SURPRISE! We didn’t have one. We had pretty much every other Facebook profile possible except a fan page.

So, finally it is my honor to give you. The official Enquiro Facebook Fan Page – http://www.facebook.com/enquiro.

As I write this there’s an automated countdown clock in another browser window counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until millions of people will flood the internet in search of the perfect Facebook username.

On June 12th at 12:01 a.m.  EDT Facebook will go crazy. Everyone who was previously assigned a user name made up of random numbers (id=123456789) will be able to obtain a username similar to what LinkedIn offers. (Official announcement here)

I can now shed my previous Facebook identity (120400011) become facebook.com/chris.davies, or if that’s not available perhaps w.chris.davies to match my LinkedIn account.

They’re limiting the potential for name-squatting by preventing pages made after May 31st and profiles after June 9th from signing up for a username, so if you’re not already on Facebook, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about it. All users who joined Facebook after the cut-off will be ableto claim usernames on, June 28. In the mean time I’ve already had questions from several clients about how they should handle this.

Best Practices:

1. Make a reasonable effort to get a good vanity URL for your pages and/or your profile. It won’t be the end of the world if you don’t lock down facebook.com/firstname-lastname. Don’t stay up all night, but if you happen to be up at 12:01 a.m., you might want to flip on your computer.
2. Your best choice is your proper name as you usually use it, with no spaces. I’m going to shoot for www.facebook.com/chrisdavies. Remember, you want to keep it short, memorable and easy to communicate, like a verbal business card.
3. For brands, go for the most commonly used form of your name. For Enquiro, that means using facebook.com/enquiro, and not the full name of our company, Enquiro Search Solutions. Don’t worry if someone’s squatted on your brand.
4. You can prevent your registered trademarks from being registered as usernames. You can do that by filling out this form.
5. Update your other social networking profiles to reflect your new-found vanity URL.

Resources:

Usernames for Facebook Pages

Username Eligibility FAQ

Info for Intellectual Property Rights Holders

First of all, I don't think Facebook Groups work for everyone and if you're creating one from a business perspective it is important to understand the purpose of the group.  They work similar to blogs and forums in that you can use them to communicate with members in the community as well help increase awareness of products, news and services in your organization/industry.  Below are a few items that you should consider addressing to help prolong the life of your Facebook Group:

• Growing the Community: It's important that you can continue to grow the number of members in your community for a couple of reasons. First of all, mentally, it gives other group members the confidence that your group is of interest.  Secondly, more members usually means more eyeballs viewing your content and more perspectives in the discussion.
• Fresh and Relevant Content: As with any blog or information portal on the web, users will come back if the content stays fresh and is relevant to their business needs.  I try to post relevant links to PDFs, case studies or posts regularly and this is useful in providing content for my members as well as promoting content from other industry sources.  Besides textual content, consider uploading images for your members to view – if you're in travel post hot destinations or discounts, if you're in entertainment post brochures or advertisement, if you're in search marketing post cool landing page or conference pictures.
• Promote Discussion: It's difficult to get your members to initiate conversation, however since you are quite familiar with your vertical it allows you to get the conversation rolling with questions related to hot topics.  Discussion boards are an excellent way to share ideas and get multiple perspectives on a given topic.
• Leverage the Community:  If you have a community that is truly engaged with your group (i.e.: they actively participate in discussions, communicate with you offline, post links/images video) then you can leverage the community by promoting new whitepapers, events and industry news; this can be done with mass messaging to the entire group.  You can also segment the delivery of the content based on the members' geographic location or type of organization.   However, I do recommend you don't abuse this power because an information overload could lead to members leaving the group.

The social media strategy using Facebook Groups is still in its very early stages, therefore it's important to experiment with different tactics and share the results on ones which have and have not been successful.

There is value for businesses via Facebook.  Everything from brand lift to reputation management, Facebook is becoming a great tool for business owners to drive consumer engagement.  In fact, Facebook has generated so much interest that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have all been reportedly trying to acquire part of the social community that has become so popular in 2007.

So amidst rumors of Yahoo being ready to acquire Facebook and Microsoft to buy a minority stake in Facebook for a half a billion dollars, should Google fear Facebook?  Facebook is still an emerging Web property, but many believe that Facebook will become even more popular in the future due to their open development platform.   Currently Facebook allows developers the ability to build applications off of its platform.  Google is said to be gearing up to give developers in its network the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third-party applications via the APIs.  So is Google worried about Facebook at all?

