Saving Face in Facebook

Facebook has an identity crisis on its hands. When the company opened up fan pages so you could have a customized name (facebook.com/YOURNAMEHERE) a torrent of URL name grabbing took place on a scale not unlike greedy Gold Rush prospectors grabbing land out West in 1849. Now fans could also make their page look even more official with a customized URL.

By releasing naming rights to the public Facebook compounded an already difficult challenge for companies trying to unify their official presence within the walls of a social network. Here’s what Facebook itself has written about its fan page policy:

Note: Fake Pages and unofficial “fan pages” are a violation of our Pages Guidelines. If you create an unauthorized Page or violate our Pages Guidelines in any way, your Facebook account may be disabled.

Now what if someone were to take your name, post content about you as though they were you, and then spread false information about you. When your friends visited Facebook, they might inadvertently friend the faux you. When your boss (new client, old flame, mom) looked you up on Facebook, they would see this “you” and then your false presence could interact with the people who are really important in your life. If they were an evil false version of you, they could deliberately request to be friends with your real friends, and wreak havoc with your reputation.

Would you stand for this? I don’t think so. So why should a brand stand for it? The plot seems to be pulled from an awful Michael Keaton movie, Multiplicity. It’s a running theme for the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman of films Being John Malkovich (who has 353 profiles), Adaptation (in which Nicholas Cage has an identical twin – over 500 profiles for him) and Synecdoche, New York (starring Philip Seymore Hoffman who has 114 profiles by the way).

Fan pages do not display their administrators or contact information in many instances. And if you write on the wall asking who they are and if they’re “official” expect to be ignored. The burden of proving falsehood of a fan page is on the company that wants to own its brand experience in Facebook.

Facebook should drop the “Welcome to the official Facebook Page” prefix they tag onto all pages listed with search results. They’re not official unless a company has authorized them, per the policy. Also, make page administrators contact information a requirement for creating a page, and enable Facebook to contact them to determine whether they are authorized to speak on their behalf.

Rather than rely on having a brand take over a false page by starting a whole other page with the same name, let the brand import all existing fans automatically into the real authorized fan page. Seems it would be simple to do with some coding.

Let the fans remain in groups where different rules apply. This isn’t about being Big Brother; this is merely a form of reputation protection. If Twitter can have verified accounts why can’t Facebook?

Now it’s been reported that a woman and a man, both named Kelly Hildebrandt, met on Facebook and are now getting married. I wish them the best of luck with their nuptials. I’m so glad they found each other and hope they keep it real. For all of you walking the line between your personal and professional brand, and the brands of your clients, what’s the best resolution so we can all live happily ever after?

Tagged as: Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman, Facebook, fan pages, Kelly Hildebrandt

Michael Bourne

Thanks for the feedback. You’re my first official comment on the new blog! I also added a bunch of old posts to my site from our old blog. Having a company take over a user-generated fan page is almost as bad as becoming friends with your parents in FB. But like that, you kind of have to do it, even though it takes some of the fun out of things.

I want FB to change its policies so it’s not so easy for anyone to create a site that builds a following and then posts nothing of value. Or nothing at all. I’ve seen many FB fan pages purported to be from the company, that have zero posts. That makes the brand look like they're socially illiterate.

The real question that’s being raised is “Who is in control of your brand to begin with?” Was it ever in total control of the company? Clearly not. But the line between control and outright copyright infringement is being blurred, and Facebook is on the side of corporate America, not the individual. Things sure have come a long way since FB’s Harvard dorm room days.

Keep the fans in groups, keep the companies with their own unique pages, and let fans comment freely on company pages as they do now (but please don’t have them speak for the brand – they’re not on the payroll, they don’t do marketing for a living, and they’re spreading information that’s probably not reliable).

Jason Potteiger

Really enjoyed this post, I think it raised a lot of those strange - internet etiquette/ what is the essence and value of things on the internet - types of issues.

I remember when we talked about this briefly in your office, and I asked if you were concerned about offending the users of a brand by taking over its named-"official"-but-clearly-unofficial user managed page(s), to which you made a point similar to what you wrote here: "...what if someone were to take your name, post content about you as though they were you, and then spread false information about you." essentially arguing that these people never had a right to use a name that wasn’t theirs in the first place.

And technically of course that’s true, but I don’t think that’s how users would see it. I think people see whatever they do on social media/ the internet as theirs, especially the millennials like me. It’s strange, but since brands have just started getting into the social media environment, when they make a move on things like this I think there is a danger that it could come across as: “hey thanks for getting all those followers, I know we just wised up to this stuff but that’s ours now, so screw off while we make this corporate.” And this, I think, would piss a lot of people off. Also, I bet that most of the people who started/ run these pages also actually love these brands and they think they add to it. Might not make much sense, but I users think they own what they have done online and anything is theirs if they got there first - just like urls, it’s finders keepers.

Not saying companies shouldn’t take their name back, not at all. I think that all of your points are well taken. Further, people could still have their own unofficially official fan pagers. My only point in the end is that being right isn’t always enough, so things like this probably need to be done very carefully (and Coke paying that Fbook page set a precedent for that type of thing). Last thing you want if a feature in the NYT about a massive boycott that spread via twitter because a brand “screwed” a well connected user/ fan page administrator.

Saving Face in Facebook

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