Across the nation, there are Local Government bodies debating whether they should be getting involved with Social media and to what extent. For many, there are questions about how they can best manage the conversations that will occur when they get involved, for others there are concerns about responsibility within the organisation as well as any potential legal issues that may arise. All of these concerns need to be worked through sensibly and properly so that when the organisation does decide to engage, they do so with confidence.

However Facebook has decided that they need to throw everyone in the deep end and see who sinks or swims.

Facebook, the largest social networking site in the world has launched a new initiative its calling "Community Pages". These pages won't belong to anyone except Facebook and will be a combination of content pulled from Wikipedia and filtered public posts within Facebook itself. It's a pretty blatant attempt to retain relevance in an online world that is increasingly becoming hostile to Facebooks MO.

The range of topics and subjects covered by these community pages run the gamut from Aardvarks to Zygotes and everything in between. Essentially if it has a wikipedia entry, then it has a corresponding Facebook Community Page. This has meant that pretty much every Local Government organisation in Australia now has a page on Facebook.

This is a problem.

Before we get into the issues of presence hijacking and fragmentation this move represents for those Local Governments who have made the leap to Facebook, let's have a look at how badly this "feature" has been implemented.

First problem: Lack of differentiation

When you search for something on Facebook it presents a list of results, these include groups, pages, friends and so on. The problem with the Community Pages is that they are presented in search results without any sort of indication that they are not "normal" pages. This can cause much confusion when there are multiple results returned for a search.

Second problem: Duplicates

Another issue has been the creation of duplicate pages for each subject. For instance, below are the results for "Port Stephens":

Each of the pages listed here are Community Pages with the same content pulled from wikipedia. There is no differentiation.

Third problem: Auto "Like"

One of the more genius moves in this whole mess has been what appears to be an automatic "Liking" of these Community Pages based on what information is contained within a persons profile (address, bio and so on). This means that people are being automatically listed as "Liking" pages on Pol Pot and the Holocaust. This is not a Good Thing(tm).

Bringing it directly to the Local Government level, this means that people who suddenly find themselves "Liking" their Local Government are going to be slightly confused about why, and they're also going to start seeing the Community Page as the "Official Page" for the Local Government body. This is a recipe for mis-communication.

Fourth Problem: Wrong Language

Here's the description as pulled from Facebooks page on Leichhardt - a suburb in Sydney, Australia:

"Leichhardt è un sobborgo di Sydney, nello stato del Nuovo Galles del Sud, Australia.

È situato 5 km ad ovest rispetto alla city di Sydney ed è il centro amministrativo della Municipalità di Leichhardt.

Leichhardt è conosciuta anche come la Little Italy di Sydney.

Confina ad ovest con Haberfield, ad est con Annandale, a nord con Lilyfield e a sud con Petersham."

Yup, that's right, the page is in Italian. If you search hard enough you can also find pages for the Leichhardt Municipality in German.

All of these present a massive problem for Local Government.

These pages are causing a whole lot of concern to those in Local Government who have been doing the hard yards to bring their organisations to the social media watering hole. Where they've been arguing for a measured staggered engagement, Facebook has stomped up, said "You're with us whether you like it or not" and then stomped off, leaving confusion and badly translated devastation in their wake.

If you're in a Local Government body in Australia and have a Facebook account, do a search for your org, you might be unpleasantly surprised. 

Update:

Since I posted this, Facebook has stated that they are looking at developing a process that will allow the subject of the Community Page to take "administrative control" and to migrate the users snagged by the auto-like process over to the official page. While this goes a little way to recognising the screwup, we're still going to have to deal with the fact that people are going to be cranky about the fact that they have been arbitrarily assigned to a page without their input.

Sigh.