Why Google Fears Facebook

Think Google feels Facebook is not a threat?  Well think again.  Here are a couple of reasons as to why Google fears Facebook:

• Facebook has experienced a quick rise to the "top" – Facebook is currently the second largest social network on the Web, behind only MySpace in terms of traffic.  There is strength in numbers.
• Facebook is the most viral software distribution platform ever
• Facebook is addicting!
• As reported on Googlewatch by Clint Boulton, "Facebook has made no secret of the fact that it wants to go public and will likely allow its search box to return keyword-driven results to generate greater online advertising dollars, which would pose a serious threat to Google."
• Facebook is not some little startup, many believe Facebook's value to be in the $8-12 billion dollar range. 
• There are nearly 3,400 applications on Facebook with about 100 million installs.  These numbers are not small potatoes.  
• Microsoft continues to acquire a stake in Facebook.  Bill Gates said at the start of the year that Search is a number one priority.  Desperate times call for desperate measures. Microsoft needs to do something drastic to compete in the online advertising game.  Furthering the existing Microsoft/Facebook partnership might be drastic enough to present some serious competition for Google.

Still think that Google is not worried about Facebook?  Well then why was there a so called secretive and highly confidential meeting at Google's headquarters in Mountain View the other day.  Topic au jour?  The "Facebook Issue".  The threat with Facebook is that by enabling keyword search on the site, Google's "keyword search advertising model" faces a serious threat for the first time in it's history.  Google is currently the most convenient provider of keyword search driven ads.  This is their bread and butter.  According to a posted comment by Lee Lorenzen on Techcruch, "… Google’s dominance in search (and its by product keyword-driven CPC advertising) is threatened when there is another search box staring at, and being used by hundreds, of millions of users for hours each day (i.e., Facebook’s people/group/app search box that will have 200+ million users by Dec. 2008 and will be the dominant Social Network in the most lucrative advertising markets in the world)."

The threat from Facebook may indeed be real.  Is Facebook a serious threat to Google?  When you start holding confidential meetings to discuss a strategy to diffuse the situation. I would say the Facebook issue is already a serious threat. If Google has done their homework correctly, they understand that Facebook works to keep their users on their site and not on a search engine or other social community.  Who do you trust more?  Your friends and family (via Facebook) or a Search Engine (Google)?  Where will you be spending your time online?  In a community with friends and family or on a plain white Google results page?  It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few months and years.

I will say this, very few companies are as innovative and as creative as Google.  While they have enjoyed phenominal growth and profit over the past five years.  If anyone has the power, knowledge, resources and technology to stay on top it is Google.

• Facebook would receive hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in return.
• Google would get access to more personalized information from the millions of Facebook users. This would help Google in offering the most relevant search results.  Google does own Orkut, however Orkut only owns approximately 0.5% market share in the Social Networking space, primarily in Asia.  Personally I think Facebook is the superior product of the two.
• Google would gain yet another point of access to user behaviour data including upstream/downstream data at Facebook, Popularity of Groups / Locations / Users / Applications and time spent.
• Google could display contextual advertising throughout Facebook, furthermore they could offer users the ability to display AdSense on their profile/group pages allowing them to make money through Facebook.
• Facebook would receive enhanced search functionality.
• Google would have the ability to integrate many of its other services including gadgets, maps and checkout.
• If Google opened up Facebook profiles publicly (outside of the log-in), users and groups would become indexed in the organic search results. Public profiles would also allow images in Facebook to get indexed in Google's image search. Facebook users tag their images and this would make the images very relevant to search queries.  I know that this would violate the privacy of users, however Facebook could do something similar to LinkedIn where you can specify what is public and what is private.
• Google could apply authority based on the amount of friends a user has or the amount of people a group contains.
• When Google purchases a company they often make many services free, as they did with FeedBurner. Perhaps with Facebook they would offer gifts and polls (and related demographic data) for free.
• With Google's resources and deep pockets Facebook could receive numerous enhancements.

Facebook provides an excellent service and if Google does plan on acquiring Facebook they will have to work fast because Microsoft and Yahoo! are most likely lurking very close behind.   With the recent rumblings of a Facebook IPO the chance of Facebook being Acquired is looking much slimmer than ever before as I am sure Michael Zuckerberg and team have plans of their own.