11/02/2010 Read 1053 times -
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7 minA Little Administrative Rant
by Kaila Colbin
Am I the only one who finds it difficult to manage multiple accounts, multiple admins, and multiple campaigns online? Surely not.
Facebook used to live at the inconvenient extreme of making it impossible to remove the originating Page admin, implying that no mere successor admin could ever be trustworthy enough to carry the mantle forward. Now they've boomeranged to requiring a nearly saintly level of trust in each and every Page admin, any disgruntled one of whom can remove all the others and destroy your company's reputation with a few judiciously placed comments and inappropriate pics. Really, Facebook? There's no middle ground between the power to post a status update and the power to stage an online coup d'etat?
And, while we're at it, why are Page ads linked to people and not Pages? The whole point of a Page is to give your company an online presence, right? So let me get this straight: if the gal running the ads gets hit by a bus, nobody else can access the ads. (I'm talking AFTER visiting her in the hospital -- I'm not completely heartless!) Heck, all she has to do is take a week off and the system grinds to a halt.
Maybe right now you're all, "No problem, dude; just make a business account." But no. Technically you're not allowed to create a business account unless you don't have a personal profile. So the guy with the business account -- the one you're trusting to manage your Facebook ad presence -- is so social-media-savvy that he doesn't even have a personal profile. And since technically a business account is only supposed to belong to one person, it doesn't solve the problem anyway.
So the guy with the business account -- the one you're trusting to manage your Facebook ad presence -- is so social-media-savvy that he doesn't even have a personal profile.
Kaila Colbin -
A Little Administrative Rant
At least Google allows multiple admins on AdWords accounts. But what they don't allow is single administrative access for multiple YouTube accounts. I have a personal one, and four business ones, and for each one I have to remember what unique blimmin' email/password combo I used for it. Seriously, imagine if this happened in the real world. You're a freelancer, but you have to use a different name and cell phone for each client. PLUS I have to log out of Gmail so it doesn't automatically read the stupid cookies and try to be helpful. You're not helpful, Gmail. You want to be helpful? Give me a Master Admin page on YouTube and let me choose which account to manage.
Speaking of not helpful, try logging into New Twitter, which jovially announces, "Everything in one place!" (The cheerfulness is reminiscent of the excessively happy Eddie the Shipboard Computer from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy": "Hi there. This is Eddie, your shipboard computer, and I'm feeling just great, guys, and I know I'm just going to get a bundle of kicks out of any program you care to run through me.") The reality, of course, is that "everything" is almost entirely
unlike being in one place. If I want to manage multiple Twitter accounts -- for, say, personal and professional purposes -- I'm going through a third-party app, not logging in and out every time I need to switch persona. Incidentally, the fact that pretty much every third-party app offers this functionality shows that it's not that hard, is it?
The folks who run these services are collectively some of the brightest people on the planet, and have collectively managed to influence our culture more dramatically over a shorter period of time than perhaps any other group in history, so please don't take this article as a sign of disrespect. It's just a plea: Look at us. Look at how we use these services. There are a lot of small things you can do that will make our lives so much easier.
Do you share my frustration? Am I being ridiculous? Let me know either way, in the comments or via
@kcolbin. And thank you for putting up with this small interruption.
If you want to connect with us as well as @kcolbin, get us on our Twitter @REWonline.Categories: Articles 
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Ramona Weisent
ramona.weisent@rewonline.com REWrite Blog
