Fishburn Hedges

06.05.2010

Facebook’s ascendancy shows no signs of abating, and with recent changes, the company looks set to challenge Google for hegemony of the web. A huge amount of web journeys now begin on Facebook, and the open social graph means even conventional websites are not beyond the tentacles of the social networking colossus. Mark Zuckerberg’s key note accompanying music at a recent developer’s conference – Coldplay’s ‘When I rule the world’ - seems more apt by the day.

But, despite this, organisations may still decide Facebook isn’t the place for them. But beware. It’s well-established now that responsible corporate comms people should ensure they have registered their organisation’s presence on various social networking platforms (most importantly Twitter and Facebook), just as one would with urls, to ensure no brand-jacking. But where benign un-official pages have existed, many brands have been either oblivious or laissez-faire in their approach to asserting their control over them. Now there’s a worse scenario looming, as unofficial pages are being converted (unilaterally by Facebook) into their new community pages.

So what? Community pages have no owner. Like Wikipedia, anyone can edit them. So, you have the potential for an uncontrollable brand presence on the web’s biggest and most time-consuming platform.

It’s easy to avoid being caught brand-napping, like this, however. Regular monitoring combined with ensuring brand presence are secured on all new and existing social networks, even if you don’t plan on using them as comms channels can ensure you sleep calmly at night.

Posted by Alex Pearmain