The Face of the Dallas Mavericks’”Unofficial” Twitter Fan

“Our game is run on fans.” That’s what Washington Redskin tight end and blogger Chris Cooley said on the Dan Patrick Show on Friday.

Fans have long been the lifeblood of sports teams and celebrities.  And the notion of an “official” fan club is not new either.  But now that companies are courting fans, PR and marketing professionals are taking unofficial and official fans and fan sites very seriously.  

Chris Ebbesen would undoubtedly agree.  He is a strategy manager at imc2 (squared) in Dallas by day. But he is also a huge Dallas Mavericks fan. He started tweeting about the Dallas Mavericks in 2008 and has ridden the Twitter wave ever since.  In fact his more than 4,000 followers make him the team’s biggest fan on Twitter.  He takes his tweeting very seriously. And Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks has granted him incredible access to cover games. 

Chris has resisted the marketing department’s offer to make him official. That would make what he does work and cramp his ability to tweet freely.  And so the Dallas Mavericks tweet  under the name Dallasmavs - the “Official Dallas Mavericks Twitter Page.” Mavnews is Chris’s Twitter handle, and it is dedicated to “providing news and updates on the Dallas Mavericks via Twitter. [unofficially].”

Official and Unoffical Fans and Fan Sites

Take a look at Inside Facebook. It’s a well read source for Facebook marketing and developer information, AND it is independent of Facebook.  Its leaderboards rank Facebook pages.  Putting aside those focused on Michael Jackson, chocolate and Family Guy, it lists hundreds of company facebook fan pages, both official and unofficial.  So I did little digging.

As this chart I put together indicates (figures from this weekend), the top three  fan pages are official. But nine of the first 25 Facebook fan pages are unofficial.

Look at brands like Oreos and McDonalds.  The largest fan page – Oreo Cookies – is official, but fan pages named oreos, Oreo, McFlurry Oreo, and Oreos!!! are unofficial.  With McDonalds, the first 5 fan pages that reference the fast food chain (McDonald’s, McDonalds, Mc Flurry Oreo, McDonald’s French Fries, ~ MCDONALDS ~) are unofficial. The sixth is official. The MTV unofficial page had more fans than the MTV official page.  

So are unofficial fans and fan sites a good thing or bad?  It means your fans are engaged and talking about you.  It saves you the work of doing a fan page yourself. On the other hand, you lose control. I would be surprised if many companies know the number of unofficial sites about their brand, much less know how to engage them.

And so what do we do when ardent fans rise to the surface like Chris or Hanna Asfour who is the site adminstrator for ~ McDonalds ~ an unofficial Facebook fan page.  (His 626,370 fans far outpace the 361,214 fans on the Official McDonalds site.) We are confronted with a choice – do we coop them or let them maintain editorial distance?

Jim Anderson over at Vitrue (blog), a social media marketing firm here in Atlanta who has created Facebook applications for leading brands like iTunes wrote me:

“Our experience is that many of these unofficial pages came to life because there were no official pages for users to visit.  As brands build out their Facebook presence and engage with users, those “official” pages will in most cases tend to dominate the unofficial ones.” 

Neutralize or Neuter?

When you are dealing with critics, migrating an unofficial fan page (which is completely allowable by Facebook) helps to neutralize them.  But with fans, the effect can be to neuter them, taking away the very spirit and energy that led to their popularity in the first place.  Or worse you can risk alienating or losing their loyal following. If it is not broken, why fix it?

As marketers and PR professionals we would all love to control every message and eliminate criticism, but that is unlikely. Unofficial voices are unpredictable, but  they provide additional buzz and third party validation.  And while posts can be negative, they provide a reality check and eyes and ears for opportunties and unforeseen problems.  

That being said, when it comes to fan, companies must remain vigilant in monitoring fan activity and have a strategy in place to promote, engage, shut down or take over a fan site.

Let me get back to you.

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