’s hard to know just how many people actively read comments on sites – especially when comment threads get long.

The new comment plugin lets brands increase the audience for their comments, by commenting as a Page and posting the back to their Facebook Page. In doing so, the brand exposes their Facebook Page’s fans to their comments – potentially far more people than might be reading the other site.

3. Bring brand advocates onto third-party sites

As an additional benefit of the previous point, when a brand comments on an external site and syndicates the comment back to their Facebook Page, people who reply to that comment via Facebook will become integrated with the comment stream on the website. Given that (hopefully) many of those people will be brand fans and advocates, this greatly increases the potential of higher, positive, engagement on other sites.

4. Reduced spam

Popular blogs and news sites are notorious for the prevalence of spammers and trolls – people with absolutely nothing constructive to add, who just looking to cause trouble. Those people often comment anonymously, as it’s much easier to cause trouble under an assumed name.

Facebook’s new comment plugin offers the potential to reduce spam comments by forcing users to connect to their Facebook account when leaving a comment. The additional transparency offers the potential of reducing spam comments and comment trolls.

5. Potential for higher engagement on owned properties

The ability to increase the reach of comments beyond a site itself, and to increase the relevance of comments to users, offers the potential of increasing engagement across the board.

Cons

1. Potential for confusion

The new plugin allows people to share their comments over on Facebook. However, once the comments are over there it’s not entirely clear for users that their comments will be aggregated back over on the original site.

There’s lots of potential for confusion, and controversy, when people realize their comments don’t just reside within the protective, search-resistant walls of Facebook. It’s just a matter of time before people start complaining as their comments start unexpectedly showing up on third party websites, or attracting responses from company advocates over on a Facebook Page.

Meanwhile, community managers themselves need to take extra care when posting comment replies, in the knowledge they may be synchronized on another site.

The potential for confusion has a couple of implications:

  1. Companies using the plugin on their owned properties would be well advised to make it very clear to users that their comments may be shared over on Facebook
  2. Companies need to make sure they train their community managers to understand the mechanics behind the new plugin, how to minimize the risks of those mechanics and how to maximize the benefits.

2. Comments tied to one platform

While other commenting systems such as Disqus (which I use here) allow you to sync comments with your website’s database, Facebook’s comment plugin has no such feature. That means that if Facebook changes things around, or if you change comment plugins, you will lose the comments people have previously left on your site.

3. No non-Facebook login

While Facebook is looking to roll out other means of logging in to the Comment Box plugin, right now it’s limited to a Facebook-only login. That means that if people don’t have a Facebook login (even 600m users is only 10 per cent of the world’s population) or if they don’t want to share their credentials via a third party site, they’re going to be excluded from participating.

4. Facebook myopia

Just as news sites filtering news according to the views of your friends runs the risk of offering alternative perspectives to current events, so the prioritization of comments by the social graph runs the risk of not providing dissenting opinions when it comments to debates on content.

Remember – just because someone isn’t connected to you on Facebook, it doesn’t mean their perspective isn’t valid or valuable.

Good or bad?

What’s your take on this new Facebook feature? Any other pros or cons come to mind? Do you think this is a net good or bad thing for companies? Would you incorporate it into your sites?

Posted in: facebook, social media

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Weekly Reads: Facebook, Marketing Trends and Social Media’s Effect on Stereotypes

11.02.07

Alongside my ongoing book reading challenge, I start off every day by reading the latest goings-on in the public relations, social  media and tech blogosphere. As part of my new approach to creating content, I’m going to begin curating the best for you.

Each Monday, I’ll kick-start your week’s reading by sharing some of the most interesting pieces I’ve read over the previous week. Facebook is at the centre this week – four of the seven articles incorporate the dominant social network – from conflict over Egypt, to UFC broadcasting fights, to creating an engagement guide for your organization. Also: interactive marketing trends and how social media may break down gender stereotypes.

Let me know about your favourite pieces from the last week in the comments below.

1. Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post

AOL’s spate of content-focused acquisitions continues – first TechCrunch, now the Huffington Post as the New York Times reports on its latest move.

