are fan pages/public profiles the new hot commodity?

Domain names (good ones, specifically) are running out. Unless you want to exceed the magic 5 or 6 character rule, choices are limited and resulting in somewhat oddly named sites such as snurl.com or uladoo.com. These names work fine for new start ups, but what about existing brands wishing to add their presence to the internet? Are they forced to adopt some cryptic, vaguely-related URL?

Enter: Facebook Fan Pages/Public Profiles. I've been thinking, writing and speaking about Public Profiles a lot lately. I feel that with Facebook's continued exponential growth, Public Profiles will only become a more dominant brand outlet. Additionally, with the shortage of search-friendly URL's entering crisis status, and domain prices shooting through the roof, utilization of Facebook's Public Profiles feature only makes sense. We've seen brands like Coca-Cola quietly assume control of fan-initiated pages, with some money almost undoubtedly changing hands in the process.

Now, lets take it one step beyond simply acquiring branded pages. What about more generic pages, such as Sleep or Cuddling? With each page totaling nearly 300,000 fans at the time of writing (and growing rapidly), these seemingly pointless pages offer a huge audience with a common interest.



Now, imagine Serta Mattress Co. quietly acquiring the "Sleep" page and using it as an extension of their branding efforts. Instantly, Serta would have an audience of 300,000 people all interested in what they are trying to sell--a good night's sleep. Same goes for "Cuddling". Imagine if any number of companies acquired this page. A few off the top of my head that could forseeably succesfully leverage the page to their advantage may be Cosmopolitan magazine, Trojan condoms (since we all know what cuddling inevitably leads to), or even a breath mint company like Certs.

I'm figuring that some are asking how having a page without the company name on it benefits the company in any form. As mentioned, it instantly gives the company a large targeted audience, instantly. People that like sleep are probably interested in tips on how to achieve the most restful night possible. Why not use a fan page as an outlet for tips on sleeping comfortably? Why not import the Serta corporate blog?

Keep fans updated with new information in mattress technology, or even post a status update reminding fans to flip their mattress once a month. Subtly insert the Serta name or logo here and there, and you have an enourmous as well as low-effort branding campaign. Serta could potentially become synonmous with a good night's sleep among 300,000+ people. The same could go for any number of seemingly generic and glib Public Profiles.

With Facebook being as large as it is, and Public Profiles being indexable for all major search engines, the potential for search traffic is also staggering. Imagine typing in "good night's sleep" and having the "Sleep" Public Profile appear in the top ten results, with all kinds of useful information, tips and have it attached to the Serta brand. Most brands pay thousands upon thousands to SEO analysts for this kind of exposure and ranking. Given Facebook's size and continued growth, its not unrealistic to think that a Public Profile could potentially make the top 5 Google results.

What this boils down to is a chance for huge and relatively inexpensive brand exposure to companies who may be struggling to actively engage customers. Print and television adverstising is in a sharp decline, in terms of effectiveness and relevance. Brands must explore new and diverse outlets to establish their image, and Public Profiles is nearly certain to be one of the biggest outlets in years to come.

Establishing Brand Presence with Facebook

I recently gave a presentation at the 3rd Grand Rapids Social Media Lunch. I wrote a recap of the presentation for the GRSML blog.

Given the direction Public Profiles have been heading through the past few updates, it is safe to say that Facebook Groups are dead. The lack of updates in functionality leads me to believe that Groups will either no longer be supported or may be relegated to “maintenance mode”—a concept akin to life-support in the online world.

Check out the complete post here. Check out the accompanying slideshow here.

fanpage glitch confirms facebook does keep all your stuff forever

I logged in to Facebook today to update a few fan pages I administer. Right away, I noticed my list of fan pages seemed a bit longer than I remembered it being yesterday.

Interesting, considering I had deleted the fan page bearing my name months earlier. Also, notice that I allegedly have 10 active fan pages. I had 6 yesterday. In fact, I am not sure I have had 10 pages total since creating my first Facebook fan page. This clearly shows that Facebook does in fact keep information even after it is removed by the author of the content. Interesting given the fact that Facebook’s retention of information was a major focus in the ruckus surrounding the controversial TOS changes.

