Tag Archives: Fan Pages

Please Take These Facebook Pages Off Me!

Back in the days when facebook pages were still being ‘fanned’ and none of you knew what Twitter was, I had this little idea to create an Alumni based network for Nigerian institutions.

One use case was when looking for a lawyer, jobs, business partner, house etc, you could check easily via your alumni network. Only those officially involved with the various alums would be admins of the various institutions.

So I created some Facebook fan pages of top Nigerian Universities and secondary schools, bought the domain alumni.com.ng went to Warwick and realized I would not be running with the idea. However I was stuck with the pages.

What was I supposed to do with the pages?! I wanted to delete them but I had spent a bit of money promoting them (the good old days when FB advertising targeting Nigerians was cheap before the politicians messed it up). I also did not want to hand them over to some random chaps that would spam the followers.

I tried to contact PR companies that would contact the universities/schools and strike a deal with them to handle their pages but that did not work. I asked people I knew from various institutions and could trust but they did not wish to have them. I asked officials of UDSS alumni (Hello Udoka, Osaheni and co.) and they said they were not ‘ready’. So I put it on the back burner for a while.

Any time I see people asking questions like “when are the results coming out, when are we resuming, I feel bad I cannot answer the questions and it is not right administering theses pages if I am not being of use.

So I have come to the decision,

I will publicize this post to as many people as possible, if I do not see someone to hand it over to in the next one month, I will deactivate or delete them. At least people will not feel they are not being responded to,

Who do I want to hand it over to?

  1. Any official of the institution.
  2. Credible Alumni
  3. PR companies that could handle them on behalf of the Universities.

Let me now list the fan pages I control. Hold your exclamation until I am through. :D

NYSC(Attended)

University of Benin (Attended)

Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU)

University of Lagos

Ahmadu Bello University

University of Ibadan

University of Nigeria

University of Portharcourt

King’s College Lagos (Attended)

Queen’s College Yaba-Lagos.

Igbinedion University

Madonna University

UDSS

Nigerian Law School

Benson Idahosa University

ABTI-American University of Nigeria

Vivian Fowler

Just because you attended any of the schools above does not mean I will hand it over to you. I have to ensure these pages do not get abused.

Universities have PR departments right?

If you are interested just contact me via ositanwoye@gmail. To be very clear, NO MONEY is required to take these pages. All that I need is proof you are an official or trustworthy enough to be in charge of this. I will put the contact of those that have taken over beside the fan pages.

This is probably not a big deal as there might be duplicate fan pages but these have the highest members for their various institutions.

See photo evidence below. The blurred out ones are not relevant here.

As a side note, I think facebook should start a verification badge system for people or institutions that want to control messages they send out. The cost of that can be placed on the page owners.

I am Oo, founder of GBEDU.FM where I hope to make sense of this business of music. I once tried to kill the business card with OnePage.

An Open Letter To Mark Zuckerberg: “Don’t Do A Mugabe To Facebook”

Dear Zucky,

In recent weeks, the tech news has been awash with so much negative PR of your company due to the recent changes made at Facebook, and some stunts you are pulling. I have not seen a consistent public vilification of a single person since Tiger Woods. Your users are really really pissed with you. The amount of money Diaspora has raised has shown you something, people are prepared to pay to take down Facebook. My man, this is not a good thing. I am writing this letter to you as a fan of the great company Facebook which you have built. My love for and belief in Facebook led be to write an earlier blog post in which I suggested ways Facebook can make money when the world said you guys were struggling to make some dough. This letter is my own effort to prevent you from doing a Mugabe* to your wonderful company with so much potential.

Privacy Changes

viewing the  source of the image below shows clearly the radical privacy evolution Facebook has undergone. There are few things I would like to point out.

Your browser may not support display of this image.

When I joined Facebook in the earlier days (2007), I was required to indicate how I knew the person I was adding. If I was not sure Facebook advised against it. Fast forward to today, I am continuously peddled the profiles of people whom I have no friends in common with on my 1, 953 Facebook friends list.

