Concerns arose last week when CYI took over ownership of 289 Facebook groups in order to prove a point about social media risks.

Control Your Info (CYI) is a groups whose goals is to ‘draw attention to questions concerning online privacy awareness.’ They did a search on Google and were able to find 289 groups that did not have an administrator. They joined the groups and took over. The administrator becomes the owner of the group. If a group does not have an owner it can be ‘high-jacked’ by anyone wishing to take control. This is very easy and not illegal.

Their online statement said:

‘Our method of choice only serves the purpose to prove our point and put emphasis on how easy it is to lose track of a part of your online presence. If we wouldn’t have communicated this way, our message would probably have fallen into oblivion the moment it got out.

‘We did not hack anything. Once we were administrators we owned the groups and could have changed any setting. We chose to change the picture, the name, and the description of every group. Our intention was and is to restore these groups to their original form and find a suitable admin among the members. To be able to do this, we first backed up all the data we wanted to replace.’

Online security in Facebook can easily be controlled by altering your privacy settings but CYI actions do act as a warning that it is important to know what you are doing with social networking. From a business point of view this could be a disaster if a group is left open to unscrupulous rivals.

Facebook responded by saying that the groups that had been hijacked had been abandoned by their owners. They said:

‘Group administrators have no access to private user information and group members can leave a group at any time.

‘In the rare instances when we find that a group has been changed inappropriately, we will disable the group, which is the action we plan for these groups.’

Facebook is in the centre of a controversy as it has been accused of clickthrough fraud for the second time in one month. A case against Facebook has been filed in the US by Unifed ECM who are accusing them of charging for ‘non-existent, fraudulent or invalid clicks.’

Earlier on in the month RootZoo, a sports forum, sued the social networking site for charging for clicks that did not materialise. Their data showed that on one day Facebook had generated 300 clicks but they had been charged for 804. RootZoo had advertised on Facebook from November 2007 to June 2008.

Facebook is a social networking site that is increasing in popularity both in the UK and all over the world. This, combined with the way that it uses very target behavioural marketing techniques, makes it a very attractive prospect for companies wanting to advertise online. Done well, advertising with Facebook can be very successful.

However, this latest complaint will be concerning to those who advertise with Facebook and companies are advised to check their own analytics figures carefully with those of Facebook.

Facebook, who are obviously keen to maintain their reputation, responded in an email last month to bnet:

‘The goal of our advertising programs is to deliver value to advertisers and, as a result, we take click quality very seriously.  We have developed a series of sophisticated systems to detect anomalous activity and ensure advertisers are not charged for this activity.  In addition, we analyze tremendous amounts of data to discern larger click patterns and, in rare cases where this research, other analysis, or advertiser questions reveal charges for invalid clicks, it is our practice issue credits to impacted advertisers.  While we’re pleased at the opportunity to shed some light on the systems and policies we’ve established and continue to improve to protect advertisers, this litigation is unnecessary and baseless.’

There is certainly no evidence that Facebook has deliberately defrauded anyone but it is well known that they are still a fairly new and developing company who are obviously still getting their act together. It remains to be seen whether this new law suit will adversely affect their reputation and whether any more companies are angry enough to take their click through complaints further.

According to data from comScore’s World Metrix service, Facebook, has gained millions of new users in Europe over the last year. But what is Facebook and how can it help your company?

Facebook is a social networking site where you add people to your list of ‘friends’ or ‘fans’. Once you have done this all of the people on your list can network with all of the people on everyone else’s. You can start groups and invite members and you can customise your profile to include information that you want to share with others. There are countless, entertaining (often annoying) applications that you can add and invite your friends to use.

You can send private or public messages to your ‘friends’ too and this can serve as a useful communication tool. There is also a powerful search tool which enables you to get in touch with people you may have lost contact with, or infact, with companies that you want to know more about.

Rather than ‘Google’ a company or individual, you can now ‘Facebook’ them, bearing in mind that all the info given will be entirely edited by them.

If you have teenagers who have lots of free time you might be impressed at the amount of their free time they do spend on Facebook!

The European Rise of Facebook
Facebook is huge and in February had 275 million global visitors. In Europe Facebook pushed for a wider audience and increased its visitors by 314% to 100million visitors in February 2009.

The average user spends 3hrs per month on the site and, of the 17 countries surveyed, Facebook took the number one social networking spot with 30.4% of minutes spent in the social networking category.

The countries who most visit Facebook were the UK (22.7m), France (12.4m) and Trukey (17.4m).

How can Facebook help my company?
Facebook can help companies in 2 main ways:

Advertising
Facebook is a free application but gets its revenue from advertising. It uses very targeted marketing information to enable advertisers to really direct their products to more receptive audiences. Facebook asks individuals information about themselves, enables them to join groups and clubs and download applications. All this information enables them to track individual profiles and filter the right ads to them.

For a company, this provides targeted behavioural marketing information that can produce productive results from an advertising campaign. The high volumes of visitors (Facebook boast that they have 200,000,000 active users) enhance the effect and a recent study has found that potential customers are very receptive to advertising when they are using social networking sites.

Advertisements can be paid for either by per click (CPC) or impression (CPM) and results can be monitored in order to adjust targets and improve performance.

Company Profile
Youe company can have a personal profile on Facebook. Lots of organisations, companies and notorious individuals have a Facebook account. McDonalds has over 1.8 million fans on Facebook. If that isn’t incentive enough, here are some reasons to join in:

• Everybody’s doing it – like people expect you to have a website, they will more than likely expect you to have a Facebook account in the very near future
• It provides a good way to communicate with the general public
• You can collect feedback from your potential customers
• Its Free
• Its easy to use and can be done in-house
• Its speedy – you can let people know instantly about any news that you may have
• It helps you create a large mailing list at very little cost
• It promotes your brand
• It allow visitors access to your webpages and promotions

Word of Caution
If you have a personal Facebook page you need to exercise caution in how you use it. If you are very open about the personal details of your life you need to think how that might impact on your business profile. And not just your own information but your friend’s and family’s is readily available to others.

According to a research poll conducted by KPMG , only 16% of Britons would prefer to pay for online content that was free of advertising. In contrast two thirds of UK consumers said that they would watch online ads if they could get free digital content.

In theory this adds weight to those who believe that the way forward is to continue to have free access to online services rather than rely on subscription to find revenue.

Trying to implement subscriptions in the current climate however might be tricky anyway. People are feeling the pinch and after all, we are now used to amazing, free sites. How would we feel if we had to pay for something that we now consider to be normal to access for free? Would we be prepared to do it?

So, currently, free sites with advertising seem to be a win-win combination. And infact, we are actively encouraged to see this as a model for success in search engine rankings no matter how big or small our business is. Search engines will rank our sites better if we have regular free and useful content and we can use, Google Adsense, for example to earn a potential income. The more useful our site, the more visitors, the more revenue we can get from advertising. We are not just talking about the big guns here – it applies to all.

Some people just ignore the adverts or don’t even notice it.  On the other hand, there is great potential now for specific targeting. Facebook, for example are honing in on people’s stated interests which can enable them to really provide value for money for their advertisers: catching those who are receptive with goods and services they are most likely to engage with.  Facebook, also however, claim legal rights to people’s information and this has been the subject of much controversy.

The poll found that consumers were most receptive to advertisements when they were shopping (47%) and using social network sites (35%) and least receptive when on a phone call and using navigation tools which is understandable considering the focused and active nature of these tasks.