The reappearance of deleted content doesn’t particularly concern me—I don’t really have anything of major concern. It does make me wonder, however, about users who do have some deleted skeletons in their closet? What are the implications for them?

facebook opens up TOS changes for voting

Just logged into Facebook and saw this:

From the Facebook blog:

Last week, we returned to our previous Terms of Use as we worked on a new set of governing documents that would more clearly explain the relationship between Facebook and its users. Since then, I've been excited to see how much people care about Facebook and how willing they are to contribute to the process of governing the site.
Our main goal at Facebook is to help make the world more open and transparent. We believe that if we want to lead the world in this direction, then we must set an example by running our service in this way.

We sat down to work on documents that could be the foundation of this and we came to an interesting realization—that the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use document are just too restrictive to achieve these goals. We decided we needed to do things differently and so we're going to develop new policies that will govern our system from the ground up in an open and transparent way.

Beginning today, we are giving you a greater opportunity to voice your opinion over how Facebook is governed. We're starting this off by publishing two new documents for your review and comment. The first is the Facebook Principles, which defines your rights and will serve as the guiding framework behind any policy we'll consider—or the reason we won't consider others. The second document is the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which will replace the existing Terms of Use. With both documents, we tried hard to simplify the language so you have a clear understanding of how Facebook will be run. We've created separate groups for each document so you can read them and provide comments and feedback. You can find the Facebook Principles here and the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities here. Before these new proposals go into effect, you'll also have the ability to vote for or against proposed changes.

I believe these steps are unprecedented in promoting understanding and enabling participation on the web. I hope you will take a look at these documents, read them carefully, and share your thoughts.
Facebook is still in the business of introducing new and therefore potentially disruptive technologies. This can mean that our users periodically experience adjustments to new products as they become familiar with them, and before becoming enthusiastic supporters. The launch of News Feed and the recent interface redesign are excellent examples that illustrate why we need to continue to make independent decisions about products in order to push technology forward. While these products must be consistent with the Principles and in compliance with the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, they will not be subject to the notice and comment or voting requirement.

We're honored that so many millions of people around the world have decided to bring Facebook into their lives to share information and experiences with friends and loved ones. We understand that gives us an important responsibility to our users.

History tells us that systems are most fairly governed when there is an open and transparent dialogue between the people who make decisions and those who are affected by them. We believe history will one day show that this principle holds true for companies as well, and we're looking to moving in this direction with you.

following the fray: a look back at the facebook TOS debacle

There is no doubt that Facebook’s changes to their Terms-of-Service was the hot blog topic last week. Let’s recap the events blow-by blow.

The Consumerist originally broke the story with the quasi-sensationalist (and ridiculously-long-titled) blogpost Facebook’s New Terms of Service: We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Stuff Forever.

Facebook's terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later.* Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

Mashable was right behind The Consumerist with a similar, albeit less sensational blogpost. Tremendous user backlash ensued, which resulted in a lot of unqualified speculation as to the implications of the changes.

AllFacebook News then published some clarifications from Mark Zuckerberg regarding the new terms-of-service, and the ability of users to delete their accounts, along with some much-needed editorial perspective (highlighted below in bold). Zuckerberg stated:

When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

Mark goes on to highlight the conflicting position with users:

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other.

So should users be angry about the latest change in the terms of service? I don’t think so. Do you think Facebook is going to resell your family photos to others? Does the company have a diabolical plot to resell your personal information? Doubtful.

Zuckerberg’s clarifications seemed to quell the masses for the most part. Facebook did lose a few users in the fracas, but with nearly 500,000 new users each day, I doubt they will really notice the loss. It seemed the controversy was over.

