Tag Archives: facebook

How should Page Admins deal with Flame Wars?

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The chart above illustrates the emergence and resolution of a flame war[1] on Waitrose’s Facebook Page last November.

The horizontal axis represents sequential Posts on Waitrose’s Wall while the vertical axis represents the individual contributors to the "conversation" (really it was more of a barney than a conversation.) Each blue dot plotted on the chart represents at least one comment posted by a specific contributor on a specific post.)

So the more blue dots in a column mean the more unique users have commented on that post; the more blue dots in a row, the longer that unique user has continued engaging with the overall conversation (or to put it another way, the greater their appetite for the fight.)

The flame war in question more or less dominated Waitrose’s Facebook Page for more than a day and a half; accounting for 70% of all Posts and 72% of all Comments until it finally ran out of steam.

Much as I’d enjoy going into them, the ins and outs of the matter have little bearing. For the sake of this post, I’m only interested in what the numbers tell us about how Page Admins should deal with these emerging crises when they appear on their Facebook Walls.

Because, as it turns out, the accepted wisdom may be misleading.

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9 days of activity on ASOS’s Facebook Page

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9 days of activity on the ASOS Facebook Page

This chart (click for bigger) represents 9 days of activity on ASOS’s Facebook Page. Compare it to the Budweiser flow and you’ll see how focused ASOS is on Customer Service by comparison.

And yet their post frequency is high: an average of more than 3 posts per day. They promoted 11 individual links during the period which between them delivered over 120K clicks through to the ASOS site.

So Customer Service is only half the story; there’s a robust DR element here.

Facebook Pages aren’t a community

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Facebook Pages aren’t a community as most people would understand a community. They’re more like an email list in many ways (albeit an email list with some pretty compelling social features.)

The thing we see on all the brand Facebook Pages that we’ve analysed so far is how much the conversation is controlled by the Page Admins.

(What is) The Value of a Fan

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One of the most worrying questions in Social Media today seems to be, “what’s the value of all these fans? How can I mark them down as an asset, and not a cost?”

Recently I was invited to talk about these at Warc’s “Social Media: Beyond the Hype” conference and at Webit Congress 2011 (Webit is the digital industry’s get-together for CEE. It’s huge: very energetic, very exciting and great fun.)

Below are the slides, and below that, my script. I know that it’s hard to read the two together. Actually, someone told me that I mumbled a bit during the presentation (I wasn’t used to my Madonna-style headset mike to be fair) so the script is for them (and for anyone else who was too polite to complain.) You can download the script here.

NB: I write my scripts (like all my stuff) in a kind of lazy version of Markdown. This works great, but can make for a fairly ugly layout.

The Value of a Fan: Webit 2011
View more presentations from Mat Morrison

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Mapping the social graph of weight loss groups

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These are the graphs from some research on weight-loss groups on Facebook. I’ve processed the data so that:

  1. the size of dot is related to "total number of friends" – this only works where a user’s friends are publicly visible – quite often they aren’t, and I haven’t checked to see what the incidence of this privacy setting is generally and specifically
  2. all isolates (i.e. those users with no relationship to any other within the group) have been removed.

    3. personal weight loss support group

    This is the network graph of relationships on a personal weight loss support group. A college student set this up to support her own goals. She told me: " For my group, I just started it out by inviting all of my friends and then some people joined the group who found it in a search, I think. I am amazed by the amount of support I receive from random people who encourage me to keep on going. There are some spammers on the group who are just there trying to sell stuff and that gets annoying, but I know I can’t avoid them."

    unofficial weightwatchers support group

    This is the network graph of relationships on an unofficial weightwatchers group on Facebook. You can see that there are hardly any member-get-member relationships here. My friend Valery Yakubovich (who has a professorship in this sort of thing at Wharton) says:
    "It’s very common that organizations and interest groups become foci for personal networks. In fact, I believe that joint activities are the prevalent mechanism of tie formation."

    But it doesn’t look like it here. Looks to me that – while people may form relationships around special interests – they don’t mirror these on Facebook. Say I suffer from Meniere’s Disease (apparently true) and I participate in a Meniere’s support forum (not true at present), I don’t necessarily make those people my Facebook friends…

    blog-related support group

    Another example of the "not many personal relationships" graph for a weight loss support group on Facebook, this time, it’s the Facebook adjunct of a popular weight loss blog.

    How do people get information on weight loss? After a few interviews, I think the answer is like this:

    1. Influencers are "pull", rather than "push" resources (I’m thinking of going on a particular product, so I mention it casually to several friends to gauge consensus/temperature. One or more of them tell me "oh yes, I’ve heard of that", and one tells me "yes, My friend tried that, and lost 20lbs") This is not an active market. Most people won’t be evangelising, and evangelising behaviour may even appear suspicious.
    2. That said, people trust strangers to an extraordinary degree. Friend-of-friend endorsement is readily accepted, as is the anonymous commentary on boards & groups. Bloggers are slightly less trustworthy, it seems – because most of them have an axe to grind.