Facebook groups

I was recently invited by the car dealership through which I leased my Mazda3 to join their Facebook group. I went to the group page and it is a pretty standard Facebook group with a picture of the dealership in the corner and a few pictures of the members. I was surprised to see that they had well over 100 members already in the group. However, when I looked down at the postings, there were only two posts by owners of cars and the rest were Mazda employees thanking these two people for their posts and asking others to post stories.

It struck me that 110 people were willing to join the group but none were willing to comment on why. I also found myself closing the window having no desire at all to join. With all the buzz about the power of social networking, I think that these companies still haven't figured out how to integrate the business community successfully into these domains. The first thing that jumped out at me was the starkness of the webpage. There was only one picture of the dealership. This contrasted to the Mazda e-newsletter I got recently which had a picture of a new model, info on their new hydrogen/hybrid engine development and a racecar design contest the company just won. I think if this more eye-catching, relevant format could be imported to facebook pages, businesses could see more returns and have people more excited about joining and posting on their pages.

In the end, I don't think I joined because I'm not getting anything out of that facebook group. Rather, it only benefits them to have people glowing about Facebook and also have a portal for customer feedback without having to pay a research firm to run a survey. If they also offered me some information, I think I'd have joined and maybe been prompted to post something in reaction to recent Mazda developments. Hopefully by merging a sense of design and interaction companies and social networking firms can work to build better pages that are more customizable and interesting for members.