Facebook Page and the Corporate Conversation

Over the last five years or so, Facebook has come to dominate the social networking landscape, following in the footsteps of MySpace and leading to the inevitable success of Twitter. Within the last year, Facebook's development of the "Page" has helped to improve the manner in which companies keeo themselves engaged with the consumers of their products and receive feedback on they way they are conducting themselves. In her article "Why Conversational Marketing Requires Fundamental Business Change," Vicky Tamaru discusses the three essentials factors of conversational marketing that are crucial in maintaining useful, expansive conversations between companies and their consumers. Nowadays, every company and brand must have a fan page on Facebook to receive vital, developing feedback on their services. For conversational marketing to be useful, Tamaru says that web conversations must be

1. On-Going
2. Two-Way
3. Authentic

These qualities can easily be seen in the way that companies interact with their customers on Facebook. Take, for example, the Facebook fan page for Alternative Press, a monthly alternative rock magazine which is just shy of 14,500 fans. Through either Discussion board threads or wall posts, Alternative Press has different media where a fan of the magazine can leave comments, hear other people's criticisms of the topic or his comments, and respond accordingly. Users can leave and return to these conversations by simply clicking their ways through the profile page for a few seconds. This makes the conversations on-going.

To look at the next two factors we can examine the topics posted on the Wall of the fan page to observe the way the messages are two[way and authentic. For example, on Feb. 3 at 6:22 p.m., Alt Press posted a question on its walls asking what fans thought of the 30 Seconds to Mars cover story and received 45 comments, ranging from the completely asinine to useful criticisms on the way AP covered the band. Some comments were even critical of the choice of the band itself, which could prompt the magazine to rethink the way it judges what is cover-worthy. Through informal and familiar modes of communication that reach millions(Tamaru says that 75% of internet users are engaged in social behaviors), Alternative Press was even able to propose the idea of the use of community profiles on the magazine's website on Jan.28. This is especially interesting because not only is the magazine using a social networking site to maintain a conversation with its subscribers, but is also proposing the creation of the site's own social network to connect its fans and create new discussions on the website itself. While the occasional "F-bombs" and worse are likely to fill up the conversation, the conversation itself is a brilliant, rapidly-developing way through which companies can make themselves more accessible and transparent to the public.