AOL buys HuffPo

2. Brian Solis: Malcolm Gladwell, Your Slip Is Showing

Nowadays, you can almost guarantee that every time there’s a significant world event, Malcolm Gladwell will stick his head up and beat down a non-existent argument that social media is driving everything. In this piece, Brian Solis offers a counterpoint to Gladwell’s incessant focus on tools, and looks at the bigger picture.

Gladwell’s slipping point

3. Wired: Trolls Pounce on Facebook’s Tahrir Square

In a bit of a counterpoint to Gladwell’s perspective, Wired looks at how Egyptian President  Hosni Mubarak’s supporters are spreading propaganda and disinformation through social media.

Facebook as a battleground

4. Fast Company: UFC and Its Gang of 4.6 Million Facebook Friends Body Slam Sports Broadcasting

UFC – the hot sport of the moment – bypasses the mainstream media and takes to Facebook to broadcast some of its fights. Fast Company notes that “Experimenting with new web integration is a natural fit for the UFC, a business built on the strapping backs of its early, Internet-savvy fans.”

Ultimate Fightbook

5. Forrester: Actual Interactive Marketer Predictions For 2011

Following-up on my presentation on 20 social media trends for business in 2011, here are a few diverse predictions from an equally diverse group of interactive marketers:

  • Ad prices increase
  • Marketing will blend promotion and content
  • Targeting gets even bigger
  • Netflix pulls out of mail
  • Mobile commerce will bloom
  • 2012 will be a year of even more aggressive innovation

Interactive marketing predictions

6. Mashable: HOW TO: Create A Facebook Engagement Policy

Mashable isn’t usually a source to rely on for in-depth walk-throughs, but this piece on creating an engagement guide for Facebook does a decent job of outlining some key areas:

  1. Categorize posts
  2. Establish acceptable response times
  3. Develop guidelines for resolving issues
  4. Create a process for handling inquiries
  5. Set clear ground rules for fan posts
  6. Set the appropriate tone

Engaging on Facebook

7. TEDTalks: Johanna Blakley: Social media and the end of gender

Johanna Blakley talks about the demographic profiling used by traditional media and the advertising industry, and how online communities and social media may bring an end not only to false demographic targeting but also to gender stereotypes in mainstream media.

Social media and the end of gender

(Image: nkzs, via sxc.hu)

Posted in: Weekly Reads

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How Will Social Captchas Affect Facebook Connections?

11.02.01

Facebook is experimenting with enhancing security around user accounts through a socially-enabled login process. Essentially, instead of seeing disguised words, users will see photos of their “friends” and be asked to identify them.

This new mechanism, PC Magazine tells us, will only be shown if Facebook detects unusual activity on your account (for example, logging in in one place then logging in a thousand miles away shortly thereafter). However, the introduction of socially-enabled sign-ins like this raises an interesting question that arose when I chatted with Paull Young last week:

What effect will social captchas have on people who accept anyone’s friend requests?

What about the Scobles, the Shankmans, the Calicanises (sp?)? When you have 5,000 friends on Facebook and you know a small fraction of them, what chance do you stand when faced with trying to identify them in order to log on to the most popular site on the Internet?

My sense is that if social captchas do become more widespread, we’ll see three things:

  1. Built-in options to allow people to narrow the set of their friends who are considered for the captchas
  2. Fewer people accepting friend requests from random strangers
  3. More ‘connectors’ and ‘a-listers’ pushing random requests to separate Facebook Pages

What’s your take? Will social captchas change the way people approach connecting to others on Facebook?

Posted in: facebook

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Don’t Put All Your Social Media Eggs In One Basket

10.12.20

So, a rumour says that Yahoo is  shutting down Delicious… or not. Cue a mass exodus as many people, including myself, look for ways to back-up thousands of bookmarks they’ve saved over the years. They also look to backup their photos on Flickr, as people realize that site may not be a sure thing after all.

Meanwhile, Facebook rolls out revamped Page layouts for brands… and then rolls them back, after first taking their site down for a while.

Both of these situations in the last week illustrate one thing:

It’s risky to put all of your eggs in one basket, especially if you don’t own that basket.

Not surprisingly, when the new Page layouts briefly launched last week, the first reaction of many of my surprised colleagues and developer friends was something along the lines of “oh, crap.”

Why?

Because this is one of the busiest times of year for many brands. Because many companies have campaigns in market over the run-up to the holidays, and any change in layout or functionality runs the risk of breaking or severely hindering the effectiveness of those promotions.

