Social Media B2B

Facebook has been in the mainstream news and exploding across blogs and the web as privacy changed, people complained, threatened to leave the social network, and Facebook privacy settings changed again. While many people have read posts about Facebook from the most popular tech and social media blogs, below are a number of posts about different thoughts related to Facebook. Some relate to B2B companies, while others are more general.

Why Facebook Community Pages Are No Big Deal For Brands…Eventually
from John Bell @jbell99
I had been getting emails from clients all week. They were noticing new pages spring up on Facebook under their brand name. Only problem is they had no apparent control of these pages which seemed to only feature a Wikipedia article and aggregated wall post comments from people. Some seemed to feature company logos. When I asked one of my Facebook contacts in our WPPDigital meeting about them, he kind of shook his head in acknowledgment and said, “Yeah, there have been a lot of questions about that. I’m told we are working on a memo that explains it.”

Are Facebook Like Buttons Wrong or Right For Your Site?
from @Problogger
The stampeding sound you may have recently heard was not caused by a bank panic or rumors of an impending astroid strike. It was just the new Like button from Facebook. The promise of this new offering is that visitors will click the buttons on your site, pump up your Facebook mojo with their friends and return fresh new traffic your way, all for free. What could be better than that?

How Facebook’s privacy disasters will change B2B marketing
from Chris Koch @ckochster
Have you ever noticed that your Facebook profile page looks like one of those horrible qualification forms that we make our customers fill out? If you go to Facebook and look at your profile, your immediate reaction is going to be that it’s asking for too much information.

Will These Competitors Slow Facebook’s Growth?
from @jeffbullas
Facebook is battling with an awareness that it takes it’s users for granted as it makes changes that both infuriate and frustrate its subscriber base… Will this stop Facebook’s inexorable march to global social media domination? Here are some competitors continuing and starting to nip at the heels of the 800 pound gorilla.

Facebook’s Culture Problem May Be Fatal
from @HarvardBiz
Facebook’s imbroglio over privacy reveals what may be a fatal business model. I know because my students at Parsons The New School For Design tell me so. They live on Facebook and they are furious at it. This was the technology platform they were born into, built their friendships around, and expected to be with them as they grew up, got jobs, and had families. They just assumed Facebook would evolve as their lives shifted from adolescent to adult and their needs changed. Facebook’s failure to recognize this culture change deeply threatens its future profits. At the moment, it has an audience that is at war with its advertisers. Not good.

Facebook, Network Externalities, Regulation
from Zeynep Tufekci @techsoc
There is a growing debate about whether people should leave Facebook and whether there should be government regulation. I’d like to argue that it is very difficult for most people to leave Facebook three reasons: network externalities, social norms and technical competence. Network externalities, which I discuss below, means that the first to become a standard has an enormous advantage that can make it very hard for competitors. Plus, I believe that users of sites such as Facebook, Google, and even Ebay, Amazon, Craigslist and Wikipedia (a non-profit), have solid reasons they can make moral, legal and perhaps even regulatory claims on these companies. Such companies exist by the virtue of the work their users have put in without monetary compensation. Also, they deal with often intimate personal information that deserves protection irrespective of claims about ownership.

Are there other posts you have read about other aspects of Facebook the past week? Let us know in the comments.

Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen or on Google+.