Thanks Everyone! Our Page Was Restored!
Just our luck…
Right in the middle of health care reform, TRICARE, the military health plan, seems to be missing a Facebook fan page! It happened April 2nd for no apparent reason.
Here’s an interesting blog with a similar story.
If you visit facebook.com/TRICARE, you’re re-directed to your home page. Strange.
Any Facebook contacts much appreciated!
Best,
Dave and the TRICARE team
Was there any confirmation before the page was run officially by those in charge of Tricare? I do know of several cases of Government agencies and organizations that purportedly have a Facebook page, but it is not in any way affiliated by the group they say they are.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of this happening. One thing to look at would be the tools your admins were using to either post to FB or retrieve information from FB. It feels like getting flagged for “suspicious behavior” may decided by a computer and not a human.
One day after signing up for Backupify.com using my Amazon account, Amazon deleted all of my purchase history and marked the account as fraudulent. Backupify uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) but neither party claimed it had any connection. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t.
@ Andrea I work at TRICARE with the folks who set it up. Additionally, we contacted FB and received confirmation long ago that they have us listed as a gov account. I guess that doesn’t guarantee we’re whitelisted 🙂
Does anyone have/know of a viable back up solution for Facebook Fan Pages and User Pages?
I am currently giving a lot of thought to the importance of my personal Facebook Page, I FB for my friends and family and most importantly (g_d forbid anything ever happen to me) for my kids. They can see what their mother was thinking, how she felt about subjects, who the important people in her life were. So mine isn’t business critical, however, that said it is important to me.
Since it is important to me I had better figure out how to mitigate the potential risk of over reliance on a third party vendor for services I don’t pay or contract for, or have any sort of SLA agreement with.
I would be very upset if I lost all of that information and wasn’t able to have it restored.
Another concern is provider ambivilence: Why should Facebook care if you are satisfied? You are a ways to a means: you use them they get payed by advertisers/data. What is the incentive to have a good customer service department? It their eyes it is just a cost center in the corporate realm. Why spend money when it isn’t going to affect you.
Since they are one (maybe THE) biggest player in the social media space I wonder the following: Do they use business intelligence appropriately for the user? Do they crowd source and use social media as a indicator of what their users need, want, like or don’t like? I’m pretty sure they don’t considering most everyone HATED the new user interface and even started a group to communicate their dislike to management. Did it change? No it stayed exactly the same. The only time they have previously listened was when the press picked up the story and it had to do with your privacy rights.
So what is the incentive for Facebook to care about an educational facilities page (that is generally where great ideas are born)?
Why care that the TriCare page disappeared? (I feel might actually may be a good thing (perhaps an intentional thing)). I don’t really like all that PII/ Data about service members families (for National Security Reasons) hanging out in the unsecured nebulous of Facebook cyberspace anyway.)
Maybe a better forum would be a similar page on DKO/AKO so members maintain the ability to share information and TriCare can have the ability to listen, maybe become better providers and still maintain security and safely backed up data? Just a random thought.
So I then ask myself what would change this situation: Until economic pressure, intense pressure from the media, or until a better alternative provider comes online. People will hopefully start to use it. Start to migrate from Facebook (like they did MySpace) and Facebook notices a significant dent/difference in their bottom line. Just my 2 cents…
Now back to the original question: Does anyone have/know of a viable back up solution for Facebook Fan Pages and User Pages? Or do I have to get one of my smart friends to make the ap to do it….tick tock.
Happy Monday
BTW: Dave and the TRICARE team: My condolences, I hope you find a quick, painless, suitable solution! I don’t know anyone personally at Facebook but I will throw out my net to my world. ~ Susan
Dave — sorry I didn’t put that connection together when I first read this post. I am sorry it happened, but I hope the content is replaceable. Or what I mean is, I hope that the content was posted on an official site first and then syndicated to your target audience using social media. In the rapid world of socmed change, I remind everyone to embrace the new tech, but don’t put all your chickens in the basket. Keep a presence you can control and track the metrics and interactivity on. Using facebook, its hard to get metrics other than likes and comments.
@ Susan Here’s an easy way to backup Facebook pages:
How To Backup Facebook Page Wall Posts & Comments:
Do this each month:
1. Log out of your facebook account
2. Visit the page: facebook.com/YourPageName
3. Expand all the comment threads on your wall for the past month so you can see them
4. Along the top of your browser: File > Save Page As…
5. Choose File Type: “Web Page, complete”
To View Your Backup:
1. Open web browser, File > “Work Offline”
2. Then Open the file you saved via: File > Open …
Note: If you received more than 23 comments on a wall post, you’ll have to visit the page that contains your comments and save that separately.
@ Andrea If we get it restored, I’m confident that the data will be there. It worked out like that for the folks in the article I linked to above.
What if a bunch of us used the Facebook share function above and got it buzzing over there? Think it would get FB’s attention? Hard to believe they’d let a story about a FB page devoted to helping our men and women in uniform access health care reach front page of WaPo,NYT or CNN..especially right now.
@ Dave thanks so much! Good luck! @ Andrew Great idea!
From FedNewsRadio’s Max Cacas on my FB page:
“Andrew… Have you taken it up with the people in FB’s Washington office? This would be a good test case to see if having such an ofc. works for the feds delving into social networking…”
Either way, you might generate some good press for TRICARE out of this…good or bad response from FB.
Messaged DC FB guy on Friday afternoon, posted to his ‘Facebook in Government” wall today. Will let you know if we hear back.
@ Andrew, I like your idea! Let’s make it happen. I’ve shared Dave’s post on the ‘Facebook and Government’ wall to my profile and hope others will do the same. If we can generate a buzz I’m hopeful we can get their attention.
Update: Page now back up. Not sure why/how yet. Will let you know if we find out! I can’t help but think GovLoop had something to do with it!