The Premise:
A recent issue of the "Facebook Ads Newsletter" featured one of Facebook's newest advertisers, the Arizona Office of Tourism. Upon reading the article, I imagined Arizona's Facebook page would face an onslaught of negative criticism related to the recent passing of a controversial immigration law. So, naturally I clicked on the link and went to the page.
The Shock:
Initially I was surprised to see a number of lively discussions and positive testimonials from many of the page's thousands of likers (Facebook's new term for fans). Nowhere to be seen were negative posts related to their new immigration law.
Digging deeper I came across a tab titled "Rules of Engagement" where they list the kind of comments that are accepted and the kind of comments that are not accepted, including comments that criticize state legistation or comments that could possibly offend or provoke others. Furthermore, the page states that they reserve the right to delete any post at any time for any reason, and they say "but we hope that it will never be necessary."
Setting a Dangerous Precedent:
By choosing to delete any posts that are not completely pro-Arizona, the state makes a poor choice when handling a negative publicity crisis in today's increasingly transparent Internet. Furthermore, they indicate that political posts will not be tolerated but they will happily leave posts that supports the state's political stance.
Finally, the fact that they opt to censor content on the largest social media network makes it clear that rather than embracing social media, Arizona is using Facebook to force its one-sided message upon millions of Facebook users, that's not social media, that's called advertising! If Arizona is unwilling to honestly engage social media users it should just not engage them at all and put their money on magazine ads where people cannot respond.
Resources:
> The Arizona Tourism Facebook page
> Another article on this topic, by Tnooz
