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Facebook – Friend or Foe ? | Is Facebook your friend ? | Marketi
October 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I wrote an article, several days ago that was recirculated a few tens of times online. I tried to capture a little bit of the angst being felt by facebookers who had been banned or suspended while simply doing their thing in the Facebook. One might define a Facebooker as someone who spends more than 90 minutes a day in facebook and who probably has it on their cell phone too.
To a lot of people this is really a non-issue, much to do about nothing. But to the 100 Million who inhabit the fastest growing social network and the several tens of millions who now spend more time inside facebook than around the rest of the internet, this is quite a serious topic. You volunteer to send out 400 invitations to your facebook friends on behalf of your boss and your boss smiles and you hear him say, wow Jim is a real go getter. You can banned after sending only 60 messages and yo partner, your now in trouble…
So, let me see if I got this right – 580 cherished friends of your mother-in-law didn’t get their invite and you just got suspended from facebook while in this, the most tedious of chores. Better come straight with your mother-in-law right away, because facebook does not lift suspensions in any “reasonable” timeframe. And as for outright bans, if you were given one of those unjustly, you can try their dispute resolution email, however for all intents and purposes you are better off kissing that account goodbye.
And let us not forget that commercial class of people feeling deep busines angst over having lost their list of 3-4000 prospects. Sometimes these are the mom and pop type companies who have decided to use facebook for marketing and sometimes these are sizable mid-sized corporations getting overly aggressive with their grassroots marketing or surveying. In any case, the loss of the profile also means no contact with the prospective customer base.
In that article, I wrote a little about the facebook warning messages which I and many others consider quite bland. I detailed in vivid language that I personally felt that for such an important thing, they facebook could have done a little better in terms of bringing the urgency of the situation to their members.
However, what I didn’t go into at that time was the myriad of ways one can get suspended and banned. Here they are, and facebook says that not reading the TOA Terms of Agreement is not an excuse.
Try hard to put images up only of persons who have enough clothes on to look comfortable on a family beach. If your family beach is in europe – please remember facebook is an american creation with american puritanical values. You may see others doing otherwise, but if you get banned for following their activity don’t expect your account to be unlocked based on that excuse.
Accept people as friends before writing to them. The Facebook interface has this backwards but you can get banned all the same for following that idiosyncrasy of the interface.
Creating a group inside Facebook with the Facebook name/word in it – its trademarked you know. Creating a website outside of facebook with the facebook name in it. Hijacking the accounts of others – only a hacker would do this one Using an image that you do not have the authority to use – tens of thousands do this. Using the facebook email like its twitter. Surprise it’ s not, there is a chat facility for that and its what facebook now suggests you use.
We see two forms of general problems that people fall prey to just before getting banned or suspended.
One of them, which includes posting obvious unartistic nude pictures and hacking etc., is a pretty blatant activity on the part of the user and the reasons for getting banned are obvious enough.
Generally, it would appear that there are two classes of evil that can get one banned or suspended from facebook. Nudity and stealing images and other such types of activity is one class of activity.
You can invite 500 perfect facebook strangers to be your friend but not in the same hour or day. Over two weeks or more would be perfect, but not 1 day.
If however you are reading this after having gotten suspended or banned, there is a resolution email on the site that you can attempt to plead your case to.
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