Many people seemed to share the sentiment of my friend Jeremy Wright, who tweeted:

FB has a fundamental responsibility to not disrupt their platform the week before Xmas.

I don’t blame him – companies are sinking big money into Facebook nowadays. It’s not just a free tool – it’s a key part of marketing activities for many brands (and has long since ceased to be free for many given application development and media buy costs).

These two situations serve to reinforce a point I often make nowadays:

Third-party social media tools have many advantages. However, you don’t own them. You don’t own the posts on them; you don’t own the design, the layout or the functionality; you don’t own the data held by them. In short, you don’t control them.

That’s why you shouldn’t throw all of your social media eggs into someone else’s basket.

So:

  • Spread it around. If resources permit, incorporate multiple sites into your approach. Integrate.
  • Own your hub. David Armano says that 2010 was the year that you went where the people were; 2011 will be the year where social functionality makes websites fashionable once again. Create your own social hub and control it. Control the design; control the paths you point people down; control the data; control the functionality.
  • Use third-party sites, but be conscious that they might not always be around… or keep their rules the same. If your site relies exclusively on Facebook’s Open Graph for sign-ins, for example, then Facebook going down must be pretty traumatic.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Posted in: facebook, social media, strategy

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Facebook Strategies: Content Over Creative

10.10.29

Are you focusing your Facebook investment in the right place?

The immensely smart Jay Baer directed my attention to research conducted by Jeff Widman of Brand Glue, who found that 99.5% of comments on his clients’ status updates come from peoples’ newsfeeds, not from the pages themselves.

Interesting, right? As Jay notes, this means that a lot of effort which is expended on customizing fan pages on Facebook is, frankly, wasted.

The first time that people come to your page is absolutely the most critical. They’re not going to keep coming back for the sake of coming back. So, your job #1 as a steward of your brand’s Facebook page is to draw people to your page and maximize your conversion rate of visits to “likes.” Beyond that point, investment in “ongoing” features for pages may be money down the drain.

The continued rise of Facebook community managers

This shines the light firmly on community managers as the key to Facebook success for brands. As with so many other aspects of social media, it’s not all about having a flashy, creative, well-designed page layout. It’s not about dazzling people with creative gadgets. Success on Facebook depends on companies  providing interesting, valuable content that engages people through their home base on Facebook.

Facebook itself doesn’t make things easy for brands. Well, to be more specific, it doesn’t make things easy for brands who provide mediocre content. You see, Facebook doesn’t treat all content equally. The site uses an algorithm to prioritize content based on both recency and on engagement with that content. The key, then, with Facebook content, is to ensure that the things you’re posting actually drives people to interact with it rather than passively consume it. To do the latter is to ensure that the content appears in few peoples’ streams and is soon relegated to just appearing on your wall for the 0.5% of people who may interact there.

This isn’t universally true, of course. Specific initiatives can draw people to engage directly on your page (contests, for example). However, that kind of interaction isn’t sustainable from either side of the equation.

The rise of spacial marketing

My colleague Steve Rubel has begun to talk recently about a new dimension we need to add to our digital engagement: time. In an age of Twitter streams and Facebook news feeds, it’s no longer enough to post the right content in the right place. We need to post it at the right time, too.

Mashable yesterday featured research conducted by Vitrue into the days and times that Facebook users are most active. As they summarize:

  • The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
  • The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
  • Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.
  • Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

To maximize our effectiveness, we need to take data like this and optimize our timing even further to reflect the activity pattern of our own community.

Shift your budget

The bottom line is that many marketers on Facebook are paying insufficient attention to content design while paying undue attention to creative design. While look and feel does matter, instead of spending the bulk of your budget on custom design and widgets, consider splitting that budget differently, with more of a focus on:

  • Converting people from visitors to fans – optimize your page; use tools like Kontagent to test and tweak your apps to get the best possible results
  • Effective community management – generating genuinely useful content and interacting with people in the community over the long term, and driving towards your objectives

Do you agree? How do you approach your Facebook activity?

Posted in: best practices, facebook, strategy

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Do Facebook Fans Really “Like” You?

10.09.13

They like you, but do they really like you?

