All companies love product enthusiasts, those customers who are such fans that their activities help the company market its products and support its customers.

Enthusiasts of a particular company or product often join owners groups or user groups to network, share ideas, and support one another.

These groups can be sponsored by the company or entirely independent.

Social media are a natural forum for product enthusiasts as they meet online to share tips, tricks, rumors about upcoming products, and the pros and cons of various products, as well as provide feedback to the companies that make the products they use and enjoy.

Imagine you’re on the social media team for Android, the operating system made by Google that is used in more than a billion mobile devices. With nearly 2 billion likes, the Android Facebook page is a popular online destination for Android smartphone and tablet users. After posting an item about some new software features, you get a comment from Shauna Roberts, who has commented on hundreds of posts over the past few years. She is definitely an Android enthusiast and has helped many other users with technical support issues—

and helped the Android team with a number of great product suggestions.

Today she has a proposal for you: She wants Google to start paying the top commenters on the Android Facebook page in return for the work they do to help both customers and the company.

Her argument is that Google benefits from the enthusiasts’

time and expertise, so it would be fair to offer some modest compensation in return.

Your task: Draft a message that you could post on the company’s Facebook page in response to this proposal. The idea has come up before, and the company’s response has always been that paying enthusiasts for social media activity, even if it helps the company through word-of-mouth marketing and lower support costs, would be too difficult to manage. First, judging the relative value of thousands of comments would be next to impossible. Second, quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality when it comes to sharing technical information. And third, the administrative and contractual overhead needed to make these work-for-hire relationships legal and legitimate would be overwhelming.