Media Week

An Australian court has allowed a lawyer to use Facebook to serve legal documents on a couple who defaulted on a housing loan in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

Mark McCormack, a Canberra solicitor - a keen Facebook user himself - sought permission from the court after more conventional attempts to reach the couple failed.

Users on Facebook who are worried about being approached by lawyers can adjust their optional privacy settings to prevent anyone from outside their personal network contacting them. Which would prevent someone like Mark McCormack getting in contact with them.

What this shows though is how far our lives are moving online and that it is not going to be long before judges etc are all going to join in. While Facebook might see itself as a reliable medium in light of this judgement, the Australian court action is going to raise privacy issues and concerns among social networking site users.

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The Evening Standard carried a report last night about M&S ex-workers badmouthing their ex-employer on Facebook.  There's a group called 'I used to work at Marks and Spencer and detested almost every second of it'. There are even attacks on the customers who are called 'snobbish'. Woolies does better with people trying to save it through Facebook.

I wonder if M&S has got a Facebook policy or strategy? Or is it just one of those places behind the firewall which M&S executives don't believe matters to them?!! There is going to be a massive shift next year in social media communications as companies wake up to the fact that social media communications could be a pretty good cost effective replacement for traditional advertising. However, communications through social media are not one way. Companies like M&S need to develop strategies for Facebook engagement which could be highly valuable for them in terms of gaining customer feedback. They also need to equip staff with clear guidelines in order to protect the reputation of their brands. At the same time, they are going to have to learn to live with criticism rather than being able to remove it. Social Media is real people talking about real things. Social media represents a return to a real marketplace where customers talk directly and honestly to producers. It calls for new models of corporate communication.

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I am not referring to the TV show but there are plenty of companies thinking of engaging with Facebook and they are worried about being too intrusive. If you have a group of fans on Facebook and you want to engage with them by creating your own Facebook presence, what is the best way to approach existing fans? As fans, are they automatically going to be pleased to hear from you? Are they going to be a bit taken aback that you are getting close to them? Should companies just leave positive facebook groups alone? Or does it come down to a question of style? How you approach people? It's a question of being sensitive, isn't it? Personally I think that fans will be keen to hear from companies that they are fanatical about but they are going to require more than standard corporate messaging othewise the relationship will go nowhere. It needs to be personal. What do other people think?

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I think advertisers have to accept that there are limits to advertising on social media sites. As the Economist points out (edition 29 Nov- Dec 5) in a piece on internet trends, people go to social networking sites to socialise not to shop. 

The Economist reports that five per cent of online time is now spent at YouTube and Facebook.

There is no escaping the fact that marketing managers have to change the way they operate if they want to engage with consumers using social media sites. The fact of the matter is that consumers are no longer just going to corporate sites. They are going to user generated content sites for news and views.

I have met quite a few apologetic corporate PR managers who say that the culture of the business is conservative and they cannot embrace social media for a variety of reasons. They are living off past successes. The old way of working has served them well. But companies who do not embrace social media will become culturally irrelevant or be outwitted by more nimble and progressive competitors.

And of course so many talented corporate PR/marketing managers cannot even see what is being said about their brands online because the board does not get social media and some reactionary IT executive has put up a firewall which makes it impossible for them to do their jobs properly. How can marketing managers and PR people do their jobs if they cannot participate in social media? How long will this farce continue for? Naturally the clever marketing and PR managers will take more innovative courses of action and there are a lot of them around as well - thank goodness!

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