Fight the FB spam!

October 28th, 2008 § 3 comments

On the homepage for Facebook, a login form is ...Image via WikipediaAutumn started. More precisely, summer ended, which means lots of businesses and non-commercial associations started working again. Usually, this only meant an increase in traffic on the streets, but this year, it means increase in the FaceBook spam as well.

Following up on my notes on how Twitter hit Slovenia in Spring, it seems FB discovered us as well. Which is actually a great thing, because it’s way easier to organize parties now.  The only problem is, that my fellow citizens don’t know that FB friends are not meant for organizations or product.

I will not point at names, but apart from some really personal brands, it only makes sense that those smart web-marketing advisors who are behind this trend pull their clients off the FB and create proper entities that we can be ‘fans’ or ‘members’ of. After all, FB is one of the first social networking platforms that evables us to use it like that and thus fight the spammers.

I hope that anyone responsible reads this and gets it. I hate getting several new friend requests per day from top Slovenian companies. Imagine being ‘a friend of WallMart’ It makes me sick.

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§ 3 Responses to Fight the FB spam!"

  • ces says:

    I completely agree. It bothers me as well, but I haven’t voiced my complaint yet. Consider it done now :). As you’ve said, FB enables products, groups and I’m sure many other ways of showing off your product/company/… I too hope, that the people responsible read this and stop their misguided attempts.

  • TS says:

    We had a long long discussion about this before choosing to be a person, not a brand/page on Facebook.

    The Think! logo and the connection we have with people made us much closer to a person (not human, but still a character) and not a company. We try to behave as a character and communicate our personality with the world around us.

    p.s.: sorry about the spam 🙂

  • bostjan says:

    this is really interesting, would love to hear a case study on how companies decide on issues like that. one would think that it’s one soul’s sole call…

    I understand the logic, and can relate to it, however you should understand that it limits the reach to only those who know you and the team and the product. They can be more passionate ‘friends’ instead of general ‘fans’, but one would think that enterprises are more interested in soft mass community than intense group of few.

    I am happy to make friends with people I know, but every enterprise or even worse, poor random NGO that is trying to reach me in this way is causing the channel’s value to deteriorate…








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