Facebook is making it quite clear that the Vietnamese Government’s blocking of their site will not hold them back in their bid for growth.

Click the Facebook job advert and the requirements are listed as follows:

Facebook is seeking a Policy & Growth Manager for Vietnam..has a background in technology or social media, business strategy and legislative and regulatory matters.

The ideal candidate will… have experience in government relations work and navigating government agencies along with an extensive network of contacts in the government and the technology space.

..the ideal candidate will be able to communicate effectively in both English and Vietnamese and have experience in government relations work and navigating government agencies along with an extensive network of contacts in the government and the technology space. The candidate should have experience in developing a growth strategy that involves creating coalitions and communicating with policymakers across the government.

Facebook, it appears, are fighting back.

To put it another way – it’s great to be able to point to several thousand friends or followers but that’s doesn’t mean your social media activity is doing its job.

The other problem is that zero activity is unlikely to add to follower numbers. So the temptation is to keep pushing, pushing, pushing…way beyond levels of interest.

Recently, on a page I administer, I was asked to plug a link from a group of expats. It’s the kind of thing that, if it had been a charity requesting I’d have done it without thinking twice. But passing on this message – which I am pretty sure our followers had heard, and moved on from, had absolutely no positive benefits I could think of.

To put it another way – if other people are sharing your links then that’s great. If it takes on a life of it’s own then that’s the holy grail of “going viral”. But if you’re pushing it at every turn and pasting links in every location then it’s easy to become an irritant. Worse still it can cross over the line into being spam.

When it comes to working for clients it’s a difficult one to gauge. Too little and it looks like laziness to the client. Too much and you’ve lost your audience. I’m sure I have crossed the line before.

Maybe the test of spam is as much about interest as it is frequency or who sent it. If I have no interest then it is spam. If I share it with my followers, who also have no interest, then that’s so much more spam.

When content is created we can give it a push in the right direction. We can tweet it, blog it and add it to our status update. Much beyond that and it can irritate.

A lot of social media, it occurs to me, is actually about forgetting what you think good online marketing might be. Instead, go back to social norms.

Don’t be pushy. Don’t ask favours of strangers. Don’t be too needy. Don’t be just plane weird. Don’t make people avoid you (or press that Facebook “hide” button). Don’t talk too loudly.

Or how about this…be yourself, if they love you then they love you.  If they don’t then learn to live with it.

If what you have created isn’t interesting then it’s better to let it go and learn from it. Or perhaps the content is good but interest has already peaked.

“Going viral” doesn’t mean begging for plugs and links. Just as being popular isn’t helped by pleading with people to be your friend. Maybe it’s better to have a small circle of close devoted friends than being regarded by many many more as an irritant.

Flogging a dead horse will only alienate followers. Your sheer activity may mean you numbers go up – but it doesn’t mean they love you.

If you know the area you’ll know that’s bad news. There’s a torturous two minutes wait before the lights change. During rush hour you can be halted for four or six minutes. The longer you’re stationery the sweatier and more irritable you become.

By the time I reached the front row of traffic I noticed a solitary young guy. After each light change he walked across the traffic handing out flyers to motorbike riders. I didn’t want one and shook my head but no one else did.

I watched as each person took a flyer, read it, folded it and stowed it somewhere safe. Not one was dropped. That is a remarkably high tolerance for unsolicited advertising.

The same can be said of social media marketing activity.  In particular that local maddening corporate ploy of tagging pictures with people’s names. It means that each “friend” also gets to see the picture.  The picture is essentially an ad.

Irritating? Yes. Spam? Certainly. Against Facebook rules? Yes, although Facebook appears to do very little about it. I know – I’ve tried clicking the “report” button. Nothing happens.

What is oddest is that in Vietnam spamming appears to work. Boutiques have been quick to jump on the bandwagon. Every new blouse is accompanied with a whole stack of tags. I feel like, sometimes, I am the only one complaining.

The spammers often have thousands of followers. Young women queuing up to add their names so they’ll be sent a steady stream of pictures of handbags and shoes. Click on their photos and instead of pictures of themselves, you’ll see a whole array of fashion wear and accessories.

The practice has now become widely used by individuals too.  Proud of their holiday pics they’ll add all their friends’ names as tags so pictures can’t be avoided.  Not even by friends of friends.  Facebook baby bores can reach overkill at the best of times, but it’s worse still when they tag images of their baby with your name.  Almost forcing you to comment on how lovely their offspring is.

