Bright Notion

There’s been much buzz about Facebook lately and for good reason.  It has lapped and gotten much more buzz than its competitors MySpace and LinkedIn.

However, it’s achieved these lofty heights because it is believed to be far less spammy and more real than the other social networking sites in the marketplace.

I’d have to debate this less spam belief because from what I’ve seen after using it for 19 months now the spam has increased as time goes on. Guess it’s only natural the spammers go where the eyeballs are.

I had over 3000 friends in my Facebook profile.

I tell you this not to brag but simply to point out I was a heavy user of Facebook.  And admittedly most of these were business contacts not personal friends I had met in the off-line world.

I used it mainly for networking with people who are interested in the kind of business and markets I am in.

I even built up 4 groups with 500 plus members each and two of those groups had over 1200 members each.

Of course, I was a member of probably about 50 groups and got quite a few e-mails from them each day.  And lots of times I didn’t have the time to fully read through all of those e-mail communications from the groups I was a part of.

So the point is you must make sure your communications have highly valuable subject lines, with high levels mysterious and value provided so your group members will open them because it’s just like any other e-mail inbox in that you have to compete with many other messages for the attention of your group members.

Your goal is to be the ‘go-to’ source they trust and look for whenever they want info about your market.

I was moving along networking and doing my thing when…disaster struck.

Unfortunately, a crazy thing happened to me on Monday, January 12, 2009.

In checking my e-mails I saw a couple of notices from some of my Facebook contacts which I needed to respond to.  So I clicked on the link in the e-mail to go to the appropriate page on Facebook and it gives me the login screen.  “Okay, I thought I’d indicated to keep me logged in but no big deal I’ll just go ahead and log in again” I said to myself.

And that’s when the unthinkable happened…

It gave me the message and I paraphrase “your account has been disabled by an administrator”.

“How could this be?”  I asked myself

I hadn’t even log in to Facebook since Thursday of the previous week and this was Monday so how did my account get shut down over the weekend. There was no activity at all much less suspicious activity to warrant them shutting me down.

Since I began using the site in July of 2007 I’d gotten caught in their “account warning” filters twice. My account had been disabled due to this.

Basically, I had been adding friends in groups I was part of too rapidly with the same canned message using Roboform.  And so the Facebook administrators re-enabled my account after telling me not to do the suspicious activity anymore.

After the account mishap I’d been very careful and not done any friend adds because by that point many people were friending me.

So I was terribly vexed as to why my account got shut down.

After talking to a few of my expert friends I had a theory as to why it happened.

Facebook is now disallowing promotion to groups which was the way they wanted you to mass communicate…up until an apparent internal company policy shift.  I guess now with Microsoft and the other people being heavily invested they only want promotional messages to go out through their pay per click advertising system or their social ads.

In talking with my contact he said he talked with a few of his friends and had seen about eight groups deleted because the group admin was consistently making promotional e-mail communications to those groups.

I had sent out a subtle e-mail communication with a link to an opt in page to all four of my groups on Thursday.  I did this because I was helping a friend launch a new product about Google Friend Connect and I varied the words I used in each of those e-mails so as not to upset the Facebook gods.

Since this policy is new and I had no idea I sent out my normal communications and got slapped.

I have emailed the admins twice but to no avail. They won’t even give me a reason why or rightfully turn my account back on.

This is extremely unfair to me and all the thousands of man-hours I’ve put into building my profile as well as the thousands of connections I’ve made and the people who count on me for the information I provide them.

But it’s like falling into a black hole where there’s no person you can contact to get your account back.

So here’s what you should do…follow their rules as much as you can. Only add 20 or so friends a day and don’t send out anything promotional. Get people to contact you through other means to make an offer to them.

Facebook is still a great and high growth platform with over 140 million users now.  You just have to be very careful when you’re using it so you can avoid the fate I suffered and the thousands of man-hours now down the tubes because of an unpublicized policy shift.

So happy Facebooking and beware.

Granada

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