Are you a fan?

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I'm getting amused by all of the new "fan" pages that are coming up on Facebook nowadays.  

Are you?  

It's kind of a funny thing... they (Facebook) have built this thing out this new thing and it's really started to catch on.  Perhaps you've either seen on the "people you may know" or the news feeds something like this:

Bob is a fan of I hate waking up early
Bob is a fan of Piedmont Park
Bob is a fan of Jesus daily
Bob is a fan of Starbucks
Bob is a fan of Blue Bell Ice Cream
Bob is a fan of 24
Bob is a fan of Not being on fire (this is an actual fan page.. I'm not making this up)

and so on...

It's kind of funny how we, the Facebook community, can now express our fandom for just about anything, large or small.  

What's been interesting to see, especially for me as a marketing guy, is how some brands have picked up on this and are using these pages to communicate with their fans.  I recently became a fan of the "Chick-Fil-A" site (I'm also a fan of Trader Joe's, which is also dabbling in this stuff), and am impressed with how they are leveraging it to extend their brand.  

There are a lot of conversations going on in the marketing community in regards to social media, Web 2.0, and User Generated Content (UGC).  Given that the new generations entering the workforce (Millennials and Gen-Y'ers) largely disregard push marketing efforts and traditional marketing channels like TV, radio, and print (who can blame 'em with the onslaught of messages coming at us today in this new century!) but will give permission to brands they love to market to them (us... I consider myself younger than I am :) ), this may be one of the keys for brands to both market to and build relationships with it's consumers.  It's a great idea, but it has one catch.  

Your consumers must be fans.  Raving fans.  Or else, you may want to reconsider. 

UGC, whether it is through blogs, fan pages, LinkedIn groups, blah, blah... must be perceived as authentic in order to be effective... and usually that means that it must BE authentic :).  Chick-Fil-A is able to put out a fan page and get millions of fans raving about them because they have always worked hard to create and keep raving fans outside of the website (with the "chikin", the guest experience in the stores, the cleverness of the cows.... all that stuff).  As soon as a company puts out a page and it appears like the Rush Limbaugh show (only catering to one point of view), then it loses it's appeal because it isn't real.  That's honestly what we crave as human beings, authenticity... and especially in the virtual world where people have been burned in the past.  

One thing that I really liked about CFA's site was that their recent status was about the lagging complaint about them being closed on Sunday.  Well, of course this is not changing... Chick-Fil-A simply came out and said... "It's for God.  I think we should all understand that."  464 "likes" on that post... I think they're doing just fine :-)


So, what are you a fan of?  Which products you buy would you "fan?"  

I mentioned some of mine:
Trader Joes
Chick-Fil-A
Blue Bell
Starbucks.


You?

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