That is, until bloggers like Alexander van Elsas and Razzed called into question Zuckerberg’s response. Or lack-thereof. Van Elsa’s aptly-titled post Mark Zuckerberg is answering the wrong question, and we fell for it again deftly exposed Zuckerberg’s avoidance of what was the larger and more important of the issues brought to light in the change of terms:

While Mark does a good job explaining this process and it’s complexities I cannot help but feel that the blogging community has let Mark get away with answering the wrong question. He has done a perfect job in avoiding a much more important privacy issue than the issue that arises when two people share information via Facebook.

The questions Mark should have answered are the following:

What exactly does Facebook do with all the user data has been collected on Facebook, and how exactly does it monetize that, even after a user has deleted his or her account?

Begin Backlash Round 2. Facebook’rs quickly realized that in fact, Zuckerberg had answered the least important of the questions raised by the controversial new TOS clause. More users deleted their accounts, and the rallying cry in the comment section of most social media blogs became “cancel your account!” I’m not sure how many actually followed through with their threats and delete their Facebook account, but I’m confident it wasn’t enough to truly matter.

With threats of formal FTC complaints and government involvment, as well as new protest groups popping up across Facebook’s own network, the situation was quickly spiraling out of hand, gaining momentum by the second. Nick O’Neill wrote for AllFacebook News:

One group, “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)“, has been at the forefront of the backlash although the group doesn’t appear to be gaining a ton of traction beyond the 58,000 members that have joined it. While 58,000 users is nothing to sneeze at, it hasn’t yet surged to levels witnessed during Facebook’s news feed launch or during the Beacon backlash.

I can no longer find the group, however I do know it surged well beyond the 58,000 member-mark. It became clear that Facebook had potential for a serious PR disaster on their hands. Then, something occurred which no-one quite expected (at least I sure didn’t). Facebook reverted to their old TOS. This was clearly a move to avoid the impending PR debacle. The controversy died as soon as it started. All this—the whole series of events beginning to end--took place in the span of less than a week.

The debacle brilliantly displays the speed at which social media moves, and how quickly a company’s reputation can be destroyed. In less than a weekend, Facebook’s brand had gone from the benevolent and much-loved social media giant to a sinister power-grabbing corporation, with no concern for it’s millions of loyal users.

Facebook, seeing the potential for disaster, did exactly what the angry users and bloggers wanted: they reverted to the old TOS. It was a move that shocked many, and pleased nearly everyone. It was not the move of a heartless, power-grabbing corporation. It was the move of a truly social network, ruled by its loyal users. Facebook re-established their brand as one of benign benevolence, as the decision created a sense of empowerment and influence among the dissatisfied users.

Perhaps even more than the potential for destruction of a brand in social media, the series of events illustrates the forgiveness of social media. That is, if:

• A situation is met head on
• The situation is handled with transparency
• There is a willingness to concede that were mistakes were made
• And finally, a substantive and and more-than-adequate response is produced

facebook reverts to their old TOS (we won)

We won… Facebook has rescinded their TOS and returned to the original one. Its rare to see this happen, but kudos to Facebook for making this decision in the favor of their users.

facebook’s zuckerberg answers questions; unfortunately none were important

In response to the wake of recent criticism and controversy stirred up by Facebook’s change to their Terms-of-Service, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg sat down to answer some questions. Unfortunately, no one asked him the right questions. Zuckerberg said in defense of Facebook’s new policies:

“When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information,” stated Mark Zuckerberg on the Facebook blog. “One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.” (pulse2.com)

While this does address some of the concerns raised, it leaves out most of the more troubling portions of the changed clause. The new controversial clause reads as follows:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

The troubling portions of the clause, none of which were addressed, are emphasized in bold for your reading pleasure. Many users feed their blogs through Facebook as a way of keeping friends updated on new posts. Actually, if I did my math right, about 1/4 of the people who read my blog post will be reading this on Facebook. According to the new TOS, my blog, because it is fed through Facebook, is theirs to use at their discretion.

What may be even more troubling is the portion that reads “including by offering a Share Link on your website…”. How many websites offer Facebook share-links on their website? It is without a doubt well into the millions. Most any blog or online publication knows that a Facebook share-link is a sure-fire way to attract readers. Does this mean just the presence of a Facebook submission button constitutes the legal right for Facebook to distribute the information at their discretion and wont?

