Do you trust your brand to Facebook?

According to the “Guide to Business Success on Facebook”, companies should use a personalized Facebook URL for all marketing materials, i.e. facebook.com/name.  Really?

I can understand why Facebook would prefer this approach as it drives free advertising for the company across all types of media – trade pubs, TV, radio, billboards, Websites, etc.  What I don’t understand is why companies, even some really smart marketing ones, heed Facebook’s advice and essentially trust and associate the Facebook brand to theirs.  Some examples include: facebook.com/ford, facebook.com/staples, facebook.com/pierstonight, facebook.com/bestbuy, and many more.

This type of association is usually done to help companies lift their brand via a third party brand.  However, it can also backfire.  Think Accenture and Tiger Woods.  After the Tiger debacle, Accenture had to scramble to disassociate the Tiger brand from the Accenture one.  Now Accenture uses nameless animals in their ads.

The only argument I’ve heard in favor of this type of association is the leveraging of Facebook’s network effect.  Obviously if someone “likes” your product on Facebook, you gain the multiplier effect as that product, and your brand, are exposed to each of their connections.   While that logic is compelling, Facebook offers an extensive library of API’s that allow you to integrate all aspects of the Facebook network  into your site, which means you control the user experience.

A better Facebook approach for well-know companies would be to leverage their own brand.  Rather than use facebook.com/CNN, the Cable News Network should use CNN.com/facebook or even a broader, more generic, URL such as CNN.com/social.  Either approach allows CNN to control when and how to drive traffic to another site such as Facebook or Twitter.   In addition, it gives CNN the flexibility to decide which conversations to keep on CNN’s Web site and which to push to others.  CNN actually does a good job of integrating the Facebook APIs to leverage the network effects, by including a recommend button with each story.

Another example of companies outsourcing their brand to Facebook is in e-commerce.  Many companies jumped on the Facebook e-commerce bandwagon in hopes that Facebook would be the next Amazon of online commerce.  That idea has failed to materialize.  In fact, many companies that opened Facebook stores have since shut them down in favor of driving e-commerce traffic to their own sites.  This seems so simple and logical it’s hard to image why companies went down the Facebook road in the first place.

“Customers had no incentive to shop at Gamestop (GEM)’s Facebook store rather than the company’s regular website because purchasing online is already convenient,” said Ashley Sheetz, who is the Grapevine, Texas-based company’s vice president of marketing and strategy.  You can read more about the e-commerce shuffle on Bloomberg’s Website: Gamestop to J.C. Penney Shut Facebook Stores.

While Facebook is doing well with ad dollars and will likely have a huge IPO success story, smart companies should rethink how they leverage and refer traffic to social media and other third-party sites.  Back to Brand 101.