You’ve seen the emails and Facebook posts from your friends:
Frequently followed by a request to repost/forward to all of your friends.
But before you do that, take this step in order to avoid passing on an Urban Legend:
While Googling recently to find performance samples for a gig application I came across something unexpected: a hit for the Sonicbids.com profile page of a former band. This surprised me because when I left the band I had turned over all of its digital assets (domain name, website, Sonicbids account, MySpace, Facebook, CD Baby, etc) to the band leader after removing my payment information from any which charged fees – and as far as I knew that person had not renewed any service that was not free.
Given that this transition had occurred a couple of years ago, I was concerned that perhaps I had not successfully removed my payment information from that Sonicbids account – I could see that it had not been updated since my last visit so I knew that the band was not currently using it. Searching my email archive I came up with the old user name and password, and logged in.
When people visit your Facebook page, if they click the About link under your icon photo in the header they will be taken to a page that displays various information you have entered about yourself: schools attended, employers, contact information, etc.
When you set up your personal FB page you may have entered an email address to be displayed to friends or a wider audience (depending on your privacy settings), or you may have decided NOT to list any email address.
If you haven’t revisited this choice recently, Facebook has played a little joke on you. They decided to give everyone an email address, yourname@facebook.com… AND they decided to replace whatever other email address you listed as your primary contact information (or no listing at all) with this new Facebook email address!
You may or may not have taken to heart the many articles about checking your privacy settings on Facebook and presuming that anything you post on the Web may be seen by anyone. Unless you are being stalked by an ex-lover or rabid fan you may have assumed “This doesn’t effect me, because why would a stranger care about my Facebook page?”
What many people don’t realize is: when you do something that makes people more interested in you, and specifically if you are soliciting money from them, the smart potential donors/customers are going to Google you to research whether you are legitimate. Do you know what they will find?
As I’ve mentioned, I back a lot of Kickstarter projects (over 50 so far). While some of those are presented by people I already know and trust, many more are presented by strangers to me personally, and frequently not even known to a more general audience (i.e., not performers/businesses known in some other location).