Facebook Tips

1. Albert Pereira, CMO & President-Digital, Genesis
Burson-Marsteller puts forth the case for ‘digital’
in The Economic Times.
How companies figure out what facebook likes
Last week, the world’s largest social network,
Facebook took down the pages of Cadbury Bourn-
ville and FCUK India, only to restore them - with
the fan base and wall intact - back two days
later. It was not a sweet surprise for the choco-
late maker that is still wondering what they did
to earn the suspension. “Cadbury is working with
Facebook and agency partners to ascertain the
reason for the move. What was the reason and
why the page was taken down weren’t specified,”
a Cadbury spokesperson told ET on Sunday.
Facebook can hit the delete button
With Facebook hitting the delete button, albeit
temporarily, a full blown debate has erupted
about the growing clout of social media and how
companies use and in some cases, misuse social
networks like Facebook. “Most of the brands
don’t fully know Facebook norms and regulations
and even if they do, they tend to ignore it - until
now. And Facebook’s move to temporarily disable
big brand pages makes everybody sit up and take
notice,” says Adhvith Dhuddu, founder and chief
executive officer of AliveNow, a Bangalorebased
social media management firm. “Facebook was
forced to do this because many brand pages were
not following guidelines and it was only a matter of time before Facebook came down heavily on
them.”
This is not the first time that Facebook has taken punitive action against a company. Even Fas-
track pages were temporarily disabled for contest violations. In early June, Facebook clamped
down on Pizza Hut India’s page as it found an old application on its Pizza Hut Delivery page that
was akin to a contest.

2. Promotions or contests by building an external application or tab
According to the Facebook rule book, if a brand
wants to release promotions or run contests, they
should do it by building an external application
or tab. This idea is to clarify that “the promotion
is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered
by, or associated with, Facebook.”
“It was an old promotional offer that was still on
our wall,” says Sandeep Kataria, chief marketing
officer, Yum! Restaurants India that owns Pizza
Hut, KFC and Taco Bell in India. “The site was
temporarily disabled until the old content was deleted,” adds Kataria. The restaurant chain is
now in touch with Facebook administrators to ensure that they comply with the social network’s
revised guidelines. Clearly, no one wants to alienate the Facebook fan base.
Good Connections
And there is only one reason for that - Facebook
is the six-hundred-pound gorilla of the social
networking world. In April 2011, Facebook us-
ers in India crossed the 25-million base mark,
well ahead of all social media players, including
international ones like Orkut, Twitter, YouTube,
Linkedin, SlideShare, and its smaller, regional
competitors like BuzzCity and Bigadda.
Its closest rival Orkut is languishing at approxi-
mately 19 million users with little signs of
growing. With everyone from the person next to you to your favourite brand to even the Munici-
pal Corporation of Delhi getting on Facebook , the California-based social networking service is
the biggest marketing platform to be in.
India has over 8 crore internet users
“Earlier, the case for digital marketing was not
supported by numbers, which never justified that
as a separate component in the marketing budg-
et,” says Albert Pereira, president (digital) and
chief marketing officer, Genesis Burson-Marstel-
ler, a leading public relations firm’s social media
management arm.
India has over 8 crore internet users, which is ex-
pected to grow to 25 crore by 2015. Given these
numbers, and high social media adoption in the
country, it is not surprising that the likes of MTV India , Pepsico India and Pizza Hut view India as
the big game in the space. Like Pizza Hut’s Kataria puts it, “We have to go fishing where the fish
are.” And going by the numbers, there is a lot of catch in the Indian waters. PepsiCo India has
13,42,058 fans; MTV India has 27,65,005 fans and Pizza Hut Celebrations has 11,83,357 fans. The
standard profile of a social media user according to Global Web Index 2011 is 16-35 city slickers.

3. The numbers are no longer small
“The numbers are no longer small. Even YouTube
has 4-5 million hits on a daily basis,” says Sand-
eep Singh Arora, executive vice-president (mar-
keting, cola), PepsiCo India. The soft-drink giant
currently works closely with YouTube for generat-
ing and populating content and with Facebook
for sharing it. Between January and April 2011,
PepsiCo India was the fastest growing Facebook
page globally.
Intel was among the first tech companies to start a Facebook page along with setting a YouTube
channel and a Twitter account. Intel has a global Facebook page and is networked with 1.9 mil-
lion people and 40 country pages. With a fan following of 2,20,469 in India, Intel’s India Face-
book page is among the fastest growing for the Asia Pacific region for the company, says Jam-
shed Wadia, interactive manager, Asia Pacific marketing and consumer sales, Intel.
Leveraging the new medium depends on the right partners
Even FMCG major Nestle has realised the power
of the new media, especially when it comes for
consumer-driven initiatives like their Maggi cam-
paign. Currently, the company is networked with
4,05,076 people on its Meri Maggi page. “Social
media is enabling users to demonstrate their
preferences and loyalty for brands and products
and that’s why brand websites, Facebook, mobile
and SMS are good touch-points to engage with
consumers in the new environment,” says a Nes-
tle spokesperson.
Arora says effective partnerships for content creation will help harness this new medium. Cur-
rently they have tied up with Mo Films for developing short films for YouTube. “Leveraging the
new medium depends on the right partners that you align with,” he says.
Let it grow
Speaking at AdTech India, the premier global
technology and advertising event held in Gur-
gaon in April 2011, David Fischer, vice-president
(advertising and global operations), Facebook
announced to a packed house: “Marketers do not
need to market their products any more - people
will market it for them.” It’s this promised future
that’s whetting the industry’s appetite. Sensing
the potential, even Nasscom announced its first
Social Media Summit 2011 in New Delhi.