Alexander van Elsas saw right through the shallow response to the most benign of the TOS’s changes. In his (as always) outstanding post Mark Zuckerberg is Answering the Wrong Question, and We Fell for it Again, Van Elsas writes:

…I cannot help but feel that the blogging community has let Mark get away with answering the wrong question. He has done a perfect job in avoiding a much more important privacy issue than the issue that arises when two people share information via Facebook.

The questions Mark should have answered are the following:

What exactly does Facebook do with all the user data has been collected on Facebook, and how exactly does it monetize that, even after a user has deleted his or her account?

I could care less about the information I share with others via Facebook. That sharing process is a conscious act. I know that if I share that whatever gets shared is out of my control. What I do not know is what Facebook does with that information. Why do they tap into all of my interactions and my data? What do they store, and how do they monetize that exactly? If I set my privacy settings as strict as possible do they still see everything? How is that data being used outside of Facebook? Do 3rd parties get access to that information as well, even if I do not want them too?

The problem at hand isn’t users sharing things on Facebook. It isn’t even controlling privacy on Facebook. The problem is that I do not have a clue or option to protect myself from Facebook. Any service that monetizes user data and interactions indirectly using a free but advertisement business model puts the value of the network in front of the value of the individual user. You get a free service, but you do not know exactly what you are giving up for that. And that is what Mark should be explaining. The rest is just a decoy so that the really difficult questions do not need to be answered.

I might not even mind that Facebook monetizes my user data, my friends, and my interactions. But right now, I don’t know how Facebook uses that data.We might think that our online lives are not connected to our real lives. We might even think that privacy is dead. But the problem is not that privacy is dead, but that it is distributed unevenly. In other words, the user is forced into total transparency when signing up for services like Facebook. But the service itself lacks transparency. There is no way we are going to find out what Facebook does with us. And it is this unbalanced relationship that we should be worried about. Mark Zukcerberg does a great job answering the wrong question, and we all fell for it again.

Are Facebook users truly satiated by this non-response by Zuckerberg? It seems that for now the controversy has died down, despite a distinct lack of questions of consequence being answered. It seems that the same users who let Facebook’s TOS nearly slip past them were just as easily duped by Zuckerberg’s non-answer. The same users who were shocked to learn that Flickr, Gmail, Yahoo, Tumblr and most other popular social networking services have similar TOS’s to Facebook's revised version. Fool us once, shame on you, fool us again--shame on us.

Alexander van Elsa had it right when he said Zuckerberg duped us again. I have a feeling this won’t be the last time.

all your bases are belong to facebook?

Mashable and The Consumerist broke the news today that there’s been a significant change to Facebook’s Terms-of-Service (or “TOS”). There is a flurry of speculation as to what exactly the changes mean, but one thing is clear: Facebook more or less owns any content you publish on their site, and your account can never be deleted. So, anything you put on Facebook is probably going to follow you around for awhile. Check out the new TOS paragraph:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Yikes. Photographers—take note. You probably want to start watermarking or digitally signing your photographs. I’d recommend a huge, ugly watermark right across the photo. As a writer that feeds his blog through his Facebook account, this has left me to wonder if my blog, though published externally, is also subject to this new clause. Would my posts then become the property of Facebook, to be re-used and re-purposed at their discretion?

As disturbing as the new TOS may seem, there is something much more disturbing brought to light by the controversy sparked by this change. The fact is, Facebook’s new clause in their TOS is closer to an industry standard than an exception. The outrage sparked by the changes highlights how few users actually read TOS’s when signing up for an online service. Even Google’s Gmail service, despite Google’s benign and egalitarian image, has a clause almost identical to Facebook’s controversial clause.

If anything comes out of this, I am hoping it will be a renewed interest in TOS agreements, as painfully long and boring as they are. Rarely do I take the time to read a TOS agreement anymore, but Facebook has reminded us just how far the implications & consequences of glossing over a TOS contract could extend.