I just returned from Podcamp Montreal, where I attended several thought-provoking sessions which I’ll write about over the next little while. One of those touched on an interesting question:

If someone “likes” your company on Facebook but hasn’t tried your product, what is that worth?

Not in terms of dollars, but in broader terms.

Are they really worth anything if they just like your ad, or promotion, or even your outreach, but haven’t tried your product or service? Is a fan of your marketing really worth anything?

On one hand, you could point to reports showing a correlation between Facebook fans and higher spending on products they “like.” The report above also indicate people are more likely to recommend those products to their friends.

The question is, though, is that connection just a correlation or is it actually causality?

  • Does liking something on Facebook cause you to spend more on a products and talk about them more?
  • Do people who would do that anyway search out the Facebook pages to like them because they’re such fans of the products?
  • Are some people just enjoying your marketing efforts?

I would suggest that while this would actually be very useful to know, there is actually value in all three of these scenarios.

If the people liking something on Facebook then recommend the product more and buy it more, then the benefits are clear, and your challenge becomes how to continuously engage them while recruiting more people.

If people like something because they already buy and recommend the product more than other people, then Facebook becomes a useful retention mechanism for your business.

If people like something because they just like the marketing, that puts them much higher up the CRM cycle, so you then have the task of moving them further along the funnel over time.

Of course, the odds are that a page’s Facebook fans comprise all three groups (and more). However, knowing that breakdown still matters – that’s where the community manager and the type of activities undertaken to drive new fan acquisition comes in.

What do you think?

Posted in: facebook

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Altimeter Report Provides Facebook Page Guidelines, Benchmarks

10.07.28

In the latest of a series of practical and helpful resources for marketers, Altimeter Group has released a free report entitled The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing.

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing
 

The report, based on input from 34 industry vendors and consulting agencies, outlines – you guessed it – eight criteria for determining the success of Facebook pages from companies’ perspectives, and in doing so provides a useful set of general guidelines for marketers managing or launching Pages.


 

The report also uses those criteria to evaluate the success of the Facebook pages for 30 well-known brands.


Some key findings:

  • Most of the brands examined did a good job of branding their pages and keeping them updated. However, making them pretty and posting content isn’t always enough.
  • The brands generally did poorly at setting users’ expectations, engaging in two-way dialogue, encouraging peer-to-peer interactions, fostering word-of-mouth and providing calls to action.
  • Most brands neglect to set expectations through guidelines, commenting policies etc. Strangely, Nestle still hasn’t learned its lesson.
  • Most brands hide the identities of the team interacting on Facebook, lowering the “authenticity” of interactions. Brands under fire online fared worst for this.
  • Brands still tend to talk at people, not with them.
  • Few brands deliver direct calls-to-action to fans, thus missing out on opportunities for conversion.

The report also delivers a few recommendations for Facebook page administrators:

  • Put aside your read-only playbook and tap into two-way social marketing
  • Bolster your Facebook pages with applications from third parties
  • Connect the Facebook experience with existing efforts, like your corporate website
  • Measure and analyze based on business goals – not by fans or “likes”
  • Reduce risk: Use the success criteria to analyze your efforts over time

There are a few holes in the report, including a couple of dubious conclusions – I hardly think that not explicitly encouraging peer-to-peer interactions counts as “muzzling” your fans, for example – and a sample size of five per industry is far from sufficient to draw conclusions about entire verticals. Overall, however, Altimeter has released a useful resource for marketers with success criteria, best practices and the case studies for which we are all clamouring nowadays. For those reasons alone, I highly recommend that any communicators using Facebook to reach their audiences download and read this report.

Check out the report, and let’s add to it – what are your best practices?

Posted in: best practices, facebook

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Why Facebook’s Community Pages Could Give Brands Headaches

10.05.10

A couple of weeks ago I received a worried call from a friend working in PR for a large company. Her opening question went something like:

“What the heck are Community Pages on Facebook, and why is there one for my company?”

Community Pages 101

Facebook’s Community Pages are an initiative from Facebook to create “the best collection of shared knowledge” on a wide variety topics. Right now the content from the pages is pulled from Wikipedia (if available) and from your friends’ updates, so they’re often pretty bare but apparently Facebook plans to enable users to add content in the future. The social network launched roughly 6.5 million of these when they first launched.

