Fan Follow Flounder

On one of the Facebook accounts we manage we recently received one of those occasional [?pseudo-]outraged comments from a business owner, along the lines of “I like you why don’t you like me (name of the company)?!!”

Whilst sometimes these complaints & comments can be made in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way, they can also be an attempt to get a quick plug for their business, and it can make them look just a little desperate for business, as well as not giving you the greatest faith in their communication skills; why would you trust and do business with a brand that makes online social media into a school playground?  Their comment was seen by nearly 1.5k of one particular location ‘philes’ that could very well have enjoyed the services offered by this company, but now they risk damaging their brand.

Our ethos regarding Twitter and Facebook accounts that we manage is about providing a feed or medium that is inspiring enough for people to return to, READ and click on what is perceived as a valuable link, ideally to share & reTweet; this includes the people and companies that are ‘liked’ and ‘followed’.  We don’t follow or like everyone that follows us for our ‘klout’ value but if we find them interesting and with services and feeds that we believe others will equally enjoy and find useful as well as trustworthy and professional we do!  Those likes and follows are the simplest form of indirect advertising, and the adoption of a free-for-all ethic says masses about the quality of a company’s associations.

One of the biggest pleasures of the online world is that you have the ability to filter and sift, stopping spammy Tweets and Facebook posts that are all about “sell sell sell”.  They’re dull and frankly bore the pants off everyone; why do many people move away from the TV when the ads come on?  People do not tolerate a spammy sales person offline, quickly giving them short thrift, it is amazing that some companies still try and replicate this in the online world.  The value associated with a brand that does nothing but this is diminished, and why would you want to be associated with such in any manner? 

Mass marketing in the online world turns into junk and we all know what happens with that: unliked, unfollowed and binned; I hope companies wake up soon to the power of ‘online association’ too.