Who exactly is the person behind your inbox icon?

Bizarrely, social media has erected barriers to communication between ordinary people like me and brands.

I recently tried to get contact details for a well-known South African FMCG brand’s marketing manager via Facebook. The brief was clear, I had a solid reason for my request and I included all my work contact details to prove the legitimacy of my need.

I thought I would get not only a quick response, but a useful one.

You’d assume that the team working on the Facebook account of any brand would know who the marketing manager was. They must have to liaise with them at some point. But this was not the case. The response I got was that they were trying to find out who the people in marketing were. So who exactly is managing this Facebook account and what authority do they have to speak to a community when they do not even know the names of the team behind the brand itself?

Having worked on numerous social media accounts myself, I know the need for constant communication between the marketing/brand team and the social media team. It’s a daily back and forth discussing the right way to respond to negative and positive communication, all the while staying in line with the overall brand messaging. It’s about the golden thread, and I assumed it was there.

When I eventually did get another response (after following up 24 hours later), I was informed that my request had been sent to head office and that I should wait for a direct response. Reading between the lines here, I know I wasted my time and that I should have gone directly to the 011 number I had written down in the first place.

If you’re doing it right, thank you. If not, I will have to call head office myself.

The big take-out: Brands are all over social media, but they need internally empowered teams, not a pack of new-age social media advisers sitting behind the brand’s inbox icon saying who knows what to who knows who.