If you’re a Facebook user, you were recently forced to either allow Facebook to turn all the keywords in your profile’s Info tab into active connections to “Community Pages” or have them removed. Entirely removed. No middle ground.
That sucked. But it wasn’t even half the suck.
I had reluctantly said yes to community pages, not wanting the alternative of a blank profile. My naive assumption at the time was that Facebook was at least attempting to connect my listed bands, TV shows, movies, place of employment, schools, etc. to existing Fan Pages (or what used to be known as Fan Pages, but now you “like” instead of “become a fan.” Whatever.)
Today I saw a notice in my newsfeed that a co-worker at my company had “added Virante Online Marketing” to her employers. I clicked on “Virante Online Marketing” and was disturbed to see this:
Facebook's auto-created Virante "Community Page"
….instead of the actual Virante Page that we had created, carefully branded, populated with regular content, and begun to build up a fan base.
Apparently Facebook has taken the millions of keywords posted by users on their profiles and turned them into a whole new set of anonymous, blank “Community Pages.” Where in the world is the value in that? There is a link on our unasked-for Community Page inviting me to sign up to “help” with the community page if I “have a passion for Virante, Inc.” Yes, I have a passion…for the actual page I spent a lot of time creating and nurturing, the page that actually has something to do with Virante, Inc.! The invitation tells me that Facebook will “let [me] know when [they’re] ready for my help.” I can only hope that when they are ready, the first thing they’ll let me do is post a redirect on this fake page to our real one.
It gets worse. Each slight variation of the name of a company, band, etc. entered by anyone in their profile results in the generation of yet another Community Page. So far we have “Virante, Inc.” and “Virante Online Marketing” both out there because those are the wordings used by employees in their profiles. And sometimes the results are humorously ludicrous. One of my friends had listed his employer as “The Man.” So of course, Facebook blindly created a Community Page called “The Man“, which I notice pulls into its wall any post by anyone on Facebook that had the phrase “the man” in it. So useful!
I used to promote Facebook as a viable, indeed nearly necessary, marketing presence for companies or organizations. I am less and less sure of that. From the lack of flexibility in customizing your company’s Page to this current Community Page circus of a debacle of a travesty, I’m going to hold on that recommendation. But first I’m going to go change my Facebook hometown to “Life, the Universe, and Everything” so I’ll be “connected” to, well, everything. Doesn’t get more social than that.
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- Why Facebook’s Community Pages Could Give Brands a Headache (socialmediatoday.com)
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Wow. I had no idea they were being that ludicrous. They really should have introduced this with more thought behind it. I don’t understand how they don’t realize that they have 400 million users. If they piss off too many of them, they could suffer from serious backlash and halt their growth. I understand the need to innovate and improve their product, but the “SURPRISE! we-changed-all-the-rules” attitude is what nobody wants!
Thanks for the comment, Scott. There may already be at least one serious challenger. A group of NYU students received a healthy dose of funding for their Diaspora Project, a social network that will be distributed and open source, where users will own and control their own data.
This is exactly what I was beefing about (on Facebook) a couple weeks ago. Forget the privacy stuff; this forced dumping of individuals into big generic pots is pointless, and strips all the fun out of reading friends’ profiles. (If Facebook isn’t fun, what’s the point?) Instead of useful links, now we’re all clicking on each other’s unpopulated, automatic community pages. Anybody want to join me on the “talking theology with my husband Brandon” community page? No? That’s because it’s unique to me–no one wants to build a community around it! This is a mess.
Commenter Mindy found a brilliant way to demonstrate the inanity of the new Community Groups feature. She simply typed “creating empty meaningless facebook pages by simply typing something into my activity slot” in the Activities section of her profile’s Info tab. Sure enough, Facebook created a Community Group with that title.
Please go there and “like” the group.
The thing is, we still don’t know what Facebook is going to do in relation to the Social Graph “likes”, existing Fan Pages, and these new “Community Pages”. I think they’re still figuring it out as they go, but, eventually, it’ll be tied together in one cohesive ecosystem.
