This question came up the other day during a session at the Seattle Online Marketing Conference I was attending.  The remark was something to the effect of:

Would you rather interact in a customer support community with Doug from Dell, or 'eBay'?

i.e., people tend to prefer dealing with a person than a company.  I can't remember exactly which person/company presented that though, sorry.

Oh, also if it's cool I'm moving this discussion to the online communities section as it's more applicable around external-facing use of social media.

To answer your question, I'd say a resounding NO.  I echo Adam -- People want to deal with a person.

I've always felt the same way about group email boxes, i.e. customerservice@xyzcompany.com.   I hate those.  They are so impersonal and, based on experience, my expectation of a response goes down to about 5%

Companies can have GROUPS but I don't think they're allowed Facebook profiles.  The site is pretty stringent when it comes to this.  Anyway, who wants to be a friend of Nike?  I think the 'groups' feature is far more versatile when it comes to seeing your community and bullitens.  The profiles are not equipped to deal with the amount of information and interactivity that a product or company needs.

Not a bad idea.  Kind of like a stealth widget.

Check out the Clearstep facebook page: http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Clearstep/13377894499

Love that flickr widget - cleanest one I've seen. Going to borrow that idea!

I didn't know this...

According to the FB Terms of Use - Please be aware that managing multiple accounts is a serious violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts. Maintaining multiple accounts, regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to create business accounts for any reason.

I am not fuly aware of FB TOS but if they state that any accounts (whihc inlcude profiles) can not be used for commercial actiivity/benefit there does not seem to be sense in having a profile page for companies. For business reasons there are compnay pages and FB advertising. But a comany can do stealth tactics like encouragin it's employees or say relatives of employees (lol) to go join FB , build profiles, say good things about their company and products to others. Much similar to flogging.