Facebook Community Pages: Beyond your control ?

We had another interesting chat last night on Twitter with our #socpharm group. One of the people in the group pointed out that Facebook currently has Community Pages on some pharma brands to which the moderator Eileen O’Brian said “tell me more”. Here is everything you need to know about Facebook’s Community Pages and why you are in less control of your brand than you think.

1. What are Facebook Community Pages ?

Facebook’s Community Pages are an initiative from Facebook to create “the best collection of shared knowledge” on a wide variety topics. The content from the pages is pulled from Wikipedia (if available) and from your friends’ updates, so they’re often pretty bare but apparently Facebook plans to enable users to add content in the future. The social network launched roughly 6.5 million of these when they first launched.

In theory these pages should be a good thing for companies. The intent, according to All Facebook, was to take generic topics that aren’t necessarily brand-focused and to create Community Pages for them. Facebook states:

“Generate support for your favorite cause or topic by creating a Community Page. If it become very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.”

So, if your Facebook Page falls into “owned media” in our social media ecosystem, Community Pages would fit more into “earned media.”

2. Why are there Community Pages ?

Over time, Community Pages would reduce the number of errant brand-related pages set up by individuals – a good move from a brand’s perspective. As Christopher Heine at ClickZ wrote, “Big brands that have seen their official Facebook fan numbers hindered by third-party fan pages will likely welcome the move.” The piece also noted that “community pages will indeed help make official brand pages more distinct from third- party pages and groups on the site.”

3. Wait a second. We already were planning a community page on Facebook though ?

Many companies have spent time and money building sizeable communities on Facebook through their curated fan pages. Now they’re seeing Facebook roll out yet another form of pages which undermine their efforts. As it it weren’t confusing enough already, we now have:

• Pages – representing an organization or person

• Groups – for communities of interest

• Community pages – theoretically about topics, causes or experiences but seemingly also about brands.

These Community Pages also create an additional challenge for companies – they’re a monitoring nightmare. Community Pages are pretty much impossible to monitor effectively, as right now each user only seems to see content posted from their own network. That means everyone sees a unique page driven by their friends. As if there isn’t enough noise on Facebook already, companies now have to deal with a third wave of pages about their brands – and this time they have absolutely no control over them.

4. Why did Facebook do this ?

This is about the world’s largest social network encouraging companies to set up shop on their network and to invest in their presence there, then pulling the rug out from under their feet and launching a new aspect to the network that dilutes the investment for those companies.

5. Is there anyway for pharma to control the content on these Community Pages ?

Most of the content is pulled from sources out of the company’s control, so here are the recommendations:

• Keep a close eye on your Wikipedia page – your company’s information is pulled from there, so brand-jacking efforts may shift there even more if Community Pages take off.
• Enter your company’s official website if it isn’t already included on the page – Facebook lets you enter that, at least.
• Pay even closer attention to monitoring other social sites.Facebook still offers no effective way to monitor your brand; however as more and more Facebook content is made available on the wider web, you may see more spill-over if an issue does bubble up, and these pages make it more important than ever to catch those issues when they do.
• Prepare in advance for how you’ll react if a crisis does emerge. How will you decide whether to respond? Where will you respond? How? Who will do it ? What will patients say and do ?

As I had stated earlier, the time of having one person in charge of a brands online marketing is over. Pharma needs to allocate the resources to the Internet NOW or else they risk losing more control of their brand and muting DTC marketing.

Facebook Cymbalta page

Marketers cannot ignore Facebook anymore