No good deed goes unpunished

As I’m now on the AAIT Board of Directors, I offered to help create a Facebook page so that we could stay connected with local AAIT members. I’m pretty internet-savvy and do a lot of social networking so I never thought that I would have any issues doing this…

Well, I started out creating a “page” on Facebook which I realized was not what we needed; for the purposes of AAIT, a “group” makes more sense. “Pages” are better suited for large businesses and celebrities. So I deleted the page, and somehow by doing this, my personal Facebook credentials got completely messed up and I couldn’t log in anymore. The thing is, to create a “group”, I need access to my personal account. No idea why this happened, or even how. It makes no sense to me and I’m still completely baffled.

I did “password reset” several times and it never worked, I did “account recovery” and pretty much everything else they asked me to. At this point, you could even quiz me on their entire Help section; I’m sure I know the answer. But what’s absolutely crazy to me is that Facebook has ZERO customer support; no direct email addresses, no phone numbers, nothing. We’re left to our own resources. As Clarke Howard would say: “it’s customer NO-service.”

If it weren’t for my promise to the AAIT I would actually welcome a break from Facebook. I  have a love/hate relationship with Facebook and have been considering giving it up recently, even though I use it for my business, and everyone and their baby is on there, it would be nice to go for a few weeks sans. I have a personal and a professional account and although I strongly believe in the power of social media for businesses, I also wonder: would I really miss out on anything? Would anyone actually notice that I’m not posting anymore? After all I still have  Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ accounts + my blog and websites. But having made this promise to the AAIT Board, leaving Facebook is not an option  so I am doing everything I can to be able to get back  it.

Things I learned:

-Do your homework beforehand. I was a girl scout when I was little, so I should have known better! I should have done some research before making my promise. Had I done that, I would have known not to create a page, and then none of this would have happened.

-I’m so glad that I have other social media accounts for my business and don’t rely solely on Facebook.

-Don’t count on Facebook for any kind of customer support! Enter at your own risk. If you need help, there are some tech-y forums out there, but they may or may not reply, and they may or may not be able to help.

As of right now, I have to wait 24h before trying to log back in. They verified one of my email addresses and I reset my password (for the upteenth time). We’ll see tomorrow if it works. Wish me luck!