When Facebook launched its advertising platform last year, there were a few issues  - ordinary members could create ‘Fan Pages’. So fans started creating pages around their favourite brands.

But there was a problem – when advertisers want to advertise with Facebook, they are requested to 1^st create a fan page and then buy social ads. So what happens when an advertiser wants to advertise and the fan page is already taken?

Before we continue the story, the term ‘fan page’ in itself is a little misleading. Is it a page made by fans or for fans.

Anyway, to continue, 2 users have had their fan pages taken away recently. One of the users owned a Ralph Lauren Fan Page. Facebook notified him to give up a fan page, he didn’t – his profile was banned. The user must have been REALLY pissed off with Facebook. Ralph Lauren on the other hand capitalized by giving him a $200 gift certificate. This is going to be a continual problem. How Facebook deals with this is going to be interesting. Incidentally the power of social media is such that the scales of ‘power’ in terms of the relationships people have with brands, and indeed with each other have tilted drastically. In my opinion, brands should be happy that fans are creating fan pages and work in sync with brands rather than causing such dissonance.

Orkut recently allowed the co ownership of communities on its social networking platform. About time.

*Rupesh Adds:* We should have a feature on Orkut that allows communities to merge. As you will often see, on Orkut, for a particular community, you will have tons of communities around one topic. If somehow these communities can be merged and owners can be given co ownership of the main community, then the experience will be a lot more Social.

*Harshil Continues:* Very true, this should actually implemented across networks. Groups are far from ‘social’ on social networks with the implementation of such features. Check out the Paachvi Pass Communities below. Its quite clear that all 3 groups want to talk about the same thing – so why shouldn’t they have the option to merge?

Facebook is in the process of revamping its profile pages by the way. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a preview. 

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