Facebook Deleting “Unofficial” Pages
Posted by Peter Corbett on December 3rd, 2007 9:37 AMWhen Facebook announced their new Facebook Pages feature there was an expected land grab for top brand pages.
Those Facebook users-brand-evangelists snapped up the likes of BMW, Apple, Nintento Wii, Entourage and more. I created the Nintendo Wii Page (and Sequoia Capital, American Eagle, Corona, Under Armour and a few others) which was taken down on Friday.
Fake brand pages out number real ones by 100-1 by my initial estimate and this should come as no surprise due to the fact that busy brand managers have little time to play with every new feature that a social network rolls out. Users are much faster at created content for brands than they or their agencies are. Additionally, brand managers with major integrated marketing campaigns won’t concern themselves with a space that garners roughly 500-1000 unique users however passionate they may be. Though some are using them for targeted online focus grouping as I am for one client.
While i’m certainly biased in this argument - having had one of my pages taken down - debating the utility and augmentation of the Facebook Pages system is a worthy exercise. In a word, ‘unofficial’ Facebook Pages should not be take down by Facebook if they’re not disparaging the brand. User-brand-evangelists should be treated as brand ambassadors, and at such a time as a brand wants to take over their page, they should be granted that right without question.
Smart brands will engage their page creators and keep them in their camp as online community leaders. It’s surprising to me that Facebook, who claims to lead the social web, doesn’t get the power of creating brand ambassadors and delivering them to the open arms of brands themselves.
This topic is only just starting to peak the attention of Facebook Users - Fred Wilson exposed my unofficial Sequoia Capital page only after he had linked to it, skyrocketing the fan base from 13 to 300 today. I wrote a detailed write-up of this page creation experiment which can be found at iStrategyLabs.
-By Peter Corbett (Follow Peter’s Twitter Stream Here)
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But the brands aren't in charge here. Customer-evangelists are unlikely to pour any money into Facebook's other marketing offerings such as SocialAds; and the control panel for Pages is clearly designed to encourage the Page creator to see Pages as just one option in a suite of marketing tools. And the others cost money!
While the idealism of connecting brands to their evangelists (for free) is a more natural evolution of the social network, it is easy to see why it doesn't fit in Facebook's 'monetization phase'.
Deleting unofficial-looking Pages at random is likely to cause problems - especially when many companies make their initial foray into Facebook using semi-professional third parties.
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Facebook staffers have been quoted as saying they don't care if pages are created by brands or their fans themselves. If they actually cared, they would have baked in domain verification as they did with the birth of the product in the first place. That would solve any issues from the get go. Instead they have to delete the work brand evangelists are producing.
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FB could have warned/written me, and I would have said "sorry", and had the clients/friend create the page, and add me as an admin.
Nick, you said you are using a page as a "focus group"? That's cool, can you explain more about?
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Cool, keep me/us updated, I'm interested, as are others I'm sure, in any discussions relating to how Facebook's business pages are being used (if at all?!). Instead of Beacon, I want to know how people are using SocialAds, and what kinds of resluts they are getting.
And let me plug this group; if anyone wants to follow the drama of Facebook's deleting my account (it's probably related to what I was doing with Pages), please go to http://MarkMayhew.com
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When the wraps came off in early November, I could NOT believe that they were a) Not going to sell subdomains such as http://mybrand.at.facebook.com b) Not going to have a layered software tool for brands, their PR and Online Media / Marketing companies to claim, manage and administrate groups of business pages c) Not split Social Ads Admin from Page Admin d) Not reveal Beacon well in advance to advertisers and privacy critics and e) Have such sloppy and useless terms and conditions added to deal with pages - http://www.facebook.com/terms_pages.php
I thought these guys were smart - but they turn out to be acting like a bunch of green college kids after all, and having set something in motion with little thought for the all-too-obvious consequences, now they're acting like paranoid a***oles to paper over the mess they made. And it's a fine mess, to quote Oliver Hardy...
No brand is not run by one person. Facebook have set up a mechanism where major global brands can have their name used or abused by any one person, and their legitimate fans can be disenfranchised, misled, and well-meaning brand advocates and fans can be simply dumped or left in limbo as readily as those who are acting with malicious intent - and all of this damages the credibility of facebook, and will be likely to take up a growing amount of admin time - and that's before the lawyers get onto things. Get this one: "Facebook reserves the right, but is not obligated, to resolve any complaints, disputes, or potential disputes regarding the infringement of any third party trademarks in connection with your Facebook Page or Facebook URL in any manner it deems appropriate in its sole discretion." Translation: "We might help you protect your IP, or we might not want to get involved. But whatever, we're in charge, and your ability to protect your brand is powerless here, OK?"
Pardon my french, but that's one huge f***ing mess to make, especially if you want to monetize screen (or eyeball) real estate to those brands, and if I were an investor in a company that's meant to be worth $15bn, I'd be kicking some asses very hard, starting right at the top, because this is the kind of self-inflicted damage that can destroy any company, but which makes the position of what is widely acknowledged to be an arrogant, fast-growth, high-growth and overvalued company very, very tenuous.
The main asset of facebook is their user base, and their only source of cash at present comes from investors and advertisers. If they alienate or marginalise any of these constituencies, they destroy their business.
This could be the tipping point that signals facebook's decline unless they get this issue dealt with transparently and rapidly - and also creatively, because they really have been very dumb, and put themselves between a rock and a hard place.
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You need to contact Facebook directly for that. I would also assume that you need to pay them a nice little fee or have friends that work there ;)
Best,
Nick
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