Flickr: Gideon van der stelt
Love Meow is a sad kitty today.
We received a message from Facebook, asking us to authenticate our fan page in the next 3 weeks or else Love Meow admins would lose their rights to publish any stories. Facebook suggested several ways to authenticate our page and said that we only needed to choose one of them:
1. Add a fan box to the official website or link to the fan page
2. Add an email address associated to the business
3. Add additional email address affiliated to the business
4. If I did not have a way to authenticate my page, I could write a description about my affiliation to the busniess
I took this message very seriously and filed the report right away where I provided our website URL since we already had a Fan box added there. In addition, I gave them my email address and a second email address, both affiliated to LoveMeow.com. On top of that I even added a sidetab which links to the Fan page. I don't know what else I can do. I have exhausted all my options.
I have NOT heard from Facebook for more than 2 weeks. Supposedly next Tuesday will be the final day if they do not take off the warning message for me. I googled the problem and found many fan page owners that are experiencing the same frustration:
Tennessee Department of Tourist Development's story
There is a whole discussion about it on Facebook. There are a lot of highly distressed people there.
Many of us have paid $$$ to promote our fan pages through
Facebook's advertising program. Now they are taking away our admin publishing rights for no reason at all and without a single explanation after we have worked so hard. Facebook finally went profitable last year largely because of all the advertisers.
Tennessee Department of Tourist Development eventually got their admin power back after a tremendous amount of work trying to get ahold of someone from Facebook. It caused the entire department a great deal of stress. Unfortunately Facebook did not provide an explanation as to why they blocked their admin publishing rights.
I would like to give you guys a heads-up in case anything happens to the Love Meow fan page. Feel free to give us any suggestions that you may have. If you know people who also have a large fan page or maybe going through the same problem, feel free to share this story with them.
Here is my personal Facebook account. Feel free to add me.
Update [Dec 4]:
Love Meow Fan Page has finally been authenticated after 2 and half weeks of long wait. Luckily we didn't experience being blocked like many other legitimate Fan pages. Many people are still looking for a solution as to how to get their page authenticated because many people are still losing their pages every day. Below is a summary of what I did in the past one week:
First of all, I believe Facebook has totally underestimated the amount of time they need to process everything and they did a horrible job setting up the authentication system.
What I did was I kept bugging Facebook via help and the following email addresses.
appeals@facebook.com,
customerservice@facebook.com,
warning@facebook.com,
disabled@facebook.com
I wrote them twice every day and filed the authentication form once or twice a day in the past one week. Also, I tried to contact them via their advertising program (see below link). Basically I have tried anything that would help me get in touch with a real person.
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/#/business/contact.php
I got an auto response message from Facebook today replying to one of the later forms I sent.
Thank you for taking the time to authenticate your Page, Love Meow. We have now verified you as the authentic representative of the Page. If you have any further questions regarding your Page, please visit our Help Center at the following address:http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=175
One of the guys from the discussions mentioned that his page was unblocked 1 week after his admin publishing rights got revoked. Facebook apologized to him for the mistake. I think Facebook is having some problem, but they are trying to fix it. Unfortunately it is causing many people a lot of emotional distress.