Facebook revamp

It seems like each time Facebook gets called out on an embarrassing misstep, they atone for it by giving us a new feature we’ve long been wanting. Screw-ups (such as the time they publicly announced on my Facebook page that I had just booked a flight through Travelocity) have each soon led to concessions ranging from the ability to read a full Facebook message via email without having to visit the Facebook site to view it, along with the mother of all Facebook user requests, the ability to post a status update that doesn’t include the word “is” directly after your name. Facebook’s latest screw-up came in the form of changing their user policy to basically state that they own anything you post to the site, something draconian along the lines of if you upload a photo of your dog to your Facebook page, Mark Zuckerberg himself reserves the right to come to your house and seize your dog if he so chooses.



Okay, so it wasn’t quite that bad, but the upshot is that it’s once again Atonement Time. The true long-term payoff this time around may have been Facebook’s adoption of OpenID (which up to this point had been almost completely irrelevant due to the fact that Facebook hadn’t adopted it), but the more immediate news out of Facebook is that its “fan pages” are in the process of being modified into something that looks less like, well, a fan page, and will instead more closely resemble the profile page of an individual user. In addition to being a “fan” of several different pages on Facebook myself, this new announcement caught my attention because iProng Magazine itself has a fan page on Facebook. And an iProng Facebook group. And I have my own personal profile. And from my standpoint, it all makes just a little more sense now. Back in the day, Facebook groups were where all the action was. Not that any of us were ever quite sure what to do with them. In most instances someone who had a vital interest in the group would invite you to become a member, you’d go ahead and join simply because you knew the person, and that would pretty much be the end of it. Of course this was back when the typical Facebook group was entitled “I secretly want to punch slow-walking people in the back of the head” (yes, that was actual group name), and of course this was long before Facebook was viewed as a legitimate commercial promotional tool.



As time went on more Facebook groups popped up that were aimed at specifically promoting or uniting something, such as iProng’s own long-running Facebook group which we use to announce and showcase each new issue. Eventually, Facebook launched fan pages, which were more explicitly geared toward allowing a person, a band, or a company (or a publication) to seek out existing and potential fans. So we created the iProng Magazine fan page, but quite honestly, there wasn’t much to the fan pages that wasn’t already do-able through the old groups. To that end, we’ve generally only been updating our fan page about as often as our group (each time a new issue is released), in effect making the group and the fan page facsimiles of each other that just happen to be laid out differently.



But that all changes as of now. While we’ve hedged our bets by keeping both of our Facebook properties active, the fact that the “Facebook” link on our home page leads to our fan page and not the group tells you what you need to know about which of the two I suspected represented the future of Facebook’s promotional and community opportunities. And it looks like that has turned out to be the case, because my latest visit this week to the iProng Magazine page on Facebook clued me in to the fact that the company is about to convert each fan page into what is essentially a plain old user account – with a few extras of course. In other words, “iProng Magazine” will now be an individual entity on Facebook much in the same way that “Bill Palmer” is.



Although the official changeover isn’t coming until a little later, I went ahead and opted our page into the new format today so we could get a jump on the new way of doing things. Sure enough, “iProng Magazine” on Facebook now has a profile picture, a wall, and even a status update option – just like a regular Facebook profile. Not that the page didn’t have some of those options before, but the fact that they’re now arranged almost exactly like an individual profile just seems to work better. The left sidebar includes the things that make a fan page distinct, such as the “founded” date, the displaying of six random fans instead of friends, and so on. But make no mistake, a Facebook fan page is now essentially just another user profile. And I think that’s the way it should be.



Any why not? For us, as an entity, the motif works well. The status update bar allows us to communicate with our fans much in the same way they’re already used to being communicated with on Facebook. And really, we want our readers who are on Facebook to think of iProng Magazine as just another Facebook friend. One of the things I’ve learned from new media over the past few years is that the more humanized your entity is able to present itself to folks in the new media space, the better chance is has of legitimately connecting with those people. Few are likely capable of considering a huge corporation as an actual friend, which is why such entities have little chance of succeeding in social media no matter how they approach it. But I’d like to think that iProng is deep enough into the social media trenches that the people who enjoy us can think of the magazine as an actual “friend” on Facebook (if we do it right). I guess we’ll find out going forward. Now that Facebook has turned our fan page into something interactive instead of just being a glorified Facebook group, we’ll see what we’re capable of.



I suspect this changeover is even better for public figures. Let’s say you’re a musician with both a Facebook fan page and your own personal Facebook profile. Maybe you’re not looking to let every one of your fans so deep into your social life that you want to let them see those old photos of you from high school that your old pals are so fond of tagging you in, but up until now the only real way to deeply interact with your fans on Facebook has been to let them become friends with your profile; a musician’s Facebook fan page until now hasn’t been much more than a professional bio page. But now, fans of your music can feel like they’ve legitimately connected with you on Facebook by becoming a fan of your fan page; which for a musician will act as a second, more public-oriented profile page.



As with all things, we’ll see. Although all our efforts going forward will be with iProng’s fan page, we’ll still continue to update the iProng group. We’ll reach you however you want to be reached, and some users still clearly prefer the group motif. But I know where our efforts will be going forward. By the way, you can visit our fan page by clicking here.