In January 2010, I spent far too much time trying to find the "Official" Zune Facebook fan page. There were three Fan pages, two of which had almost 30,000 fans. However, I wanted to be join the official Microsoft owned/run/sponsored Fan page. Sadly, there was no way to tell which of the three was created by Microsoft. I had been a fan of the two larger fan pages, but they had pretty much stagnated at 25-30k fans for many months.
So, while I was working at Microsoft, I spent many hours over several days searching intranet web pages, wikis and SharePoint sites, trying to find ANY reference to Zune’s Facebook page. I found NOTHING.
Out of frustration, I started emailing people on the Zune team, as well as a couple of internal marketing support teams to get the answer. My basic message was "There are millions of Facebook users, yet Microsoft’s Zune.net website has no way of telling those users how to follow Microsoft’s Zune product. Unlike the www.XBox.com website (and several other product sites,) there is no Facebook icon/link on the product homepage to direct users to the Fan page."
Within a couple of days, one of the marketing people from corporate emailed me back and said that they had talked to someone in Zune, and that they would add a FB icon/link to www.Zune.net. I did a quick screen-shot of the Facebook fan page on 2010-01-07 to note how many fans there were. Within ONE week, they had added over 5,000 fans (prior to that for MANY months, the number of fans hardly changed.) Now two months later, the fan page has over 42,000 fans. (click the image for a comparison)
I’m taking full credit for helping the Zune marketing team with this one. Not that 10,000 Facebook fans means all that much, but it’s a start. Now if I can just get them to fix their Facebook application that’s been broker for 2 years…