Posts Tagged ‘web’

Smashing Magazine had a very useful posting yesterday on how to create effective fan pages on Facebook. It turns out that creating an effective Facebook fan page takes just as much effort, design sense, good copywriting, and marketing savvy as any other advertising effort. Most of all, like the “real” web, an effective Facebook fan page also takes carefully crafted content with a high perceived value.

To that I say: duh. Too bad, but, duh.

(What’s a “fan page”? Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, Facebook believes that people are different from business entities. This means that your business can have a  ”fan page,” but not a “profile”.  There are more restrictions on a fan page than on a profile; for example, you don’t have the ability to add friends.  The penalty for confusing the two is abrupt and ignominious removal from the Facebook universe. Ironically, that means it’s easier for a business to be tossed out than for an individual to erase their Facebook presence voluntarily.  So if you’re having trouble closing your Facebook profile account, I suggest you try changing your name to Giant Corporation, Inc. and see if they’ll close it down for you.)

Should your business even have a Facebook Fan Page?

It’s probably worth a try, if…

• You’ve got a consumer brand that customers regularly engage with, or get passionate about.  Cars. Trendy clothing. Starbuck’s. A rock band. Organic knitting wool. Artisan olive oil. Boutique wines.
• Your target market is a heavy user of Facebook. Examine your market closely. There is a big difference between “has a Facebook account” and “lives on Facebook”.
• You offer a lot of coupons, short-term offers, or events. Facebook lends itself well to these kinds of programs.
• You do it right, both creatively, and as part of a thoughtful online strategy.  This is not a task to leave to the summer intern.
• You have all your other marketing ducks in a row. Facebook is cheap — however, as I’ll show in a minute, by no means free — but it’s no substitute for a real marketing program.

It wouldn’t hurt, and might help, if…

• You’re a business-to-business marketer with an offbeat brand.
• You have a cutting-edge product in an emerging field where there is a lot of discussion between product creators and end-users/consumers. But be cautious — where Facebook might be a good forum for interaction and brand-building if your product is a highly experimental surfboard, I’d steer clear if it’s something like commercial-scale green energy technology.  Facebook is, after all, a social network, and can appear frivolous.  If you want to be taken seriously, a blog is a better choice.
• Your consumer customers are on the cusp: some of them live online, some don’t. Do some real testing to see if the results are worth your time and effort before committing to a program.

You probably shouldn’t, if…

• You’re going on Facebook only because you keep hearing that you should.
• You think it will instantly make your solid, traditional brand look hip.  It won’t.
• You’re a traditional b-to-b with traditional sales channels. Hardly anyone we know develops fan-like zeal for a particular brand of rooftop tarring materials or network-management software.  Customers may love your products, but they almost never feel compelled to shout “Hinkley’s Industrial Packing Tape rocks!” Nor are they likely to visit you on Facebook.
• You don’t have the resources to maintain it.
• You want to protect your content.

And that brings us to…

The Great Facebook Content Hitch

Quick quiz: Who owns your Facebook content?

A. You do.
B. You do, but Facebook co-owns it as long as you’re a member.
C. Facebook does, forever and for all time.
D. You do, but Facebook can borrow it as long as it’s on your page.

Most people think that the answer is (A).  It’s actually never been (A).  For most of Facebook’s history, it was (B).  Except for a strange, unsettling period lasting from February ’09 until just recently, when it was (C).  In fact, during the megalomaniacal fever dream that was Policy (C), the company claimed “unending and irrevocable license to use any content uploaded to its service”. (Read more: Concern over new Facebook content rules – Wichita Business Journal)

Scary. Creepy. And with the potential to collect all user-posted content into some giant Wikibook or Faceipedia.  (One can only imagine the lengthy entry on uses of the word “dude”, or the photo essays on the topic, “Me and My Friends at a Party.”)

Facebook’s policy is now (D), to wit:

“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

(Read the full statement on Facebook.)

As far as I know, Facebook has not ever used these considerable powers over content, let alone abused them. But the potential for such unlimited (albeit temporary, as long as Policy D is in force) power over content makes me nervous.

This is a big deal, because content is expensive. If your content is created in-house, you may think it’s cheap, or even free, but it is most definitely not.  This content, for example, took me a dang long time to write. In my opinion it’s a worthy investment, but it’s still a cost.

Of course, the best way to maximize that investment is to re-use your content. Facebook’s content ownership policy has the potential to diminish or dilute your ability to do just that. How? Here are two hypothetical examples of what Facebook could theoretically do under this policy:

1. You have a line of clothing that you market to pre-teen girls.  Every week, you liven up your Facebook page with a clever, quotable saying.  Eventually you decide to put these sayings on your back-to-school tees.  Only Facebook has already loaded them into a highly popular rotating widget and printed them on bumper stickers, none of it tied to your brand. Now you’ll look like you got them from Facebook, not the other way around.
2. Your company is the world’s leading expert on dust-repelling heating ducts. To save money and time, you use your Facebook fan page as a blog instead of setting up a real one.  You post answers to customers’ FAQs. You and your engineers write about how to achieve smooth installations and why your ducts are the best ducts of all time.
   After a while, almost without trying, you have the makings of the kick-ass white paper that you’ve been putting off for years.  You have loads of text and pictures to enrich your content-starved website.  Only by now, Facebook has launched Faceipedia, and the article under “Dustless Ducts” has all your accumulated wisdom. Nobody needs to go to your branded site, or to download your white paper.

I don’t know that Facebook wants to do any of these things. They probably don’t. But the fact that they might be able to should give you pause about what kind of content you post there.

It would be lovely if Facebook could make you instantly cool, drive millions of new customers to your door, and allow you to eliminate all but a pittance of your marketing budget. But the fact is that it’s pretty much like all marketing tools: valuable for some, highly effective when used with skill to the right target audiences, and no magic bullet.