MAY 21, 2010: Samuelson’s Diamonds, Baltimore’s Downtown Diamond Destination, was featured in the May 16th Edition of National Jeweler Article ‘The Facebook Wave is Cresting’:
Some of the jewelry retailers that have embraced Facebook are realizing significant returns. Samuelson’s Diamonds, for example, a recognized leader in the movement, has not only posted a page under its specific company name but also operates a page under the title “Diamonds.” As I write this column, that latter page was being followed by 342,977 people. Imagine what that’s doing for Samuelson’s.
Samuelson’s is continuing its focus on being a leader in the jewelry industry in social media and cutting edge technology. See our ‘Diamonds’ Fan Page here:
The original article is from the May 16th Edition of National Jeweler and is entitled “The Facebook Wave is Cresting” A pdf excerpt is available here.
As of last night, we’ve removed the recently-added authentication requirement for setting custom landing tabs on Pages. The requirement was instituted as part of a Pages quality initiative, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused to our developer and business community. We are re-investigating the situation, and will not make any further changes without first giving our community standard notice and lead-time.
… Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager. …
This is potentially a good move, since it requires page owners to actually have a relationship with someone at Facebook (this is fine for small biz) whereas spammers and scammers in particular would shy away from any kind of relationship which could be used to trace their identity when their malfeasance is discovered.
But what is odd is the ambiguous language: ‘must work with their ads account manager.’ This implies that these page Admins must be paying ads customers – in other words, the little guy must put some skin in the game to prove he isn’t a crook.
Then again, presumably there is no required ‘minimum spend’ (Don’t see this anywhere) for being able to work with a manager to authenticate your page. While the attitude is typical of large bureaucratic organizations (guilty until proven innocent) when dealing with small players, the effect may be, in the long run, positive for small businesses and Facebook, provided that Facebook does not use this as a blatant opportunity to extract a toll from small or medium sized businesses.
Looked at in a different light, this could be more evidence that the switch to ‘like’ and the attendant changes were Facebook finally jumping the shark. I’m holding out hope that they retain their good sense.
This stunning wedding/anniversary band features five round brilliant cut diamonds. Always available in 14K white gold and platinum. Come by and take a look!
Almost everyone I know complains about Facebook. Sometimes its the constantly changing interface, the privacy debacles, the spam, or even just service outages that are the cause of these complaints. Sometimes I think it’s like people riding a train complaining about it; sure the train could be better, but who is going to do anything about it?
Some guys from New York – freshly minted college guys of course – have put their money (or in this case, their summer and perhaps the rest of their lives) where their mouth is. Their project is called ‘Diaspora‘:
They’ve already raised over $100,000 ($135,815 as of this writing, according to KickStarter) from people who want to see this live. (They originally thought they might raise $10,000!)
The skinny is this: Unlike most ‘aggregation’ services, this is not some site somewhere that is trying to grab as much of your data for itself as it can (like, um, Facebook?) but rather a piece of software – a seed as they have it – which can be planted in a variety of places including (it seems) your own website, interact with everywhere else (Facebook, Twitter, etc) but let you choose how much data you want to share, and your own data remains your own (such as a list of friends) so long as you do not wish to share it.
It appears that there will also be a ‘turnkey’ service available – for hosting it no doubt – which raises the single question everyone might be thinking right now. In all probability, running Diaspora will not be ‘free’. Now, Diaspora will not cost anything itself, but you will be responsible for hosting it, or paying for the turnkey service (which logically must be a form of hosting with Diaspora pre-planted.)
My prediction is thus: If they can make the turnkey cheap enough, they can bust Facebook’s bubble. It might take a miracle, or a disaster (a privacy-related disaster no doubt!) for this move to take place.
To me, it is quite pleasing to think of this as internet homesteading; I log into my own seed, and there I get everything I have on Facebook, but not on Facebook at all. And if someone isn’t on Diaspora yet, I can still interact with them (via Facebook’s open graph) and best of all, Facebook does not know who all my ‘friends’ are.
And if you can’t pay or figure out how to host it yourself, chances are someone you know and trust can. Now that’s a local internet.
MAY 6 2010: Third generation Baltimore jeweler Ron Samuelson of Samuelson’s Diamonds, Baltimore’s downtown diamond destination, will be speaking in the America’s Best Jewelers breakfast education series during the 2010 Couture jewelry show in Las Vegas, June 3-7 2010. The topic will be Social Media Best Practices.
Details about Ron’s appearance:
Saturday, June 5
7:30 a.m. to 8 a.m.–Breakfast
8 a.m. to 9 a.m. -”Peer Panel 3: Social Networking 2–Best Practices.” Join your fellow jewelers to continue the social networking discussion, concerning maximize return from social networking. What are realistic expectations? What tools do you need to get started? How do you gain customers?
The presenter for this session will be Ron Samuelson, chief executive officer of Samuelson’s Diamonds, an 87-year-old, family-owned business. The retailer’s Facebook fan page, titled simply “Diamonds,” boasts more than 300,000 fans.
