Chris' Scratchpad

I've been playing around with a lot of social media data flows, trying to determine the best way to leverage company and community content across various social networks. Facebook has a huge following so I decided to play around with Facebook pages.

Facebook fan pages have the same look and feel of standard personal pages with a few slight differences. The biggest differences are in the accessibility

• Fans can view your content on their wall, bi-directional friending is NOT necessary
• Fan page data is publicly available and can be searched (even in google)
• Standard Facebook applications won't always work on pages unless configured to do so
• External applications (Picasa upload etc) usually won't work for pages

For businesses.. really?

Things don't really start to fall apart until you try to do things that .. a normal business would do.

Can't change fan page owner

Personnel change, people get reassigned, business get sold but Facebook doesn't allow you to change page owners.

[facebook page]
The discussion group for this topic is located here. There is no formal Facebook response!!

What if a business wanted to hire a consultant to help them set up the page or develop a complete drop-in social media flow? Just in case you thought to create a phantom account or business account read this..

[facebook page]

Can't change page type

Currently you can't change the category of your page which also determines what extra data you can enter about it. When I initial setup my page I choose business, but now website is available. My basic Info settings are: physical address, store hours and parking options .. and that's not really working for me. The only Facebook answer.. delete it and re-create it (losing all fans and efforts).

[facebook page]
The discussion group about this topic is located here (166 posts since June 2008).

Side effects for page owner

[facebook page]

Despite the statement above to the contrary, the line between page admin and your personal profile is NOT always clear.

When I comment on a fan's photo or like a fan's link, my personal account appears.

[facebook page]
Recently I commented on a fan post that appeared to be from my personal profile, while others appeared to be from the page (?!?)

Admins can't write on a page wall as a themselves, just as the page

Facebook says  that any post, comment or like made while the owner/admin is on the page will be seen as a response from the page (even though that isn't always the case). This also has a negative side effect; fan page interactions will not be seen on your personal page wall and only friends who are also fans of your page will see your comments. Facebook does NOT allow page admins to comment as their personal profile on a page they own.

Needless to say this makes including/introducing fan page material to your friends difficult. Friends who are also fans might get upset with the duplication.

I just want the option to choose Fan Page or Individual. The discussion group for this topic is located here. There is no formal Facebook response!!

Helping build Fan Pages

I'm not trying to be overly negative, I'm just trying to point out issues that I've encountered.. things that make you go hmmm (ttmygh)?!? I've thought of 100's of different applications that would benefit from a successful online presence and social media integration; small business, groups and/or communities.

While Facebook has it's place, it can't be the ONLY presence on the web, so integration with Facebook becomes a critical component. Most small businesses or groups are busy running their organizations and can't/won't take the time to explore and develop the optimal solution. These are just some of the issues I've discovered during my quest with Facebook.. (others here).

I would love to help bridge the gap between the organizations who could benefit from this integration and the companies that provide the tools. More issues will certainly appear and I'll try to document them on this blog. Hopefully the final optimized flow can be detailed on my "It's New to Me" blog.

How are others dealing with these issues? How do non-tech savy small organizations deal with these complexities?

I just noticed that the way my friendfeed content gets displayed in facebook has changed. Instead of just a simple activity message displayed under RECENT ACTIVITY I get a full blown status update to my friends in addition to a post to my Wall.

Most of my friends have no real idea that I am a closet geek.. they might have wondered but this will surely solidify my geekness. I recently started sharing even more content by adding my Google Reader shared items and my new posterous blogs to my friendfeed bounty. Don't get me wrong, I love it and I've found it increadibly valuable.. I guess I'm just over sensitive to the noise I generate, especially to those that aren't familiar with firehoses!!

I think I'll disable the wall updates and make sure people know that all my geekness (if interesting) is still available under the friendfeed tab.

Note: If anyone knows of a way I can tag or filter my friendfeed content (that goes to my friends) please let me know (in the comments).

What do you think? Are most of your facebook friends already firehose junkies?

You would think that Facebook would want to make it easy to add content to a Facebook fan pages. I can understand the "Walled Garden" approach on personal pages because the private/symmetric friendship required to view content is what users want and expect, but Fan pages are open!!

FBML language is a pain in the @$#. First I have to add a FBML box, add my markup and then publish it.. there isn't even a preview mode. When I'm viewing my "boxes" page I can't even edit the content of the box, I can only move it to the wall tab or remove it.. what about actually editting it? Most of the common embedding methods (javascript and iframe/embeds) won't work.. so you have to find an app, try it, figure out the various non-standardized parameters and work around the bugs. The easiest integration I've found is FriendFeed, I use the image version of the feed widget.. which works everywhere AND it updates too!!

Allow access?

Facebook has a Calendar but I already use Google Calendar so I don't want to manage another one. I found an app that does an OK job of viewing the content BUT anyone who wants to view the calendar has to allow access.. why?  I just want my "fans" to be able to view the calendar (like on any other webpage).

Currently you can add only a single Note feed to Facebook, which can be limiting. Sure yahoo pipes and other aggregators could be used but my goal isn't to duplicate my entire web content within Facebook.

The Future

From what I understand the “Open Graph API” will change all this. It will allow any web page to have Fan features that will allow users to subscribe by becoming fans, and receive information on their Facebook newsfeeds that could be seen by their friends. I can understand how large brands can afford to market their content on Facebook, I hope future features will allow small businesses to benefit from the Facebook community with minimal integration effort.