Tamara Littleton

If a brand was late arriving at the social media party, they could find a pre-existing fan community on Facebook that they had absolutely no control over. Facebook’s policy then became something of a wait and see game: if the brand concerned complained, the page would be removed. Although this left the way open for the brand to set up new fan pages, they lost the valuable opportunity to reach the millions of fans that were kicked out of the old page.

Facebook’s solution was to implement three clear categories:

Brand Managed Official Pages – Fan pages became official pages, that the brand would run for the fans to follow. When the official page starts gaining large numbers of followers, Facebook checks to make sure it’s being run by the brand and not someone outside the business.

Fan Managed Groups – Any Facebook user can create a Facebook group about any topic and they can be set to private or public.

Community pages, split into:

1. Facebook Managed Community Pages – The new community pages were launched in March and there are already over 6.5 million. Facebook automatically created these pages based on members' interests, and it populates them with content from Wikipedia (where available), and a live feed of comments from member's wall posts. Publication of content remains with Facebook.

2. User-created Community Pages – These look and feel much like an Official Brand Page (although there are crucial differences) and publication is controlled by the user who created the page. However, if the page becomes popular enough Facebook will take over admin control.

Potential pitfalls for brands

Users may not be able to find the official page and so brand messages are likely to get lost in the mix. Brands that decided to create an official page have to compete with unofficial groups, community pages - which may contain many duplicates as they were created automatically - and the pre-existent fan-created pages that remain on the site. For example, a quick search under pages for Twilight results in dozens of pages representing the teen vampire saga, listed under categories as diverse as “local business” and “public figure”.

Currently, there is no way to distinguish between a community page and an official page via the search results other than looking at the number of “likes” the page has (one would assume that the official page would have the most likes, but there’s no guarantee of that). As a consequence, people searching for a place to meet other fans and get the latest news may end up trawling through pages of un-official content before they get to the official page. For very popular franchises and brands, “like” numbers can be very high for unofficial pages, and so people may not take the time to find the official page, signing up to a popular fan page instead.

Another issue is that community pages pull in comments posted by Facebook users (privacy settings permitting). This could result in negative comments on a brand that were posted to a user’s profile being displayed on the brand page. Users won’t necessarily realise that they are being fed through to the brand’s community page. At the moment, the community page acts as a kind of live feed, so at least any negative comments are likely to disappear as new comments come through. The downside is that brands cannot respond to feedback on the page itself.

If your brand is going through a rough patch, reputation wise, this is unlikely to help matters. It could act as a hub for negative sentiment, or be deliberately targeted by users who are switched on to the fact that their comments will appear on the community page. This is completely un-moderated, and the brand has no option to engage with critics, which is especially concerning for brands that target children, who could be exposed to abusive language - for example - whilst on the brand’s community page. On the plus side, these new community pages provide some valuable sentiment information, and community managers would ignore them at their peril. However, the inability to post responses or re-direct members to the official page will result in a lack of engagement within the channel.

Then there’s Google. If a Facebook user, who has low privacy settings, decides to update their status with an angry comment about how horrible their day has been due to brand x, it could appear on Google search results, which has a far greater potential to cause damage to brand reputation.

Lastly, community pages pull content out of Wikipedia, which is vulnerable to hijacking itself and ranks very high in Google search results, giving these un-moderated comments an even wider audience.

So, what is a brand to do when they have an extra page (or pages) dedicated to them on Facebook, populated by their already vulnerable Wikipedia entry and an un-moderated live stream of Facebook status updates? Brands will need to shore up their social media strategy and monitor the situation for possible developing issues. They have the option to report the page for abuse, but cannot exert any immediate control over the content. This makes community pages a potential problem area for brands.

About the author:

Tamara Littleton is CEO of eModeration, a moderation and community management company which works directly with clients including MTV, ITV, Lifetime Games, 02, and ESPN as well as with agencies such as Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi, Euro RSCG, Wieden and Kennedy and Publicis. She is a member of the Home Office Sub Committee advising the British Government on moderation of communities to help safeguard children, and is currently revising the guidelines with the Moderation Sub Group as part of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety. Tamara was also the Chair of e-mint (2006-2007), the online community for community professionals. She regularly speaks at conferences and contributes white papers to aid learning and development within the social media industry.

Relevant links:

Moderation on Social Networks – a white paper from eModeration

http://blog.emoderation.com/ – eModeration’s blog

http://twitter.com/eModeration - eModeration on Twitter