You’ll probably be seeing this getting spread around the internet a lot now. Fabulous quote, but probably not taken in the context the guy who posted it wished.

But if you’ve not heard the story, here it is. Two days ago, the CEO of MOL, Ganesh Kumar Bangah was spotted (virtually) on rival company OffGamer‘s Facebook page engaged in an activity that people on the internet have described as trolling. You can check out the actual thread here, but in case it’s been deleted, I’ll summarise the story here.

It begins with an innocuous wall post by OffGamers on their own fanpage:

Simple post really, telling fans of their page that they can purchase League of Legends GG Shells for Garena from the company.

And who would you guess would be the first person to respond? That’s right, the CEO of the competitor, who simply says “buy from MOL better.” Well, in the first place, it probably isn’t a very good idea to go onto a rival company’s page and start plugging your own offerings, just like how you wouldn’t stand in front of McDonalds and hawk KFC. It’s not just courtesy, it’s the fact that people on the OffGamers fan page are more likely to be fans of their products, and less likely to be fans of competitors. So a discussion ignites. And Mr. Bangah follows this up with:

Ouch. Insulting fans on their chosen company’s fan page is probably not the best way to go. Here’s a snippet of the conversation that followed:

And if you thought it wasn’t looking good for Mr. Bangah on Facebook, you should have seen Twitter (click here to see aggregated posts using bit.ly to link to the page) and the Lowyat.net forums.

Of course, Mr. Bangah got his last word in, and commentators are already calling it the quote of yesterday: “You may be upset we are gatecrashing, but this is social media”

Of course, Mr. Bangah knows plenty about social media – his company recently acquired Friendster last year.

But the interesting about social media is that no one person, not even the cause and originator of the topic of conversation, can tell people to “let’s end the topic here.” At the time of this writing, it’s been 50+ hours since the thread came alive, and 90 comments have been posted on OffGamer’s page, with plenty of tweets and a lively Lowyat.net discussion thread.

I guess there are some lessons we can all learn from this:

1. Yes, social media is a powerful tool and there are many ways to use it. But the word “social” is there for a reason. It provides context. And in any social context, gate-crashing is not cool and will most likely lead to you getting booted out, and / or publicly ridiculed.
2. I love CEOs who use social media personally. Tells you a lot about the kind of people they are and lets their brilliance shine through. But, the opposite is also true, and I guess the same goes for anyone. We’ve all got to be really careful about how we use social media. Behaviour that’s unacceptable offline, is unacceptable online. Just because you’ve got an internet connection and a Facebook account does not mean you can be a jerk.
3. The community will ALWAYs call you out. Continuing my point above, before acting in the social media space, we should always think about what the community will think about our actions. If you’re not sure, ask someone from the community in a private communication. Or bounce it off a colleague. Yes, people will take things differently, so its always good to hear as many viewpoints as possible so you aren’t just putting out stuff you thought about in your own head.
4. Also, just because you said “stop!” doesn’t mean the conversation will end. The community will take control and drive the conversation for you. What happens on the internet, stays on the internet. And like I started with this post, I’m pretty sure that graphic will stay online for a long, long time.
5. Finally, I must mention that OffGamers did a fine job (so far) in taking the higher ground in always responding politely and resisting the opportunity to jab the opposition.