Warning: This is a rant.
I’m tired of getting the invites to join PR (sub advertising. sub interactive. sub communications) firm fan pages. Four or five times a day since the end of May throughout the business week I get invited to join yet another agency’s Facebook Page of Self Promotion and Back Slapping Excellence!
Before I go too far, yes CRT/tanaka has one, and has had one before the Livingston Communications acquisition (not to mention this summer’s attack of the Facebook fan pages). For the record, we’re not actively running around the PR marketing blogosphere promoting it either.
Back to the rant. Let me be clear: I am not a fan. At first I accepted these from friends, etc. Sure, why not? But you know what, I’ve gotten far too many, and frankly heard too much posturing and BS about companies excellent Facebook fan pages with 100+ fans! And worse — and I know it’s my fault for saying yes — is the spam coming from certain fan pages who abuse their members.
C’mon, folks! You want to be great in social media? Do great work! Find a pro bono client to start with. Build a reputation for it. But don’t posture, promote yourself as social media competent, and then spam bloggers and marketers with bogus invites.
My good friend and sometimes business partner Susan Getgood sees this issue differently. She sees it as a good training ground for PR firms.
Can a Facebook page work? As Kami Huyse noted, sure, if you build value for the fans. But PR (sub advertising. sub interactive. sub communications) people very rarely do that. Instead they just posture themselves and their firms. I wish social media changed this, but hardly so. And after more than a decade in the agency business I’ve learned not to judge PR people by what they say, but rather by what they are actually doing.
As far as training goes or recruitment or simply having the page so you can say you have it in a new business meeting. Great. But frankly, I’ve never heard it come up in a new business meeting. Instead I get unsolicited references to past case studies and theories we’ve put out in the marketplace. Because there’s a reputation there, a result of focusing on doing it and learning by practicing rather than talking about our own properties.
So, yeah, spare me the fan-page. Show me some work. I’ll be much quicker to be interested, respectful, and even write you up on the Buzz Bin.
And if you’re not happy or disagree with this post, please feel free to express yourself on my Facebook Anti-Fan page wall. :P More than 100 Geoff Livingston anti-fans strong.
Even worse is when you get three or four from the same person after you’ve ignored one. Hello? No, I’m not a fan. Thanks though. LOL…
Seriously, here are some I don’t mind adding. But it’s like you said, it has to add value to the users. It just can’t succeed as a me-fest.
No doubt, Tinu. There’s a reason I did not accept the first time.
Posers, ponces & excessive self-promoters will be peremptorily and promptly purged from my fan page list.
Seriously, I agree with Kami and have written some similar posts about fan pages. If a PR agency creates a fan page that adds value to the community, I’m all for it. If they are using it to experiment with Facebook pages, also fine.
As I said in my post, though, spammy bullshit not acceptable. Nor is fan counting, an exercise as silly as promoting the number of subscribers to your RSS feed, given how many folks in our industry “reader-hop” and never unsubscribe.
Totally agree that fan pages have gotten out of control, but more so, the way people are trying to build their communities. I wrote a post last month talking about how these ppl/pages are shortcutting their way to x number of fans.
Are they really your fans or did you just focus on hitting that 100 mark so you can get a cool vanity URL? There are pages that do it well and those are the ones with the most interaction, fresh perspectives, and thought-provoking posts. Not links to your blog posts or recent WSJ article.
Well deserved rant, Geoff.
My post on shortcutting your community, if ya don’t mind: http://www.sonnygill.com/are-you-shortcutting-your-community
@Susan Funny that you mention that. Now Is Gone still has 300+ subs and it’s been more than 13 months since we last posted there. Says it all.
I think a Fan Page can be a useful addition to an integrated marketing plan. There are some really useful features on it that, when done right, establish a solid position for your company.
You hit the nail on the head that many people are unclear as to how to use a Fan Page to its full potential. To be frank, we’re still learning and I think we always will be as social media is constantly changing.
It’s also true that you must have work to show that people can be fans of. Without true fans who like your work, it’s completely transparent and all the valuable time you spend positioning yourself will be lost.
I would happily extend that rant to quite a few other B2B firms thinking they should have a facebook fan page and then collecting an often irrelevant audience – why, I ask?
@david hargreaves – relevance is relative. it depends on what your goals are for your campaign. my team looks at facebook as a credibility page and a great way to get feedback from the public. every now and then (not often) it turns in to a 3rd party referral. nothing wrong with that! for about 5mins work once every couple weeks, can you go wrong?
My Facebook Fan Page is on the attack. And it’s coming for you, bro. ;)
I’m right there with you, Geoff.
Facebook fan pages that aren’t trying to sell you a product or a service give the fans the ability to connect and share around a common theme. A great example: U.S. Army’s fan page. Full disclosure, I created and manage the U.S. Army’s Facebook fan page (http://www.facebook.com/usary)as a member of the Army.mil Web team. There’s a lot of magic happening on the page and it’s happening without our pushing or prodding. Sure, we post stories, pictures, info, etc, but the real lifeblood of the page is the community. Army families, Soldiers, future Soldiers and supporters come to the page looking for and providing resources, help/info, etc.
Real people, common themes, connecting on a page we happened to create.
I totally agree with meghan, Fan pages is agreat way to connect and share opinions or a commom theme as long as they’re not trying to sell a product or service.
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This just doesn’t go for Facebook. It goes for a whole lot of social networking sites. The most annoying part is, they invite you again and again and again. I admit, I love social media, but some people can be inconsiderate. The must learn social media etiquette! lol!