I wanted to share some great advice that I got from a friend about scale. In one project, we were working more on expanding, but I’ve come to realize that we’re not quite ready for that yet. We need to develop a perfect system and get it just right in one location in order to make it work on a large scale. In other words, if you can do it right for one customer, then you can do it right for 100,000 customers.

It’s all about systems. Look at any big e-tailer or retailer. Amazon, Woot, Apple, Walmart, FedEx – they have order fulfillment down to every last detail. Quality control, packing, shipping, customer service – like clockwork. Does not matter what the actual product is, or whether it’s an actual product that you’re selling or a just a service. It’s all about following a detailed process that works.

And that’s what we’re developing…the perfect system. Once we do that, there’s no stopping us!

Here’s the kinda thing I’m looking for:

Wish me luck!

Of course, my natural reaction was…PANIC! How could this be? I googled everything I could think of and nothing came up. In my mind, there were a few explanations to this:

DiamondFans.net

1) A certain country banned Facebook and all of those fans (I know they are “likes” now but I still call them fans) are gone.

2) Facebook was clearing out phantom/fraudulent accounts and there just happened to be 7,000 of them on my page.

3) People just don’t like diamonds anymore.

4) Facebook is out to get me.

Well, checking this page every five minutes was driving me nuts so I just accepted it and hoped that it would stabilize. Then, Friday night I did a twitter search (don’t do that enough) and found this article on InsideFacebook.com:

Note: Facebook Working on Fixing Fan Count Bug For Pages

Over the last couple days, some Page administrators have been noticing incorrect counts for the number of people who like their Facebook Page. Facebook has confirmed that this is a bug, and is working to fix it today.

According to a Facebook spokesperson, “There was a bug that caused an accounting error for the number of people who like a Page. We are working hard to fix this bug and restore the counts as quickly as possible. No fans or data was lost, and news feed distribution has not been affected.”

We’ll let you know as Facebook makes progress on fixing the issue.

Phew, that was a close one!

Then I found this post the next day on AllFacebook.com:

Facebook Bug Results in Decreasing Fan Counts

Over the past few days many Facebook Page administrators have noticed their fan counts decreasing. If you’ve seen this happen, you are not alone. We’ve reached out to Facebook but haven’t received a response on the issue, which means there is probably a bug which needs to be fixed. Unfortunately there hasn’t been any clarifications from Facebook, but don’t worry as many other people have noticed similar issues.

Logically, it didn’t make sense, and I needed to go with my gut and realize that Facebook can make mistakes. They do have 500 million users and an unbelievable amount of content and data.

So now we’re back up to speed and moving forward on making DiamondFans bigger and better. And I will not let Facebook glitches take me off my game anymore!

Well, guess what? I look on my pages today and facebook changed that function. Now you can remove any admin, even the creator. It was ALMOST perfect timing.

So what’s the point? Well, now you can remove anyone as an admin of your page – seems as if there’s no concern now over who the creator is – sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you…

Las Vegas Strip

My wife and I would go to do some buying, but mainly to vacation, eat good food, gamble, sit at the pool and just have fun. I never went (or was invited to) any industry events. In fact, I don’t even think I knew or cared that they were going on.

The show has changed for a me for a couple reasons. One reason is the economy. The exhibitors (jewelry brands, wholesalers, etc) got knocked off their high horse and are finally starting to realize that they should be thankful for all of their customers, and not have the attitude that they’re doing us a favor by selling to us.

The show has also changed for me as my business progressed and I started building our store brand and, most recently, my personal brand.  Last year was my first year speaking about Social Media. We spoke to a pretty empty room. This year, we spoke to a jam packed room with a lively audience participation. I also had the opportunity to speak/present at the exclusive high end Couture Show at The Wynn. It was weird for me to be there, but I actually enjoyed that experience and felt like the audience responded to our talk.

JCK Las Vegas 2010

These talks provided me with the opportunity to share our new brand, The Social Jeweler. We soft launched it last week, and the response was great.  Right now, it’s about creating custom facebook pages for jewelers and jewelry brands.