4. Calling it the social media age of ‘Get to a million in a minute’ , the purpose of the summit was
to make the marketers learn quickly the different ways consumers access the internet across
multiple time zones, networks and devices. Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblog-
ging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking - businesses
have had to change their ways.
The social media space has its own set of rules
Even though, it’s relatively easy to garner a large
fan following, the social media space has its own
set of rules - some clearly stated, some unsaid
- that companies need to follow. “When you are
entering the social media space, you have to re-
linquish control because you are creating content
and sharing it freely,” says PepsiCo’s Arora.
The cola giant, for instance, chose 11 people
along with MTV India to blog, tweet and post up-
dates for their World Cup campaign on Facebook.
MTV hosted the programme as a reality show where a nation-wide hunt led to these 20-some-
things - the average age of Facebook users - making the final cut. PepsiCo didn’t moderate any
discussion or any post. It’s an approach social media management honchos agree with. “Just like
your friend base, a Facebook fan base has to grow organically. It’s one of the basic premises of
this medium,” Pereira says.
You can’t use like buttons & comment boxes to enter contests
It is for the same reason that Facebook prevents
companies from using its features like the ‘Like’
button for their promotions. Facebook’s promo-
tions guidelines as given on the sites’ link (face-
book.com/promotions_guidelines .php) clearly
states: “... the act of liking a Page or checking in
to a Place cannot automatically register or enter
a promotion participant.” Pereira claims this is a
common oversight that companies do to garner
numbers. “Incentivising the ‘like’ mechanism
forces people to spam,” he adds.
Facebook norms are clear that you can’t use like buttons and comment boxes to enter contests,
but companies tend to ignore that. “Even major brands choose to ignore this clause,” Dhuddu
claims, adding that companies are myopic in their networking content on Facebook, rarely going
beyond a contest. “Companies are unaware of the ground rules of this new playground,” says
Swapan Seth, founder of social media management firm ThisContent.
Rules of engagement
Social media management experts believe that companies need to learn the nuances of social
media communication. “Till now, brands were broadcasters. Now they need to be conversation-
al. That requires a special skill: listening and responding,” says Seth. “These are tapped phone
lines between brands and consumers. Everyone can hear the conversation - both fun and scary,”
he adds.

5. It’s a new space brands are entering in, and doing
so gingerly. “You are entering a private space
between two individuals or a group of friends,
you can’t appear as an intruder or a bug,” says
Rohit Ohri, managing partner, JWT India. This
space has gained importance for JWT so much so
they are in the process of setting up a joint ven-
ture with Wunderman International - a global
social media management firm. Ohri advises
brands to approach social media spaces as facili-
tators, something that will better the interaction
between two friends, for leveraging the site.
Facebook conversations would get more people on board
In some ways, that is social media’s biggest chal-
lenge: how do companies plug their marketing
and branding messages, without pestering users
and yet keep things interesting? Intel keeps fans
interested by adding new Facebook specific apps
like Museum of Me. The app charts your Facebook
timeline and puts it in a graphic form. “In fact,
the popularity of the app reaffirmed our belief in
viral marketing as we have had no adverts for this
app. It went viral in five countries in five days
purely on the basis of tweeting and sharing,”
Wadia adds. Intel also uses its walls for fielding queries, nearly 600-700 a day just in the Asia-
Pacific region.
But companies, even smaller ones, are setting up Facebook conversations that would get more
people on board. Shoes and apparel manufacturer Woodland talks about environmental issues in
its Pro Planet forum even as its talks about new launches and sales. “We realised that the youth
is bothered about the environment and our Facebook-driven marketing strategy targets this seg-
ment with the Pro Planet initiative,” says Harkirat Singh, managing director, Woodland.
Friends first, money will follow
Like most brands now, Woodland has a social me-
dia engagement division. Footwear major Crocs
India uses social media to connect with its core
buyers - the 16-30 age bracket. “Our existing and
potential client base is online. Crocs has intro-
duced region specific pages to connect to the
audiences locally,” says Murali Desingh, managing
director, Crocs India.
But companies need to think beyond contests,
Dhuddu says. Think photos, think discounts,
think short films. “The big challenge is how to convert fanbase into business. Facebook has
the mindshare but can it help you get the marketshare,” he adds. Singh though isn’t bothered,
“We just want to make friends not find buyers.” Friends first, money will follow.