Case Study in Facebook Questions gone horribly awry

Facebook Questions – just noise or a gateway to spam?

Written by Mike Mueller in Facebook on March 25, 2011

Go ahead, push a button. Make my day!

At first, when I saw the new Facebook Questions feature I thought of Formspring. In case you missed it – Formspring allowed random people to ask you questions. You could reply to those questions and the whole thing could be “public”. Nice idea in theory until the “MySpace’rs” and Spammers found it and it then became a mess of senseless questions and answers. Good idea gone bad.

I could see the new Questions on Facebook quickly turning from something of value into just another App creating noise.

I wanted to get a better glimpse into how and found a great question posed by my friend Julie. She simply asked Where you favorite vacation spot was. Just so you know, she’s in Kona, living the dream, so I guess for her it’s anywhere outside her front door. But I digress.

I started answering her question by posing a place of my own. As I was typing I noticed that Facebook was giving me drop down suggestions. In my example I’m typing Detroit and you can see there are PAGES being suggested.

Naturally I wanted to see where this could go so I typed in my own Page and sure enough Facebook allowed me to set that as my favorite place to Vacation in poor Julie’s Poll.

That opens the door not just for more noise but for actual SPAM! Page owners of the SPAM variety can search for polls and then simply put their page as an answer. Would that work? Just as soon as I answered the question for Julie – now my friends had it in their stream. I have almost 4,000 friends.

And for everyone who also answers a question – they’ll be exposing the same poll to their sphere. See where I’m going with this? An unscrupulous Page Owner could be answering questions all over Facebook linking back to their page!

How would they find these questions and polls? Easy! Just go here: http://www.facebook.com/?sk=questions That pulls up all the questions from all your friends into one location! SPAM AWAY!

As for how many people want to actually vacation on my Page instead of a beautiful Tropical Island… I think my page is ahead. Yes, we found out it’s also possible to hijack a Poll (even for fun – sorry Julie)

Want to see this poll in action? (and vote for my Page) just go to http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=question&id=1965960514362

Facebook turns Questions into a Poll (sfgate.com)
Facebook Launches Questions (mindjumpers.com)
How to use Facebook Questions (simplehelp.net)
How to Use the New Facebook Questions (lockergnome.com)
Facebook Questions Revamped (webpronews.com)

Go ahead, push a button. Make my day!

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Mike Mueller

Mike builds the custom Apps that create the Tabs that make Custom Facebook Pages special. He builds Discount WordPress Blogs and shoots commercial high def video. He's an avid hockey fan, rides a motorcycle (a really fast one), loves strong beer and good red wine.

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http://210consulting.com/ Jeremy Blanton

While I love it when they bring out new features, I don’t enjoy the increased levels of spam they bring with. I know FB things people would do no evil, but we all know better.

http://jasonwheeler.biz/FreeBook Jason Likes Giving Stuff

Facebook seems to be pretty good about keeping up with and dealing with spam in my experience.

http://AreWeConnected.com mikemueller

Jason – I mixed emotions about that.
At least once everyday I flag a profile as spam – not because I searched for them but because they posted something on my wall. It takes a bunch of people to flag for FB to notice (I think)

http://AreWeConnected.com mikemueller

As with anything out there – if it’s possible, some marketing type will figure out a way to exploit it. Little Known Fact: Alexander Graham Bell created the phone and the marketing guy that lived across the street invented the first Auotodialer

; )
http://facebook.com/bondsocialmedia Ed Bisquera

I see on my questions I’m able to edit answers, so I guess that while we won’t stop people from posting an unrelated page as an answer, we can at least “X” it out. That being said, it’s just another thing to monitor.

With the good that COULD come out of being able to crowdsource your friends or connections with thoughtful, life changing questions (like my Page’s April Fool’s Question: Charlie Sheen: winning or not winning? Yes, I wanted to ask, because I think he’s jumped the shark! Also, his ticket sales seem to be bogus…anywho, I digress…) I think that people will have to be careful how they use this new feature.

I personally like just posting a question in a status update and letting the answers come in as comments, but I can see some value in the new Questions feature from Facebook. As with anything else, I’m sure time will tell on how much people adopt it. For me, I’m still trying to figure out how to incorporate the metatag OG’s into my other blog!

One last thing, if you shut out the ability to add answers in your question/poll, I see that you can’t add any answer (spam). You can only choose from the set answers, so that might be a plus and a way to go, when asking a this or that type of questions.

TGIF – Happy Friday all!

Ed

http://www.rerockstar.com Matt Stigliano – @rerockstar

Considering how many people invite me to events they know I could never attend, I see this in much the same way – people spamming with their 365 pages and talk about their town/real estate market/product/service/what-have-you. I don’t like it one bit. Facebook has been good at controlling what is technically classed as spam, but if the marketing messages begin to outweigh the human messages, I think we’ve all become spam. I picture it as being almost as annoying as when everyone got a business page and needed enough likes to get a custom name. I “like” a lot of agents out there, but most of them don’t get liked on Facebook as a business page.