M & A Rainmaker

In Part 2 I mentioned that Penny and Thomas had ( quite rightly in my view ) adopted a very open attitude towards other social networks.

Thomas Power was in fact one of the people who encouraged me to join Facebook ( as he  encouraged me to join many other networks aswell ) and while I was dragged kicking and screaming on to Facebook it became for me the most intuitive of the networks that I joined. Whilst Ecademy was easy to use Facebook was easy to use and also easy to mix media – text, pictures and video’s.

The use of Facebook by bars and clubs also opened my eyes to the massive potential for interaction with customers.

New Birmingham Nightclub Gatecrasher was perhaps one of the biggest examples of this

http://www.facebook.com/chris.windley?ref=name#/gatecrasher.birmingham1?ref=ts

http://www.gatecrasher.com/crasher   ( Hey – listen to the music here and think of me !! ) 

Gatecrasher has multiple Facebook pages ( because it keeps outgrowing it’s pages ) and operates globally.

I think ( but I am not certain ) that Gatecrasher first used MySpace to promote it’s events but then added Facebook as it became more popular.

If you have any doubt about the power of Facebook and MySpace for Gatecrasher then take a look at it’s pages and the way that it promotes events to it’s group members, offers incentives and provides photo’s and video’s of the events afterwards. Gatecrasher communicated with it’s ( young ) audience brilliantly. You should probably take more than a bit of notice that Gatecrasher is communicating with young people…… the businessmen and women of the future.

So, this led me to developing a Facebook page for The Glan yr Afon Inn

http://www.facebook.com/chris.windley?ref=name#/group.php?gid=25701627254&ref=ts

Of course it had nowhere near the membership that Gatecrasher has but we did our bit to try and communicate with our customers – those that had heard of Facebook anyway.

I ignored that fact that Facebook was a social site and used it to make business connections. I eschewed the many applications telling people to message me if they wanted to talk to me rather than throwing stuff at me – even kisses 🙂

I don’t know if it was just me but it looked to me as though Facebook took on a more business orientated approach as time went on.

Next on my Google is LinkedIn – THE internet social network for business people particularly those in the High Tech world. I developed a considerable network on LinkedIn but it never felt intuitive to me. I just could not put my finger on why. As for adding pictures and videos – it’s probably easy but was not easy enough for me.

Of course both big but closed ( to the Internet ) communities. Whilst some of the content that you posted appeared outside of these networks and on Google you could not do what you could with Ecademy – i.e. to post information that you knew would find it’s way out to Google. 

Again – had I lived longer I would have put more effort into learning more about and using LinkedIn.