It has been a while since I have last updated my blog.  I am sorry about it as I have been busy focusing on my new Facebook page for the Android community at http://facebook.com/androidphonetips.

Ever since I have started this Facebook page, I have learnt a lot from the community as well as from studying how other people work on their Facebook pages.  I realized that a lot of people started their own Facebook pages but they don’t seem to have any kind of objectives and measuring its ROI.  In the end, their Facebook page became a place for them to spam their fans, and it’s also a place where the fans are complaining right inside this Facebook page! There is nothing much interaction in the pages, which I find it very under-utilized.

There are many things I have learnt from my own Facebook page case study.  But I shall focus on only one thing in this post here.  After working on it for a while, I come to learn something very interesting here:

I notice that a lot of brands out there don’t really reply when their fans are writing on their walls

It seems to me that the brands will only write advertorial messages, or share interesting information from official sources. They don’t have that personal voice attending to the real people’s needs and it turns out that their customers are freely complaining on their walls as they discuss how good or bad the brands are.. All these comments and wall posts are so realistic and straight in the face of the companies’ presence as well as their customers.

Reasons for the brands not replying on their own Facebook page

(It may not be true, but let me try to explain.) I can understand the kind of dilemma that the brand guardians are having because they have never faced such a situation in their lives with traditional media. The traditional media is only consisting of texts, videos and audio where the brand touchpoints are never direct. The consumers will only see packaged wordings on prints, trained personnel talking about how good their products are on television and radio, etc. Traditionally, the brand guardians are so used to having a one-way communication to the audience, and if there is such thing as “two-way”, it is always in the controlled situation where they will try to filter those out before it is being broadcast to everyone to know.

Just imagine if the audience is able to share the same microphone (used by the brand guardians) and talk back.  This is what social media is really about over the non-social media (I think it is safe to say traditional media is as good as non-social media)!

It may seems that I am biased against traditional media, but I am not actually.  Traditional media has been there for a good reason for sure… And I really respect that.  It’s just a different kind of media that Internet has over television and radio… Just like television is different from radio as well.

Some brands do reply in their own Facebook page, and land themselves into trouble

If the brand decides to join in the conversation in the social media, it definitely gives that personal touch with the visitors.  Engagement with the visitors will start, and when people get too deep into the conversation which is either beyond the brand guardians’ knowledge or if it gets too negative, this is when the brand guardian gets himself into trouble of explaining to his management.

Furthermore, there are groups of people who made use of the brands’ weaknesses so as to make themselves known. They will try to make the brand guardians angry, and it will start to create long thread of conversation which can be viral for them to be known because of the brand guardians!

So, what’s the solution?

I was surfing around the various Facebook pages.  I found that most brands are actually not replying at all in their own Facebook pages.  It may be the solution that they have adopted, which is safe and sound.  Even for Dell Facebook page, I have not really seen any reply from them to the fans.  In my opinion, Dell is very established in the area of social media where we get to learn a lot from them in their endeavors to communicate in the social media.  It may seem to be a better choice to keep quiet.

In my opinion, if you can just be sincere in your replies and focus on the actual matter (and not focusing on any particular person), it is most ideal to get yourself involved in the community.  In fact, when you start to build a community, you have the chance to make any mistakes and learn from them before the group grows bigger.

Also, it is never ideal to outsource the social media management to an agency to help.  First of all, the agency will never know your confidential business plans, and they may actually misrepresent the things to the public and you may even never know!  Agencies themselves also need to learn how to communicate your business to the community, why would you want to give up that learning curve and get yourself into trouble trying to understand the social media at a later stage?

Brands must always understand that social media courses won’t make them an expert

Unfortunately, there are many companies out there who don’t understand how social media works.  That actually creates a demand for social media courses to surface.  The people who are teaching the social media may be expert in their own way, but they will never be able to transfer that experience to you… What works for them, may not work for you.  Everybody sees things differently… Social media is made up of human beings actually… It’s not something which is always the same today and tomorrow.

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