The perils of social media marketing

Until last Sunday, Facebook was working well for jeweller Victoria Buckley; the page for her store in Sydney’s upmarket Strand Arcade was generating sales and had a rapidly growing fan base from around the world.

One of the key parts of her marketing campaigns are porcelain dolls made by the Canadian designer Marina Bychkova. Her classic doll Ophelia features in the window displays, on posters in the store and on the shop’s Facebook page.

Ophelia is a little bit different to most dolls in that she’s naked and anatomically correct — she has nipples.

Last weekend Buckley received six warnings from Facebook about “inappropriate content” on her page. There was no indication of which images or text broke the rules or what would happen to her page if she took no action.

“The frustrating thing is I can’t pinpoint which images” says Buckley, who goes on to point out that over the year she’s used Ophelia in her marketing, including two large banners in the busy shopping precinct, she’s received no complaints.

“It’s all a bit arbitrary”, says Buckley, “it only takes one anonymous person to click on the flag content button and there’s a problem.” Earlier this year her Flickr account was set to restricted because of Ophelia’s nudity.

To avoid problems, Buckley has blacked out any potentially inappropriate parts of Ophelia on the store’s Facebook profile and started a “Save Ophelia – exquisite doll censored by Facebook” group until she can resolve the issue.

But here lies another problem; she can’t find a way to contact Facebook. In researching this story, we’ve had no response either and neither has Asher Moses, the Sydney Morning Herald journalist who originally broke this story.

“It’s become an increasingly important part of the business,” Buckley says of the Facebook page. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to the site.”

Right now Buckley has no idea what is going to happen to her business’s profile. As she can’t talk to Facebook, she’s uncertain of the page’s future.

This uncertainty illustrates an overlooked issue with social media sites. All these services are proprietary, run by private organisations to their own rules and business objectives.

In many ways, they are like private mall owners. They are perfectly entitled to dictate what merchants and customers can do on their premises. If you don’t like it, you have no recourse but to take your business elsewhere.

As a consequence these sites have a great deal of control over your online business, a lesson that’s been hard learned by many eBay and PayPal dependent internet retailers.

A good example of what can go wrong are the Geocities websites. Ten years ago Geocities was a popular free hosting site used by many micro businesses and hobbyists. Just over a year ago the now parent company Yahoo! shut them down and all the data on them has been lost.

By relying on another company’s internet platform, you are effectively making them a partner in your business. That’s great while things go well, but you have to remember their business objectives and moral values are different to yours.

This is why a business website is essential; your traffic and all your intellectual property is too important to sit on another businesses’ website with all the risks that go along with that.

The lesson is that while using Facebook, Twitter and other internet services are an important part of the business marketing mix, your business needs the security of its own website and all your marketing channels, both online and offline, should point to it.

Fortunately Buckley’s across that, she’s pointing her Facebook fans to her website telling them: “You can join my independent mailing list at this link, in case they get really stupid and close this group.”

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Paul Wallbank is a writer, speaker and broadcaster on technology issues. He founded national support organisation PC Rescue in 1995 and has spent over 14 years helping businesses get the most from their IT investment. His PC Rescue and IT Queries websites provide free advice to business computer users and his monthly newsletter has over 3,000 subscribers.