Saturday 27 April 2013

Facebook Delivers

Facebook impacts different people or groups of people in many different ways.

For all too many parents of teenagers, it is the vehicle by which communication with child becomes challenging because “you always have your head in your phone”. Heaven forbid there be a “friend” status update that is posted 30 seconds or more without the chance to comment. The speed responses are posted is astounding.

For many others, Facebook is a great vehicle for sharing photos of family and experiences eg Travel, sport, celebrations etc

And of course there are the negatives. The parties that find their way to Facebook and get out of control due to the number of unintended attendees is one such example. There is also the negative of hate pages.

 Major Corporations have become better at managing their images and use social media to connect with new demographics, however this can come unstuck due to the inability of the “Spin Doctors” to control feed back or comments made on their pages. And for the small business, Facebook is a low cost avenue to support other marketing and sales initiatives.

 Facebook has allowed me to follow the progress of a number of staff who worked part time for Ideal Image and it has been a delight to see them establish careers, have families and to see these families growing up 

Events of the last 7 days have reinforced one of the reasons I use Facebook, even if it has taken these events to fully appreciate this reasons.

During the last 2 years, I have re-connected with a number of people I had completely lost track of. This includes several I went to school with who I literally had not communicated with for over 32 years. One lives in the USA and has for most of their Adult life.

 I have also reconnected with a former work colleague who I knew well but we went our separate ways about 28 years ago.

Reconnecting via Facebook has resulted in several face to face catch ups and to hear and learn what has transpired in their lives has been fascinating indeed.

The benefit of using Facebook were even more clear for me this last week when I discovered a message from someone who was a much valued and trusted friend quite some years ago. For a number of reasons, we were unable to maintain, or be in contact however due to changed circumstances our contact has been re-established and hopefully, will now be maintained for life.

Thank you Facebook.

It should be said however, that my skills using the message functionality of Facebook are somewhat under developed and it was only by accident that I actually found the message. The message to me had been sent some weeks ago and had been sitting unread. In fact, if I had not clicked on a button/icon by mistake, it may well have gone unread for many weeks, months or longer.