At your Facebook developer conference years ago, you claimed what kept you up at night was allowing people have the ability to as much privacy as possible while sharing what they wanted to whom they wanted. Fast forward to this year’s f8, where you said while your friends played and thought of being lawyers and doctors when they grew up, what was on your mind was how to make everyone’s information accessible to each other. Now, that is the greatest turn around since GW Bush Sr. said “Read my lips, no new taxes” then of course we all know what happened.

The open graph, the ‘like’ button, instant personalization and Privacy

In your quest to bring in revenue to justify your 716 million investment and keep Facebook afloat, you have decided to introduce the greatest advertising scheme* since Google, the like button. That move alone has put your competitors on a massive offensive. Your so called making the web ‘social by default’ is just a smokescreen to monitor the browsing habits of your over 400million users.  Don’t you think you should explain this clearly to your users?

* If you are logged into Facebook and you visit this site and any site (CNN, Pandora, Techcrunch porn sites :) ) that has implemented the like button (you do not need to visit the site from Facebook) Facebook knows of this and stores it. Since it has more information about you than yourself, they can deliver a better targeted advertising to you on those websites than Google. If you are an advertiser, who will you advertise with?

Stealing Fan Pages

What’s with the recent decision to seize popular (formally fan) pages and turn them to community pages? It is bad enough you make us pay to send traffic to your site but to go ahead and reward us for making our fan pages a success by seizing them is a very terrible strategy. It is wrong and very improper. If you claim the user should not have created the fan page in the first place, why do you not seize the less successful ones? What happens to the money the person used to promote the fan page all these years?

Facebook is not a charity and is in business to make money.

I fully understand the pressure you have been under to justify the huge investments made into you company. I would also be desperate to make a good return on investment especially having collected 200 million dollars from some Russian dudes. I completely understand all these recent moves are in a quest to squeeze out some juice. But while you go seeking that cash, I would like to point out that you seem to have forgotten some core principles that make great companies great. You have forgotten that with great power comes great responsibility. You cannot justify making changes that would affect 400 million people without regards to what they think or feel. I believe people are not necessarily  upset with the lack of privacy but the inconsistency of the rules of participation on Facebook. You told people it was ok to put pictures of their little sons and daughters an share it with only family members only to let the pictures become public and get them indexed by Google and co.

The most important asset of any company is not their engineers who can always leave but the goodwill and  trust of their customers and people. Zucky, you are recklessly betraying the trusts of your users which I think is very very risky. You should realize you are no longer seen as the teenager that built a popular website but an adult trying to take over the world.

So how then can Facebook make money?

On Facebook, the users are the products while advertisers are the customers.

I completely agree that Facebook has the right to make money but you see, Facebook’s products users are living things and can vote with their mouse.you cannot peddle them to advertisers without regard for what they think or how they feel. The question I will ask is have you tried making your users customers and they refused? Let me once again suggest ways I think Facebook can make money. First of all give your users the choice to become customers, which means providing premium services they would like to pay for.  Some premium services I think might be successful would be

  1. Sell Privacy: Yup. Make Facebook public by default and allow users customers to make any privacy adjustments they want. If it is that important, they will pay for it. The risk is that it might seem like blackmail so you could couple the offering with other premium features.
  2. Unlimited friends: Give customers the option to have unlimited friends.
  3. No Ads: Allow premium customers the ability to block ads.
  4. Priority news feed. Guarantee the delivery of news to premium users’ friends. Majority of users have no idea that many people do not see their stories.
  5. HQ photos: Yes, high quality photos.
  6. A ‘’premium badge’: Human beings are egoistical, people will become premium users just for this.
  7. Fan page owners can actually reply fans. you can make that feature premium only

I am sure you will find millions of people willing to pay $9.99 a year for these features. You currently do not make $9.99 per user so this will be a bad ass return. More so, you would have the conscience to aggressively monetize the users that would rather remain products nor customers.

Like I said in the beginning, I hope you do not do a Mugabe to your company. You are light in our generation and I would really be sat to see that light become and uncontrollable fire that has to be put out. I wish you l the best as you tackle the latest firestorm.

Regards,

Oo Nwoye, (OoTheNigerian)

*Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe and independence hero successfully made his country’s economy the best in Africa, then made it the worst.