An Insider's Guide to FB moderation: Have you done your job well?

Just a quick update to share this handy post from Melissa Gassman which I found on CPC's PR and Social Media for Businesses LinkedIn page.

In An Insider’s Guide to Facebook Community Management for Brands, Gassman shares her insights from a two-year stint as a Facebook page moderator. In light of recent tutorial discussions around brand's frequent social media stuff-ups as regularly highlighted on Mumbrella, I found her final paragraph very interesting:

"Think long and hard before pressing ‘delete’ on any comment. Facebook is an open forum and you need to accept the good and the bad comments about your brand. Unless comments clearly violate your house (or federal) rules, leave them be. If you’ve done your job well, your community may very well step in and defend your honour."

Particularly though-provoking was the last sentence: If you’ve done your job well, your community may very well step in and defend your honour.

If community managers/moderators have developed a free-flowing two-way model of communication in the first place, they may find that members may jump in to defend them if there is a negative comment. In his lecture last night, Jim Macnamara hinted that despite the media landscape changing from mass media towards social media, brands using new social media platforms are doing so in much the same way they use/d tradtional mass media - that is, to simply push out PR messages rather than using social media to create dialogue and improve brand awareness.

Many brands using Facebook may avoid social media disasters by undergoing a complete shift in their theoretical framework and work towards implementing a strategy that engages community members.