On Friday, I attended Julie Leadbeater’s Facebook seminar in Milton Keynes. This was one of the series of training seminars that The Social Media Bureau gives in association with UK4Business.
The title of this note comes from the number of times that my TomTom told me, after leaving the M1, that there was a roundabout 300 yards ahead and that I had to go straight on and take the second exit.
The Facebook training seminar was at The Jury’s Inn in Milton Keynes. This was a location that had not been used before to give our seminars. The hotel does not have a car park so the first order of the day was the purchase of a £3 ‘parking voucher’ and then to look for a ‘purple parking bay’ where apparently I would be allowed to park until 18:00.
I plan to be giving the Facebook training shortly I wanted to take every opportunity to get the material in my head and I decided to make a detour to Milton Keynes on my way to Nottingham for a family weekend.
As is the usual practice at Bureau training seminars, the attendees were asked if there were any particular issues that they wanted to be covered. The #1 query voiced was:
How do I handle negativity on a Facebook page?
As the seminar progressed other issues were raised:
Why do I have to use my personal profile to access a Facebook Business Page?
How do I keep posts from a Facebook business page off my personal profile?
And as a thread concerns about Facebook privacy in general were raised especially as Facebook has had a record of changing its rules frequently and how does anyone know what is and what is not going to remain private in the future?
The Bureau seminar covers most of the issues but clearly no-one can foretell what changes Facebook may make in the future to privacy so it has to be left as a personal choice how to access and update company pages.
I was reminded that company pages can be created without a personal profile but that an admin without a personal account does have a more limited role and cannot for example add apps to a page.
Internet access was excellent at the hotel but as usual in some locations, Dennis Brown of UK4Business had to go and renew the access tokens for the Internet with 45 minutes to go. When he returned he brought with him the largest collection of chocolate bars and biscuits I’ve seen at a seminar location.
One of the attendees on the seminar was we believe the first attendee to have been to all three social media training seminars and to have attended UK4Business’ own email marketing seminar. Now we have to get on finish off our planned Google training.
I have subsequently discovered a blog that explains some more of the issues about Facebook privacy and 3 specific privacy loopholes. Namely Groups, Tags and Photos. I can expect to have to cover privacy in some detail when I next present the Facebook seminar.
Thank you Julie for putting up with me ‘gate crashing’ your seminar and for an excellent afternoon’s seminar.