According to the Harvard Business Review, Rice Univerity's Jones Graduate School discovered that companies that use fan pages increase sales and loyalty. This study, claims that among other things, that Facebook fan pages lead to more positive word of mouth experiences, plus the people who joined the facebook page supposidly went to the store more often than the non fans. Additionally, the study claims that those people who joined facebook, spent more money than those who did not facebook.

This study is absolute BS and is an example of how people are attempting to write articles and do studies in order to get attention and press. There is nothing in this study that is new, and frankly, from the outset is an extremely biased study that specifically wanted, in my opinion, to prove that facebook was going to produce “results” before the study was launched.

Here are the main problems with the study:

1)      First of all, claiming that facebook itself was a result of better consumer quality is ridiculous because they never compared it with any other type of tool. They just sent surveys to the people who joined facebook, and never had another option (ie, invited people to linkedin, myspace, or dinner at Grampas.) There were only two subsets of people:  non-facebook users and facebook users, and there was no way to know if the very fact of inviting the people was the cause of their loyalty, or something to do with the email or even the weather.

2)      Defacto, the people who accepted the invites to the Facebook page, are probably more likely to be already loyal customers and accept an invite. They don’t provide any information in this article, or in the study about the base before the invites, except that they were “about” the same before as they were after the invite.  In the study, the “emotional” attachment to the brand was so insignificant (and they used a four point scale to determine this) that there is no way to know if this significantly changed after or before facebook. Most likely these were already loyal customers, or those type of customers more easily influenced by almost any type of email relationship.

3)      The response and survey base of people who joined facebook was statistically insignificant, 689 people only out of 13,270 customers. Because it was so little, it was impossible to break those customers out into smaller subsets and do a proper analysis. Why did they choose a company with a small mailing list, where less then 10% of the customers responded to the facebook invite? Why not some major company with millions of customers on their list?

This is a prime example of how people are attempting to use the news and the popularity of facebook to get press. Anyone in the industry knows that any CRM tool works to some degree, but instead of investigating this, the study limited itself to a popular brand in order to get attention and press.

NB: As a friend at MediaPost just pointed out, the study itself isn't making as many claims as the article did. Perhaps the article misrepresented the study in order to gain press. He's actually read the study, which I might do too.