There’s been much buzz about Facebook lately and for good reason.  It has lapped and gotten much more buzz than its competitors MySpace and LinkedIn.

However, it’s achieved these lofty heights because it is believed to be far less spammy and more real than the other social networking sites in the marketplace.

Whether this belief and reputation is true or not is highly debatable because I’ve been a Facebook user for about 19 months now and have seen the level of spam slowly creep up.

I had over 3000 friends in my Facebook account.

I tell you this not to brag but simply to point out I was a heavy user of Facebook.  I used this as my business contact and networking account so I’d only met 6 of them in person…the rest were contacts I’d friended on the site

I used it mainly for networking with people who are interested in the kind of business and markets I am in.

I even built up 4 groups with 500 plus members each and two of those groups had over 1200 members each.

Being a member of many groups meant I got more emails which wasn’t bad because I’d opted-in to them.  And lots of times I didn’t have the time to fully read through all of those e-mail communications from the groups I was a part of.

Basically, the in-site inbox has the same rules as any general email inbox. You have to get their attention so they’ll read your communication. You do this by providing value and building your positive reputation in their mind.

Once you get a reputation for consistently providing them tremendous value they’ll open up most if not all of your e-mail messages as long as you continue to provide them the high level of value they’ve come to expect from your communications.

I was moving along networking and doing my thing when…disaster struck.

Unfortunately, a crazy thing happened to me on Monday, January 12, 2009.

I’d gotten a couple email notifications that I needed to respond to from friends. So I went to the site and it gave me the login screen.

And that’s when the unthinkable happened…

It gave me the message and I paraphrase “your account has been disabled by an administrator”.

“How could this be?”  I asked myself

I was super pissed because I hadn’t been on the website at all for over 4 days and now all of a sudden my account was banned. What happened to cause this?

Since I began using the site in July of 2007 I’d gotten caught in their “account warning” filters twice. My account had been disabled due to this.

Basically, I had been adding friends in groups I was part of too rapidly with the same canned message using Roboform.  And so the Facebook administrators re-enabled my account after telling me not to do the suspicious activity anymore.

So I’ve been very good since then and had no further problems.  I operated within Facebook’s guidelines, built groups using invites, and instead of e-mailing everybody individually I would set up an event and invite them to the event just like Facebook wants you to do.

So I was terribly vexed as to why my account got shut down.

After contacting a few of my friends who are also heavy and highly expert site users I got down to what I believe may be the root reason why my account got disabled.

Facebook is now disallowing promotion to groups which was the way they wanted you to mass communicate…up until an apparent internal company policy shift.  Maybe all the heavy investment dollars they’ve taken are now forcing them to move forward more rapidly with monetizing the site than they planned. Either way it seems I got caught in the crossfire.

In talking with my contact he said he talked with a few of his friends and had seen about eight groups deleted because the group admin was consistently making promotional e-mail communications to those groups.

I had sent out a subtle e-mail communication with a link to an opt in page to all four of my groups on Thursday.  I did this because I was helping a friend launch a new product about Google Friend Connect and I varied the words I used in each of those e-mails so as not to upset the Facebook gods.

Since this policy is new and I had no idea I sent out my normal communications and got slapped.

This week I’ve contacted Facebook via e-mail twice and I’ve gotten no replies as to why my account was shut down nor gotten it rightfully reinstated.

This is extremely unfair to me and all the thousands of man-hours I’ve put into building my profile as well as the thousands of connections I’ve made and the people who count on me for the information I provide them.

But it’s like falling into a black hole where there’s no person you can contact to get your account back.

So my advice to you is to only add 20 to 30 friends per day, never send out e-mails to more than one person because you should be using groups and events, and don’t send out any promotional e-mails to your groups because apparently Facebook is now disallowing that.

Facebook is still a great and high growth platform with over 140 million users now.  You just have to be very careful when you’re using it so you can avoid the fate I suffered and the thousands of man-hours now down the tubes because of an unpublicized policy shift.

So happy Facebooking and beware.

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