About 24 hours later and my Facebook profile is back up and visible to my friends. It would have been fixed sooner but I was out all day at Dave Lakhani's workshop and it didn't end until 10 p.m.!
Though my profile has been reinstated, the Blog Squad fan page has not. There were nearly 900 fans and a lot of content on that page so hopefully I can get that back too.
Fortunately, I could communicate with my network of friends, colleagues, fans and clients in multiple ways: twitter, LinkedIn, my blog and email. I think most people found out pretty quickly that a hacker was on the loose and it wasn't really me asking for money because I had been held up at gunpoint in London (!). And the viral nature of the web made it easy for those following me to spread the word to more people to beware about the possibility of a Facebook hack.
My VA team from Fastype was outstanding as well...changing all the passwords to my critical accounts immediately and keeping me and others informed while I was incommunicado at the workshop.
Here's a link to Facebook's FAQ on "419" scams with info on what to do if your account or friend's account has been hacked.
Even though it's a pain if you have a lot of accounts connected, it would be wise to change your Facebook password today. And, make sure you have your settings marked to get email updates from Facebook. Unfortunately, I have all my FB emails filtered and didn't think to check the folder on my breaks during the workshop. I was only looking at my primary email inbox and wondering why the heck I hadn't heard anything about my password reset.
The other moral to this story is not to put all your social media eggs in one basket. This came up a couple weeks ago when Twitter "mistakenly" shut down thousands of accounts and everyone went berserk. I wrote about that in my post Why Blog When You've Got Facebook? Guess it's even more relevant now.
Yesterday I had the privilege of hearing a presentation by Dr. Rachna Jain that focused on the psychology and profitability of social media. She is one very smart cookie and I highly recommend you follow Rachna and read her blog.
One point Rachna made was that not only do you need to be on the big three social networks: Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn, but you also need to connect with all your followers, friends and connections on all three platforms.
It makes sense when you realize that when one platform goes down, you are still connected on all the others. Of course you want to also encourage those in your network to also subscribe to your blog as well as move them to your email database.
So that being said, let's make sure we're connected on all the platforms you use so we can stay in touch. You follow, friend, connect with me, and I'll do so for you.
Follow me on Twitter Do you have a story to share about getting booted from a networking site and how you fixed it? Would love to hear it (post in the comments) so we can learn the ins and outs of how to fix these messes fast.
Luckily, I've never had problems with a networking site, so I can't help with that.
However, when clients ask me why they should be on Twitter when they have a good following on Facebook (for example), I'll have one more reason to add - if one site experiences problems, they can still reach their followers on the others.
Sorry you had to deal with this.....
Posted by: Gladys | Saturday, July 18, 2009 at 03:52 PM
Disclosure: I am related to SocialSafe which I refer to below
We all use web services so much and they are quite robust so that we tend to come to rely on them; however, like anything they can and do go wrong from time to time - with the massive numbers that use Facebook the fact that there are issues with accounts comes as no surprise (looking at Twitter daily shows that temporary access issues, complete account losses and more is a fairly regular occurrence). This is one of several reasons we created SocialSafe (www.socialsafe.net) which allows you to backup your facebook profile, friends and photos (inc. those you are tagged in) at the press of a single button. You own your data on sites like FB, but it is not really yours unless you have a local copy.
Posted by: Julian Ranger | Sunday, July 19, 2009 at 02:29 AM