History part 1 - In the beginning there was Facebook

This is how it started. Back in February '09, I was at work for a weekend during a hire of the gallery for a fashion market. I'd been vaguely thinking that I should set up a Facebook group for Fabrica with an equally vague idea of why, just that it might be a good idea for marketing. Somehow. At this point I ran up against the fact that I knew nothing about Facebook, I wasn't on it personally and had only the vaguest idea of how it worked. I'd been generally resistant to it on a personal level and had declined numerous invitations from friends to join. I spend enough time on a computer at work, I don't need it in my social life too, was pretty much my reasoning. Looking back and giving in already to the hindsight that I promised to avoid, that wall had already begun to crumble because at the end of last year I got an iPhone and actually the division between my online and offline life suddenly disappeared, in fact they began to overlap. With my phone never more than a few metres away I became permanently online, in a sense I began to live my life online. This is a digression but it's an interesting theme that I'm sure I'll return to, because I think it's probably central to what's interesting about this work.

So I set up a personal account on Facebook because, I reasoned, I needed to understand the ins and outs before I set up a group for Fabrica. Fast forward to exactly a month later and I'm back in the office again for a weekend of gallery sitting and I'm beginning to understand the attraction of Facebook. I have cousins scattered across the globe that I rarely see and we're all equally bad at keeping in touch but through Facebook I started to know what they were up to and where they were going and sometimes what they had for breakfast and I loved that, it made me feel that I was somehow more a part of their lives and them a part of mine. Please excuse this detour into my personal life but it is relevant because it was at that point that I began to have the first inkling of an idea that maybe Facebook could mean more for an organisation like Fabrica than just a way of marketing ourselves and events, that maybe it was about making yourself more of a presence in the lives of the people that chose to join your group, your audience.

So I set up Fabrica group and invited some people to join and during the course of the first part of the Anish Kapoor show Blood Relations the group grew to around 180 members and I posted events on the group and pictures from the installation of the show and sent out invitations and invited comment and…… nothing really happened and I started to feel a bit frustrated with Facebook. Then they launched pages for organisations or maybe I just caught up with the opportunity and on investigation something became much clearer. By joining a group, any group on Facebook, people demonstrate an interest in something that goes as far as a willingness to click on a button that says 'join this group'. But crucially that's it, and what you've signed up for is to be on a mailing list essentially and unless you choose to go and visit the group you get nothing more from it. Now I've joined plenty of groups but rarely visit them and I’m guessing most people are the same. The crucial difference with a page is that once set up anything you post on that page automatically appears in the news feed of all your fans. It’s a much more direct intervention into their lives. Of course you run the risk of people then deciding to undo their relationship with you because you post too much or post things that don’t interest them but so be it. You don’t want people that are not genuinely interested anyway. Of course if you’re regularly losing followers then you probably need to be rethinking your posting policy.

So next I set up a Fabrica page and invited, over the course of a couple of weeks, all of the group members to switch, warning that the group would be closed down on a specific date. About 130 of the group made the jump and the rest fell off. At the time I thought it was a shame that you couldn’t just switch all members of your group over to the new page but actually, sorry hindsight again, I think that a natural cull is not necessarily a bad thing. As I’ve said elsewhere, it's better to have ten great followers than a thousand who don’t really care.

So that’s where we are now with Facebook. We get a lot more comments than we did with the group though we’re always searching for more. We now have over two hundred fans and it grows steadily. As I’m, again, way over my word limit, I’ll leave this one there but will of course return to Facebook at some point. There’s plenty more to talk about.

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