I decided a while ago on a no-tolerance response.  I’ll turn a blind eye to individuals but for corporates I block and report any spam that invades my page. Despite occasional client pressure I am absolutely adamant I will not turn to the spam dark side.

These are long-term relationships we’re aiming to build.

For clients the big issue with Facebook is log-ins. On three occasions I have been out to see potential clients and asked them about their FB page and they’ve answered that “the girl who set it up has left”.

So they’re stuck with a heavily spammed page without any interaction from themselves. When they open, as many of them do, another page with a similar name – it only serves to confuse matters further.

To pick one out of the air Bhaya Cruises has, it appears, three pages. Two are profile pages that are supposed to only to represent individuals. (See one, two, three).

The most expensive restaurant in town, Softwater, has two pages. Both are business pages (here and here), the most recent either has been updated is May 10th. The other page being September last year – did they lose the log in details for this one? Maybe they lost them for both.

So who in Hanoi is doing well? Well I like local environmental NGO ENV.

What’s particularly impressive is their attitude of sticking with it. Not many comments at first and now you can see it is growing. Keep posting interesting copy and interacting and they will come.

It’s something anyone embarking on a social media journey has to realise. We can’t all build audiences overnight. Mostly that will come only as a result of efforts to be truly interactive and to consistently post information of interest.

Better to have 50 friendly followers than 300 on the verge of pressing the “hide” button.

Beyond Hanoi, but sticking with Vietnam – albeit administered from overseas, take a look at OneVietnam for a masterclass.

In the meantime Vietnam has to careful not to achieve what its government failed to do and make Facebook unusable. Phantom discarded sites and spam becoming the norm could render its entirely useless as a tool and absolutely no fun to use.

In the end we have to be our own moderators and maintain our own “I will not spam” attitude. Corporates must not cut corners.

Social media is not about numbers.  It’s about trust, transparency and relationships.

Get it wrong and they may “like” you, but they’ll never trust you.

However, there is a problem with that way of thinking in Vietnam. When I suggested to one client that perhaps I’d be better off training, rather than doing, she shook her head.

“If you train my staff, “ she said. “They will leave”

An usual attitude in the West, perhaps, but not so in Vietnam.  And most likely not in other developing countries too.

You want your staff to be good enough but perhaps not noticeably better than anyone else’s.  Invest in them and all you’re doing is assisting them to leave. Or so local thinking can go.

It’s a common complaint I’ve heard from frustrated expats developing workforces in both commercial and non profit roles.  For many staff long-term opportunities and stability are less important than a little more money right now.

It’s not for me to go deeper into the reasons behind this but it does leave management and owners with a problem.

Most initially get around this by taking on social media activity themselves.  In the short term they achieve limited results.  In the long term they find themselves further overworked and spread far too thinly.

So increasingly, they are looking to offload the burden.  The truth is for them, an external agency is seen as more likely to offer a sustainable, long-term, consistent “voice” than a here-today-gone-tomorrow employee.

You’d certainly expect it to change as Vietnam continues to develop commercially. Hopefully there will be more incentives for staff to stay with a company and more opportunities for advancement and eventual financial rewards.

In the meantime,  if Vietnamese bosses are concerned staff will leave, then probably the last thing they also want is for them to be allowed to network online.

And so another route to a social media presence and personal online development is closed.

I do like to point out that setting yourself up a social media consultant in Vietnam is not a smart move.

As every backpacker finds out on their first visit to a Vietnamese internet cafe, Facebook is blocked. The more cynical among us will tell you that all  social media tools could go the same way.

Certainly, while there are fears that Facebook is merely the thin end of the wedge there remains room for optimism too. The most recent generation has grown up in a war-free country against a backdrop of increased freedoms.  They’ve been quick to embrace online opportunities.

When I used to work with streetkids here I was amazed to find out that they all had email addresses.  Years later I worked in a hospital in Cameroon where I found doctors with considerably less computer ability.

While the Facebook ban was a shock, more intriguing  has been how people reacted to it.  In true Vietnamese style it didn’t take people long work out how to get around it.  Almost a year on journalists talk openly of its use with only the slightest nod towards the block.

It appears that while the block was only vaguely admitted to by the powers that be, the work-around and, indeed, use of Facebook has never been deemed illegal nor even undesirable.

In many ways the situation says more about the confusing (to foreigners) nature of Vietnamese culture than of government attitudes to social media.  We’ll all go about our business pretending both Facebook and the block are not there. It’s just easier that way.

Even to a point where (see above) a huge advert referencing Facebook is situated right next to a Hanoi police station.