When is a fan not a fan?

So your brand has a Facebook page?? And it has so many thousand fans?? Has to be a good thing right?! Well as today's furore over on Nestle's Facebook page shows - a 'fan' on Facebook is not necessarily a fan and can in fact be the complete opposite! Even when perceptions of a brand run higher, in our experience it is often the case that people become 'fans' only when they are being offered something in return, with little real engagement or interest from either side beyond intial sign up. The number of Facebook 'fans' a brand has is often thrown around today as a metric of engagement and marketing success but it is clear that we are still some way off of measuring the real success of a lot of online engagement. Whilst 'hard figures' may seem like a convenient measure of a brand's success, we need to be paying more attention to the 'quality' of the conversations we're involved with as brands online. Are we engaging with those who have something to say about us online? Do we feel present and responsive? Does it feel like there is a human (and not a 'corporate drone') doing the talking? Looked at from this perspective Nestle's sudden spike in fans takes on a very different meaning! They may be getting engagement but it is mostly of a very negative kind - and unfortunately so far they appear to have been making things worse for themselves!