Facebook Fiasco Turned Good

For the past month, I have been working with my university's Facebook (FB) account. Someone had set it up before I took over. I was trying to update the information and keep it updated.

Last Friday I sent an email to Facebook because I was trying to set up a Fan Page for the University and was having issues putting something together.

Monday night, the last email of the day was from Facebook. We had violated a term of service with the profile we had.

Per our Terms of Use, Facebook profiles must represent a single individual. Users are not permitted to maintain an account under an organization's name, or use personal accounts primarily to promote themselves professionally.

With this, our entire profile was locked and almost everything was lost. Before having lost our profile, I had started working on a Fan Page to be launch the same time our latest marketing pieces hit mailboxes.

By the generosity of Carly at Facebook, they were going to move the Fan Page to my personal account. We had also found a Fan Page that was unauthorized. No one from our university had set it up. Our outside marketing firm had no idea. Hoping my new friend Carly could help, I sent her a quick email seeing if she could take down the unauthorized page and transfer the fans to the new page I had created.

Fingers crossed and Wednesday afternoon, our fan page went from 16 fans to 206 in less than 5 seconds.

In sending an email the ended up closeing what I had worked on building for a month, we were able to condense everything into one page. My Facebook fiascon turned out to be great!

Thanks Carly at Facebook!!!

Rock on,
Lane J