Theatre Thursday: Face It

Last week's entry sparked a couple of e-mail and in-real-life conversations about one of the perils of Facebook events: the fact that anyone can make one.
Complaints range from: "they get the dates wrong" to "it's annoying to have multiple event pages for one event."
So, what do you do?

Well, I think the solution is to simply be proactive. Make the first event page yourself from your company's Facebook page. (You have your own Facebook page, right? Right?) Get the dates right. List the cast and crew. Add a link to your website. (To. Your. Website.)
This way, all that your cast and crew members have to do is share the already-created page with whomever they want. Now, you may have people who still want to create their own event pages. They like to do it. You have two options. The first is that you can forbid them from doing so.
I wouldn't.
I would instead take the proactive approach again, and say, "We have our own Facebook event page, but, if you want to make your own to send to your friends and family, that's cool. Please, we just ask that you double-check the dates, spell the name of the show correctly, and you can feel free to add a link to our website - in fact, we encourage it."
Odds are that the reason multiple event pages get made in the first place is that everyone thinks no one is going to do it. You've eliminated most of that problem by making the page first and announcing it to the cast and the crew. If other people still want to make an event page of their own, that's only more promotion for you. (You may want to monitor Facebook to make sure that the message isn't going out too skewed, but that's really probably not going to happen.) I also highly doubt that all fifteen members of your cast are going to make their own pages and deluge Facebook with the events. Even if they do, and I'm friends with all of them, I'm not going to be too hacked off about being invited fifteen times. I might even be flattered. Of course, that's just me.
Again, though, if you get in front of it and make your own page first, I really don't think you're going to have any of those problems.