Coffee O Malaysia is an example of the importance of conversation in Social Media. Their inability to distinguish between noise and conversation has caused a World Wide Rant, or at least in Malaysia.

How Coffee O Malaysia Started

Coffee O Malaysia, a coffee brand in Malaysia, does not have any sort of official website. Instead they initiated a Facebook campaign by creating a lot of user profiles and simply going around adding people. They also started a fan page and suggested their "friends" to be a fan. There are many ways to initiate a Facebook campaign. One can either create quizzes, games, applications, giveaways, contests or by feeding quality content so as to build trust with the fans. Despite the fact that Coffee O Malaysia fan base was growing tremendously, there was neither any Facebook ads on them, applications or anything. Since the brand is unfamiliar to some, there was no reason for them to be able to grow that fast provided that they have a very big fan base or user database.The thing was, the brand was riding on a very common topic to Malaysians - coffee, and there were sure a lot of coffee lovers in Malaysia.

Missing the Opportunity

Given the big fan base that they have, Coffee O Malaysia was missing an important part which is to monetize their fan base. They did post messages such as, "Do you go anywhere to drink coffee?", "Please provide information about this coffee O..." and "how to make good coffee...". However, Coffee O did not seem to provide any sort of reply when a number of fans responded to such postings and even asked a few questions. The constant posting of the number of fans on their Fan page status did not help either.

What Coffee O could have done for a change was to post a note, listing down participating outlets. They could even start a contest to give away their samples. Alternatively, they could just engage in a conversation with their fans as this would in turn build trust.

From this case, it was obvious that Coffee O had the opportunity to ride on a common interest and monetize their social marketing effort but yet, they end up doing funny things on it. It seemed like they decided to build something on Facebook because others were doing it and they do so without an idea of what to do next. An advise for local businesses and brands when embracing social media marketing is to have a plan before jumping in.