Had our face(book) smashed in

You may have noticed that Wimbledon this year was doing lots of interesting social media related things. Letting people join in with the Wimbledon experience wherever they are. One of the things that was going rather well was the facebook page. I mentioned it way back a week or so ago in this post. Well a few days ago the Facebook page dissapeared. We initially thought it was an admin error from one of the writers, but now it turns out that Facebook decided to remove the page as it breached some elements of the terms of service. This was a pity as in the few weeks of the championship it had grown to over 9,000 fans. Maybe it was that volume of interest that attracted some attention.
Anyway with my social media strategist hat on, i have to say I am more than a little annoyed at this. All the groups and pages that exists on Facebook in a grey area of companies and political parties and pressure groups. A globally loved tennis event with lots of interest was kicked off Facebook for the smallest bit of administrivia around whose ID created.
I am not going to get into details as thisis really between Facebook and the AELTC, but as our I and my collegues are very passionate about Wimbledon we feel part owners, as I am sure do those 9,000+ people who know have to be told that Facebook doesnt want them to use the platform for gathering together around and event like this.
Web 2.0 is as much as anythng about letting go of brands, putting things in the hands of the people that consume them. Attempting to “own” customers and make strange laws will lead to the end of a platform. People will cotton on and drift away. Just sayin’

4 thoughts on “Had our face(book) smashed in

  1. You’re so right. FaceBook don’t own us. Is there no appeal process? Frankly, their terms of service should include a form at the bottom which helps them improve their processes. Change is inevitable, embrace or fade, FaceBook.

    PS. I can’t find the rules which allowed this group to be deleted. How is this different from say LL setting up an SL group, or one of their fan base from doing the same?

  2. I did not get the “official note” but on reading it many of us said erm… what? including our customer.

  3. Facebook have a problem. They need to crack down of bogus, hoax pages and people representiting identities that they have no rights over. There are clearly worrying possibilities with the wrong identity getting in the wrong hands, with such public support for a fan page, the identity could be abused (and has been in many cases), blemishing the real owner’s brand or name.

    I think it’s important that Facebook deal with this but they haven’t found a solution yet and carpet bombing all accounts with this mindless system is not the right approach. I’ve been getting hell just *trying* to even create a page representing a Film Producer which they have entrusted to me – the amount of correspondance between myself as representative, the producer as private entity and facebook themselves over this simple task is still piling up and without results.

    With the soon to be launched profile redesign which in my opinion is a collosal disaster, the time is ripe for a new generation social network, if it crops up I reckon users will quite happily switch particularly since the Facebook developer’s API makes data transfer (all account, profile, photo etc. information) so simple and comprehensive. Facebook’s homemade lethal injection is just waiting to be administered.

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