The faceless business pages of Facebook

This article first appeared on October 6, 2011

There’s an old saying an old friend used to remind me of constantly – there are no friends in business.

Of course I used to object, because I’d made plenty of friends in business.

Admittedly none that made it to the invitation lists of either of my weddings but the notion that business was so cold and ruthless seemed a little harsh for something that relied so heavily on interpersonal relationships.

On the other hand unfriendly enough to have Mark Zuckerberg and his team replace the “friend” button with a “like” button for its business pages.

Try as they might to try to accommodate businesses into their social network there’s a fundamental disconnect that just won’t go away.

Consumer social networks aren’t designed for business participation

It’s that simple. Despite web gurus the world over trying to work out how to legitimise business in Facebook it continues to be a square peg in a round hole that we’ve previously discussed in these pages.

The point is that Facebook is a forum for conversations between individuals and groups of individuals. Last time I checked businesses were not able to hold a conversation – not a meaningful one anyway.

Sure their staff could, but the notion of brands and organisations chatting to us as if they were your best mate just seems odd and weird to me.

Everyone knows that somebody in the organisation is charged with the social networking role but that person remains cloaked in the mysterious disguise of the corporate brand.

Are small business better placed to benefit?

It’s why smaller business may well have an advantage over their larger and more controlled larger counterparts, because most smaller businesses are inextricably linked to their operators or founders.

Take my case study from a few weeks back, Lisa Loves Admin. Lisa is one of a handful of smaller business operators who can demonstrate true positive return on investment from her social networking activities.

With just one Facebook post about her new website she received an inquiry that would pay for it and much more.

But her success didn’t come from a business Facebook page. It came from posts made about her business on her personal Facebook page.

And therein lies the rub.

Lisa was successful because her personal friends wanted to help to kick start her business, so they visited her new website and told others about it.

The person behind the business

In other words her business success was all about her as an individual, not the brand or business.

As a person she can post, chat, lol, poke and pretty much do as she pleases and in so doing she is engaging and attracting others who enjoy her banter.

Unlike a business that by its nature must be safe, careful, straightlaced and just well … boring.

It’s the same with posts I get from my favourite footy club.

As much as I enjoy the information it disseminates about the club I really (perhaps voyeuristically) want to get to know the person behind the banter and find out what they really think of the latest defeat, scandal, poaching, etc rather than what the club wants them to roll out.

Not to say that we don’t enjoy receiving these sanitised posts, otherwise we wouldn’t sign up to them.

Giving a face to the faceless

I can’t help thinking that there must be a better way of representing a business in this highly personal, warts-and-all medium.

In many ways it would make sense for the CEO to be the face of the business – in much the same way as a Richard Branson or Donald Trump are for their respective businesses.

They could post news about the business and even engage in the odd conversation (or more likely employ a ghost poster).

While that would allow for a more personal and credible page the inherent problem is that CEOs come and go, so the online transition to new CEOs etc could be a messy one.

Got any ideas? Let’s hear them by commenting below…

In addition to being a leading eBusiness educator to the smaller business sector, Craig Reardon is the founder and director of independent web services firm The E Team which was established to address the special website and web marketing needs of SMEs in Melbourne and beyond.