As far as social events, we had a great time. There was a great party Friday night at Mandalay Bay, where the show is next year, and of course our annual Face-to-Face party at TAO Beach.  Both very fun, although I will say that the management at TAO is terrible. Wouldn’t let some of my guests in because of dress code stuff (come on, it’s Vegas and 107 degrees out). Also were very unaccommodating to me. The JCK people took the lead on this party so I was just along for the ride, and I should have known about the TAO people because they were the same way last year. Overall, all who attended had fun, however, looking back, it wasn’t a great move to have the party on a Saturday night at the most popular club on earth.  But..you live and learn, so next year we’ll have it at a more intimate place that wants the business.

Sleep, relaxation? No way. It was just work and fun and then up for work again. Overall it was a great show and although I didn’t buy much, I did sell a lot and meet some great people.

Here are the latest write ups about my talks:

Engagement 101 Video Shoot

JCK Las Vegas: Social Media Can Help Jewelers, Panel Agrees

ABJ Panelists Help Solve Social Networking Issues

I also shoot a very cool video with Engagement101 magazine that should be up soon.

Here’s the write up on that one:

Jewelry Fashion Week Roundup

See ya next year Vegas!

Yesterday, Samuelson’s Diamonds wrote a blog post about the fan page changes that Facebook made:

“… 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…”

I thought about this change and although I understood why the change was being made, it upset me. It upset me because I have put a lot of time and money into our pages, most notably our “Diamonds” Page, which now boasts almost 350,000 fans. Not just Facebook ad money (we have spent a little) but actual jewelry prizes and a lot of TIME, which we paid our employees.  And although we have way more than 10K fans, I do not have an account manager.

On top of that, our Samuelson’s Diamonds Fan Page, for our local retail store, is hovering around 1000 fans. And, although the Diamonds Fan Page has almost 350k fans, we consider our smaller page to be of great significance to our business. We’ve invested a great deal of time and effort in building its content and appeal. Facebook’s determination that a fan count should decide how user friendly the fan page could be just seemed wrong.

How about all of the marketers, big and small, who are building fan pages for other companies? In fact, we are about to launch a new service for the jewelry industry, giving independent retailers and manufacturers the ability to create a dynamic Facebook presence for under $500.

Well not long after this change a message popped up on the developer site:

Hello,

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.

Thanks for all your feedback,

Matt Trainer

You can follow this topic by clicking here.

I say it’s great and thank you Facebook for taking the first step in caring about your customers.

I firmly believe that your website is still very important, but don’t forget to use your Facebook page to increase your database and talk to your customers. Both can and should work together to make your brand a stronger one.

Smart Jewelry Show Chicago

The party was a ton of fun. I want to thank my new friend, Mario Macias, for choosing the venue. The Billy Goat Tavern is a Chicago landmark, made famous from the Bill Murray SNL skit Cheeseborger, Cheeseborger. When I first went there to check it out I admit that I was a little hesitant. I wasn’t really sure if a bunch of jewelers would be willing to go to a complete dive under a bridge like this one. Luckily, I was wrong and it went over well. Check out the video from the party and my wife enjoying their signature drink “The Horny Goat”…

From the CNN article that I “liked”:

The announcement puts Facebook in further competition with other web companies like Google and Twitter, who are also trying to organize and make use of users’ preferences.

Facebook, which has more than 400 million members, says the Open Graph will make it easier for people to share information about their likes and dislikes all over the internet.

The social network will pull information about the websites a person visits, the news stories he or she likes and the music or athletes the person favors — and share all of that information with a person’s Facebook friends. That data will show up on Facebook.com and on other sites.

At Facebook’s f8 developers conference, WSJ’s Jessica Vascellaro gives Stacey Delo a post-game analysis of the social-networking company’s announcements, including news on its “like” button and what that means for ad targeting.

Of course, their big plan is to take over the web, and change the way people connect with one another. So far they are succeeding. Most experts that I have spoken to think it’s a smart move. What do you think? How is this going to affect the way you build your online presence/brand?