November 12 2007

Editorial – Social notworking

Heineken decided that Second Life was a web site too far, so will Facebook be the right sort of place to build a brand presence. I think not?

Last week Facebook announced that businesses were going to be able to join their millions of users, and be able to create a Facebook page (they're called Beacons), but why would you want to do it? And if you did, how many people would sign up to be your products or brands friend? Would your business be a top networker or a nobby no-mates?

My first question is why would you want to create yet another web presence for your business? If it’s to get your message across, then isn’t that what your website does already? If you start to create a different web presence for every “flavour of the moment “ website that comes along, then where are you going to stop? Most internet users seem quite happy with the standard way of finding out information about a company ie you use Google or just type in their name as a URL so why confuse the issue by then creating another presence?

The next question is what are you going to do get their attention that fits into the context of the site? Social networking sites like Facebook are there to do one thing, and that’s social networking. So unless your business has a social angle to it, or you can think of a way of extracting some social angle out of your business then building a Facebook strikes me as being a complete waste of time and money.

I think most of the users of a site like Facebook would never go to, or even think of going to a businesses page if it existed, and the ones that would go, are probably the ones who have already started the “your product sucks” groups on Facebook already. I did a quick search for Coca Cola on Facebook and there are already at least 30 Coca Cola sites, plus 470 others that mention the brand name, of which the first 150 are all asking why Coca Cola isn’t running the Christmas advert, the daddy of them all being the “Why you aren’t bringing back the Coca Cola Christmas truck advert?” group with 6,049 members.

Don’t get me wrong I think advertising on social networking sites is perfectly acceptable, however it needs to be in context and preferably intelligent.

The way to advertise on Facebook or any other social networking site is to do something interesting and different, that aids, amuses or catches the users’ attention and a presence isn’t going to do this. There are advertisers who are already using Facebook well, and who use the information they know about you. One of my favourite is the ticket agency who uses my favourite music information to alert me when bands I like are touring, and then pops up an advert with band picture and a cheery “they’re touring so why don’t you buy a ticket.”

On the day of the Facebook announcement I was at a Fresh Business Thinking’s Internet Marketing Masterclass conference, so it was interesting to see how this would be used in the conference, if at all. Three of the six speakers picked up on it, and mentioned it, unfortunately for the delegates at the conference they got three different answers to the question “do you think it’s a good thing”; Yes, no and probably. I’m with the no crowd.

by Marcus Austin (Web Editor)