In theory these pages should be a good thing for companies. The intent, according to All Facebook, was to take generic topics that aren’t necessarily brand-focused and to create Community Pages for them. Facebook states:

“Generate support for your favorite cause or topic by creating a Community Page. If it become very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.”

So, if your Facebook Page falls into “owned media” in our social media ecosystem, Community Pages would fit more into “earned media.”

Over time, Community Pages would reduce the number of errant brand-related pages set up by individuals – a good move from a brand’s perspective. As Christopher Heine at ClickZ wrote, “Big brands that have seen their official Facebook fan numbers hindered by third-party fan pages will likely welcome the move.” The piece also noted that “community pages will indeed help make official brand pages more distinct from third-party pages and groups on the site.”

Causing Headaches for Brands

Here’s the problem, though – alongside generic causes and topics, Facebook has also created Community Pages for many well-known brands. As my friend put it:

“But we already have a Facebook page! What do we do with this?”

Right now, she can’t do anything.

As Facebook states in its FAQs:

“At this time, there is no way for people who choose to connect with a Community Page to add their own pictures or edit the information.”

Many companies have spent time and money building sizeable communities on Facebook through their curated fan pages. Now they’re seeing Facebook roll out yet another form of pages which undermine their efforts. As it it weren’t confusing enough already, we now have:

  • Pages – representing an organization or person
  • Groups – for communities of interest
  • Community pages – theoretically about topics, causes or experiences but seemingly also about brands

These Community Pages also create an additional challenge for companies – they’re a monitoring nightmare. Community Pages are pretty much impossible to monitor effectively, as right now each user only seems to see content posted from their own network. That means everyone sees a unique page driven by their friends.

As if there isn’t enough noise on Facebook already, companies now have to deal with a third wave of pages about their brands – and this time they have absolutely no control over them.

Let’s take Roots, for example (not where my friend works). They’ve created a reasonable-sized community of roughly 14,000 people through their Roots Canada page, and they maintain it regularly. They run contests and promotions, and have a solid level of engagement from “fans” (or whatever we’re calling them now – “likers”?).

However, that page now has to compete with other Community Pages including Roots Canada and Roots. These pages are effectively off-limits for the company, and compete directly with the community the company has already invested in developing.

This isn’t unique to Roots – do the same for Microsoft, for example. When I searched for Microsoft, for example, four of the eight results shown in the drop-down were Community Pages, at the expense of Microsoft’s own pages for students and for Windows 7.

On Control…

Now, I’m of the view that companies don’t “own” their brand – that brands are really the sum total of peoples’ perceptions about the entity in question. This isn’t about that.

I also get that companies don’t “control” their online presence – I work in social media; I actually appreciate the fact that people talk about things that interest or are important to them .  This isn’t about that either.

This is about the world’s largest social network encouraging companies to set up shop on their network and to invest in their presence there, then pulling the rug out from under their feet and launching a new aspect to the network that dilutes the investment for those companies.

It’s funny if you think about it – in the past Facebook would hand over control of fan pages to companies; now they’ve launched a new type of page that’s designed specifically so that brands can’t control them. It’s quite ironic given Facebook’s repeated moves toward enabling businesses to interact more and more with its users.

Managing Risk For Your Community Page

As for my friend and her concern about her company’s new, unsolicited Community Page, I had limited advice to offer. Most of the content, at least initially, is pulled from sources out of the company’s control, so I really only had two recommendations:

  1. Keep a close eye on your Wikipedia page – your company’s information is pulled from there, so brand-jacking efforts may shift there even more if Community Pages take off.
  2. Enter your company’s official website if it isn’t already included on the page – Facebook lets you enter that, at least.
  3. Pay even closer attention to monitoring other social sites. Facebook still offers no effective way to monitor your brand; however as more and more Facebook content is made available on the wider web, you may see more spill-over if an issue does bubble up, and these pages make it more important than ever to catch those issues when they do.
  4. Prepare in advance for how you’ll react if a crisis does emerge. How will you decide whether to respond? Where will you respond? How? Who will do it? Picture Nestle’s recent Facebook issues but in a forum where, even if you wanted to respond, you couldn’t.

What do you think? Is this move good or bad for marketers, and what other tips would you offer to help organizations manage their Community Pages?

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