Diaspora is set up to fail in a big, public, and expensive way. They’ve yet to release the first line of code, and every tinfoil-wearing dingleberry on earth is piling all of their privacy-loving hopes on them to dethrone the WalMart of social media sites. It would be a bad time to be in their shoes.
1. $170K~ isn’t enough to build an infrastructure, or hire the team of rockstar developers, UI people, sysadmins, etc., to even get this thing into a late alpha.
2. Up-front, it’ll require at least a little technical knowledge for an end-user to set up. They’re planning a WordPress-like hosted AFTER they open their source code. Go ahead and try to convince Mom and Dad they need to get a hosting account to switch from Facebook. Let me know how that goes!
3. Why does it now take a team of 4 guys and $170K to do what one Mark Zuckerberg did years ago? Why wouldn’t they simply build what they could afford to (bootstrapping), and show the world a proof-of-concept working model? They could demand millions at that point, and someone WOULD buy it.
Long story short, Facebook isn’t going anywhere. People will trickle back, because there simply isn’t (and won’t be in the foreseeable future) a viable alternative.
Chris, I agree that eventually Facebook will probably do something with the Community Pages, but in the meantime they have created a horrible, confusing, infuriating mess. And from the viewpoint of anyone who is on Facebook for marketing or promotion, it is particularly infuriating. Unless and until my brand’s community pages get connected to the “official” pages I created, they are helpful neither to users nor brand owners.
And as another blog pointed out, this is yet another instance of Facebook solving a perceived problem by adding more complexity where creating simplicity was needed. Originally we just had Groups, and those worked fine for most people, but sucked for brand promoters as they lacked a lot of needed branding and connecting tools. So instead of upgrading Groups, Facebook threw Pages at us. Promoters rejoiced, but the average user was more confused then ever. When do I form a group, and when do I form a Fan Page? Some users were left very angry and frustrated when they innocently started a Fan Page for a band or movie or brand or whatever (after all, who better to start a fan page than a fan?), only to have it suddenly shut down by Facebook because they weren’t an official rep of the brand, tossing away tons of hard work to build content and a fan base.
As for Diaspora, I have no more way of knowing than you whether they will be the Facebook killer. I’m not putting my money on them, but I’d love to see them succeed. I wouldn’t count them out; web successes have typically broken the conventional wisdom and come from strange places. I am, though, more confident than you that there will be a viable Facebook competitor within the next two years. Just like the great empires of world history, social web giants rise and inevitably fall (just a lot faster). Facebook has suffered a major crack in its armor and I think has become vulnerable. Entrepreneurs smell blood and someone will capitalize on the present outrage with FB.
It’s growing pains. Everyone experiences it at some point. The smart ones will see this as an opportunity to seek out the now captive audience and invite them to their official page. Before this, you wouldn’t really have been able to seek out every iteration of your brand/band/hobby/etc…at least, not with any efficiency. Now, it’s a simple matter of doing a search to see all of the Communities that were auto-created. You could then begin friending those people, since they’re a SUPER targeted audience for your niche.
Re: Diaspora:
Just like Mahalo/Bing/Yahoo/$searchengine has realistically threatened to take over Google in the search engine market?
Everyone has tried to outdo Facebook, and no one has the capital, the social/cultural saturation, or the knowledge to do such any time soon.
How many people quit Twitter completely for Buzz? Buzz was a great idea by Google, but if even THEY couldn’t unseat something like Twitter, what chance does anyone, anywhere, have at unseating Facebook?
I think your first point about turning the Facebook Community Page lemons into prospecting lemonade is excellent. In fact…I’m going to put it right to use!
But on the invincibility of Facebook? First of all, I wouldn’t draw a one-to-one analogy between social media and search engine markets. I think social media is far more volatile. One word: MySpace
MySpace:Facebook::Yahoo/Ask/MSN:Google
I am overwhelmed by the thought, the technologies, the fitting-it-in across the rest of everything else I need to do as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer in my business