Facebook pages have been around for a wee while now (since the beginning of November, I think). I noticed recently that they’ve started pushing this feature a bit more on FB itself: When logging on today, I noticed the following message:
I promply searched for one of my favourite bands and to my delight discovered they have set up a page, so I quickly became their fan 🙂
While Facebook now also have other what they call ‘business solutions’, including Social Ads, the aforementioned Pages, Beacon, Insight, Platform, and Polls (all listed in tabs under the first link to Pages), it is pages that I’m currently most interested in. Jeremiah Owyang wrote when pages first launched:
Going beyond just profile matching of advertisements, Facebook allows consumers to self-identify with brands and becoming fans. In turn, brands can use these “Fan-Sumers” as endorsers to their own trusted networks, resulting in trusted word-of-mouth.
I don’t think this is particularly new though. We’ve always liked to wear certain brands, thus identifying and endorsing them, so how there’s a big fucking hoo-ha about this I don’t know. Even when I was as young as 10 (in the 80s), I wanted adidas Allround-trainers, or KangaROOS trainers, and not the cheap and nasty ones (not even Pumas would do – they were for losers).
Thus, ‘fan-sumerism’ may work because it’s just the same as it’s always been: We’re proud to wear our brands, and feel happier and more fulfilled because of it – only this time round, we’re wearing our Allround-trainers and our Ramones/Punks not dead/Sid Vicious – shirts digitally.
How to be Happy 
The fucking hoo-haa is not about people attaching themselves to certain brands, but about brands being able to address their fansumers directly, instead of having to search for them the slow way, using for instance competitions and contests, and also in being able to address them in a relatively cheap way.
right ok, but I was commenting more about the term ‘fansumer’ and the fact that, for the fansumer, it is surely not so different to what it’s always been (i.e. the aspect of identifying with a brand and ‘wearing’ it, be it on your body or your FB profile) – i.e. the act of ‘becoming a fan’.
It’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, though the two-way-conversation and interaction between brand and consumer is of course new (and, exciting 😛 )
And exciting:-) I suppose it’s also a little more – just think some eight years back when people where hesitant to put up their photo on dating sites… these days they post pictures of themselves partying on facebook, for everyone to see… and it seems as it they also like to attach themselves PUBLICLY to a brand – everyone must see…
An interesting piece of information from my journalism training: If you have a good story that noone will read, find a new angle – by attaching the story to a celebrity or a brand. From the attention level you gain, that’s the same…
btw, still need to answer that email, liked the ideas a lot, will mail in more detail later