Confessions of a Facebook Sinner

I’ll admit it – I blew it.  I am at the age where I am young enough to understand the significance of social networking sites like Facebook, but too old to spend all day on them.  When I launched QuickWhatsUp.com, I knew we needed to be on Facebook.  So I set up a page.  My first profile page was simply titled QuickWhatsUp.com.  Of course, unlike MySpace, Facebook does not allow groups or companies to create profile pages – only individuals.  So I was promptly booted.  I got around this rule by adopting the persona of John Q. Wu (John Quick What’s Up).  And I started clicking away, adding hundreds of friends that I’d never actually met before.  I thought I was so clever.

But I’m not.

I violated the Facebook ethos.  A code of conduct that I thought was set up to hinder people like me.  But I was wrong, and I am repenting now.

Perhaps I can be forgiven for my mindset.  I still have a deep inclination towards privacy.  I have a strong libertarian streak, particularly when it comes to social issues.  There is something a tad too Orwellian for me about the world these days – and not just because of the Patriot Act.  GoogleMaps freaks me out too.

But Facebook is built on transparency, and implicit in that is the notion of trust.  People on Facebook trust you precisely because they can see everything you’re doing.  And they listen to you because they trust you.  So it’s no wonder I was attracting very little attention by befriending people under a pseudonym.

A few things have jolted me to my senses: First, my good friend Julie who has promoted clubs in New York and Boston told me that with social networking sites, it’s the quality of your friends, not the quantity.  It doesn’t do any good to have a million friends if none of them are actually friends. She was right, but I had to find out the hard way.

Second, my friend Dale pointed out that I am the brand.  Me.  Seth Resler.  For people to attend my events, they have to trust they I put on great events.  And what’s the point in putting together all these great events (Iron ‘Tender, the New England Nightclub and Bar Expo, etc.) if nobody knows that it was you.

The latter point has always been a tricky one for me.  Believe it or not, I don’t like playing up myself.  I’m a very smart, very talented, very accomplished person.  But I don’t like saying that out loud.  I was a disc jockey on the air for years, and disc jockeys have to act with a certain amount of bravado.  You have to act like you’re the s@#*.  And I was very good at putting on that persona, but I also tried very hard not to buy into my own hype.  You have to stay grounded.  So I am often very self-deprecating.

With Facebook, I always assumed that nobody would want to be friends with me, but they would want to be friends with QuickWhatsUp.com.  Of course, now that I say it out loud (or in print), it sounds assinine.  People don’t talk to corporations, they talk to people.

How did I miss this concept? In retrospect, it seems so obvious.

In preparation for the seminar for the New England and Nightclub Bar Expo, I did a lot of research on Facebook and came to the inevitable conclusion that I was about to preach something I did not practice.  Shame on me.

I am repenting now by jettisoning the John Q. Wu page and all of its 500 (fake) friends.  I have created a Brand Page, the way Facebook intended.  (It turns out the people who run Facebook are very very smart, and I should have listened to them all along.) Facebook introduced these recently and they seem to be providing quite a bit of functionality for companies like mine.

For anybody else making the same mistakes, here are two great resources outlining the proper way to market on Facebook: The Facebook Bible by Justin Smith and Facebook Pages: The Insider’s Guide.