Ah, the power of the press. Ordinary business activity on Facebook got me banned from Facebook , but the company ignored my queries. But mere minutes after the PR team heard about the situation, I'm back online. I'm sure it's just a coincidence. Right.

This is a personal story, sure. But it raises questions about how business users should be handling ourselves in the new frontier of online, and how social networking sites should respond to their users.

Originally built for college students, Facebook has matured into a useful tool for professionals of all ages. As the site expanded and attracted more users, it became inevitable that Facebook—and social media in general—would be used for more than pleasure.

CIO is part of the business community, too, so we created a group on Facebook. The CIO Forum's intention is to provide a place where IT executives can connect with one another and to interact with CIO writers and editors. CIO set up guidelines to ensure the group consisted only of IT professionals and CIO staff. An approval process was put in place, which involved sending messages to all of those who wanted to join. However, there was a problem with this strategy: Facebook viewed the messages as spam and deleted my (the approver) account.

That's when the fun started.

My role as approver was to write to potential members, asking them to clarify their IT role (usually a LinkedIn profile). With no notice, Facebook deactivated my account. Nor did they quickly tell me why; it took three days before I learned their reason.

Since the CIO Forum was intended to be somewhat exclusive, we wanted the private group to include only actual IT professionals. The approval process involved sending messages to everyone who applied, which, according to Facebook, is spam.

Mind you, these were not messages sent in bulk to a random assortment of strangers. They were messages to people who had applied for membership and had initiated a relationship with us (or at least with the forum they wanted to join). After a forum participant sent me a response with proof of his IT experience, I approved him and sent a standard "Welcome to the Forum" message. End of story. No blast messages about anything else.

One co-worker does this process for half of the applicants; she gets a warning message from Facebook if she sent too many messages in one day. I never got a warning, but instead, one morning back in April, I was informed that my account was disabled when when I tried to log in. I checked Facebook's Terms of Use page, the relevant part of which says, "In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to: upload, post, transmit, share or otherwise make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, solicitations, promotional materials, 'junk mail,' 'spam,' 'chain letters,' 'pyramid schemes,' or any other form of solicitation." None of it appeared to apply to me.

So, on April 6, I e-mailed Facebook's user operations department asking what exactly I had done to warrant ejection. Their response (two full days later):

Your account has been disabled because you have violated Facebook's Terms of Use. Misusing the site's features to spam others is not permitted. You will no longer be able to use Facebook. This decision is final.

Thanks for your understanding,

Clark
User Operations
Facebook

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