An email to Facebook:

in our spare time, we burnt god knows how many candles, developing a good community of digital media professionals, to put something back into the industry that feeds us. You can find us at http://www.digitalministry.com

To get that community going, we had to learn to build websites, play with PHP, build email lists, avoid spam-guards, learn about Privacy Policies, online publishing and defamation laws, install bulletin boards, content management systems, MySQL databases, hosting, apologise for sending emails incorrectly, organising events and a ton of other hard graft work. All to get people to come back and not forget who we are.

We now stand at around 3,000 members across the Australian industry and believe we have a fantastic brand equity, a little bit of extra knowledge and now and more Media than whores.

Then you come along..... Facebook. YOU! ... with your fancy dancy easy peasy 'set up a group' function that takes just a few clicks to get started and easy to manage. You come along with these wonderful opportunities to build apps to help us promote our services etc.

Your ability to email members, make members officers and let members get members, let members post discussions, pictures, videos and other dangly stuff that took us years to learn how to and now can be done in a jiffy all thanks to you!

SO... if we couldn’t beat it we tried this great system of yours. And.... it's bloody awesome.

Ignoring our existing contact resources at DigitalMinistry.com, we used your damn quick and easy system on Facebook to grow some new groups with up to 1,000+ members in under a month which we are amazed at. It seems at first, that you have made it possible for anyone to become a one-click publisher in a couple of days and group media barons in a matter of weeks.

HOWEVER. Before we carry on with using your system and dump our old efforts to waste by the roadside - we have some small issues that you may be able to help us to address:

a) Someone ELSE can now set up a facebook group similar to ours and poach members easily just by posting to members on our wall and/or messaging them one by one through our facebook group members list.

b) Any messages we mail to the group are lacking in branding for the group but heavy on the Facebook name. How do we make our brand stand over yours?

c) In very small print deep down in your help section (that of course we didnt look at), you let us know that when we hit 1,000+ members you TAKE AWAY the option to EMAIL ALL MEMBERS of our group... so we cannot tell people to come BACK once they are poached.
- (p.s. on this - are you going to start charging premium soon to the larger groups to send bulk mail? - we would suggest that you are in a powerful negotiating position there)

d) With no option to email, we are now just a group sitting next to some bloke who can never email to tell us if he named his kid SpiderPig (like we care once we've joined) whilst our competitor (with under 1,000 members) continues to mail everyone telling them how busy HIS group is and to "tell your friends!" (little does he know what happens when he hits 1000)

e) You are a CLOSED NETWORK unless people register. That means that all the content our users give you isn't perfect for Google etc.. to spider very well and therefore hard to find us through normal search engines and doesn’t benefit our own content. Users will have to find us through your own search function instead (if they are registered). It also means that anything we do to grow within Facebook at our own expense (see RSS and Apps below)... can never come out again as easily as we poured it in.

f) If you offered the option to RSS 'from' the group to a users profile, it would help... or even let people RSS from 'inside' Facebook to an aggregator OUTSIDE Facebook (we don’t mean just our profile status or single feeds by person... we want it aggregator friendly for mass distribution/sharing) - but you don’t yet. Content just stays in your network and gives you your 50% daily repeat visits per user)
- P.S Luckily, we are trailing a solution to get around the RSS issue to group members in a way, but if we tell you how - we'll no doubt find that it's not completely in line with your T&C's :-s Still... it's not coming out of the Facebook network.

g) We are not allowed applications in groups yet, or we would be learning about building a group app to address a lot of the issues above.
- (p.s on this, we ARE looking at building a Facebook app for each member - but now with do many apps out there to compete with - and without the ability to mail over 1000 people we are concerned about take up UNLESS we use our own database and budget to promote it external to Facebook...)

h) Finally - and this is really the biggie... If we had put our brand and hard work on the line and invited ALL of our existing community members to go join the groups on Facebook... or spent marketing $ on promoting an application on your behalf.. without first finding out the above issues: Would we have made a big mistake that we may not recover from by handing you our users, budget and content? OR - would we find that in the end, we still have a large Knowledge IP advantage and back-up infrastructure over the new "Facebook click-and-build" barons who do not have this advantage of learning? We reckon the former.

Yours,

Chris, John and all the great people who helped build our community.

p.s. - add us as friends.