Celebrities and other high profile VIPs must ensure that their Facebook pages are continually managed and monitored for abuse and misuse if they want to provide fans with a safe online environment and protect their own reputation. Tamara Littleton, CEO of social media management agency, eModeration, provides guidance on how this can be done.
Celebrities are expected to have official presences on multiple social media platforms these days, and search engines adore social media sites. For example, a quick Google of Lady Gaga brings back a first page full of YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. As well as attracting genuine fans, these profiles can act as lightening rods for haters, obsessives and internet undesirables to gather and interact. If celebrities want to manage how they are seen, they should employ rigorous community management and moderation practices to weed out troublesome fans.
Facebook pages can be particularly problematic when it comes to managing a celebrity’s reputation. Invariably, there will be a number of fans obsessed with getting a personal response from their idol, or turning on each other because of split loyalties. Some celebrities will even face the dilemma of what to do when a fan posts a cry for help, or a suicide threat. A great deal of destructive behaviour can be played out across a celebrity’s public pages. We see many worrying examples of fan obsession: trolling behaviour, spamming, bullying, children posting on Facebook, obsession and self-harm threats. If posts go un-moderated, it could leave fans distressed, and the celebrity will be associated with the content on his or her page. (And beware – often posts are hidden away in the forum section of the page, which may slip the attention of the page owner, but will be one of the first places a fan will go to.)
Of course, most celebrities won’t be managing their own Facebook page 24/7. But there does need to be a strategy in place to deal with problems. These include:
Being honest about who posts – is it the celebrity or the management team? This needs to be made clear. Fans are understandably thrilled at communicating with their idol and will not appreciate it if they discover that they were really talking to someone else.
Tone – the person posting the updates needs to keep the celebrity’s tone of voice to keep the feel of the page consistent and help foster fan engagement. Language that is too formal for the audience will be jarring and won’t encourage fans to contribute.
Know what’s impossible – establishing a pattern of management team updates with a celebrity post here and there is a good way to keep fan expectations in check. Some celebrities love posting updates to their pages and replying to fans now and again, but unless there’s a balance established some fans may start to expect more from the celebrity than they have the time to provide.
Editorial – having a team of people updating the page makes an editorial calendar vital. Allowing future content to be planned around events, making sure that nothing is missed and the page doesn’t feel outdated and abandoned.
Guidelines – one of the most important contributions to the page will be the guidelines – which were surprisingly lacking for most of the celebrity pages that we analysed in our research. Guidelines need to clearly set out what behaviour you will not accept on the page, and what action will be taken when someone breaks these rules. Abuse, bullying, personal threats, illegal activity and spam should all be removed immediately. As should defamatory remarks. But general criticism of the celebrity or VIP is a given and should not be deleted or censored.
By Tamara Littleton
CEO
eModeration
This article is based on a white paper on managing and moderating VIP Facebook pages, which is available to download here: http://www.emoderation.com/about/publications.
