To paraphrase an old speech by the late “Mad Man” advertising genius Leo Burnett:
“The human mind is a wonderful device which starts working the minute you are born and never stops until you join Facebook.”
Admittedly I have a love-hate-loathing history with the platform.
Originally, I was on there from 2008 – 2018 before leaving.
And from mid 2016 until mid 2017 I created a hair-raising social experiment in there called “elBenbo’s Lair.” And it was so psychologically & emotionally addictive I was sometimes literally accused of being a cult leader. Not a self-described cult leader, like some of these goo-roo edgelords running around LARPing about it do.
This is something others accused me of, even good friends wondering if I’d lost my mind.
Sometimes they’d even complain about me in other groups, which only fed into the experiment.
It was also a ‘World’ unto itself – full of laws, digital harems, spy networks, corporate warfare, & soap opera-like storylines. There were so many discussions happening certain people in there were routinely locked out & tossed into ‘Facebook jail’ due to its algorithms assuming they were bots.
Lots of money was made.
Some hearts were broken.
And entire businesses were created from scratch
As well as lifelong business & personal relationships (a “splinter” group even formed right after I closed it down, with its most rabid members still there, last I heard) and even at least one wife & child came from it. i.e. I met Stefania inside this supposed “cult” I created, which then later led to Willis.
The downside to what I did on there?
It takes a lot of time & energy to use the methodology I worked out to do it all.
You also have to love being on social, and loving being social to do it long term.
And to this day I’m still burned out on using my own methods, and have zero desire to create my own such community on social media like that. I am far more content in my far-more mellow Settleheads group and/or tweeting out random brain farts, lessons, and other assorted nonsense, with zero responsibility to anyone else as far as babysitting a group of customers and fans and trolls.
The point is, elBenbo’s Lair exploited what Facebook was already doing.
i.e. To get addiction-like engagement.
But it was also intended to be a counteraction to a lot of the creepy nonsense Facebook did, and still does, that causes otherwise intelligent people to become functional idiots.
I don’t know if this adds to your life or not.
But, one thing I will add to it all:
Everything I did in there was ultimately built using what I teach about email marketing, email engagement, and email copywriting, selling, and persuasion that I teach in the paid Email Players newsletter.
More on that here:
Ben Settle
P.S. By the way:
1. I do NOT use much of what’s in this book in my current Settleheads group.
Why?
Because I don’t have the time, energy, bandwidth, or, really, desire or probably even the ability to try to recreate what I did. I basically had zero privacy. Everyone was up in my business constantly. And I hated that then, and hate even more now. Plus, what I did required creating endless amounts of conflict inside, spending time thinking up crazy rules, and basically keep people on a perpetual roller coaster.
Fun at the time.
But nowadays I got enough drama with multiple businesses, writing novels, trading, being a dad, etc.
2. I hated Facebook so much I left about a year after I abruptly shut elBenbo’s Lair down.
But, a few years ago I ended up coming back once I figured out how to make it so I never see any of the stupid content (or the stupid people) I don’t want to see or hear from, and only the content and people I do.
The trick?
Set your preferences so nobody (NOT ONE single person) can friend you or message you. Not friends, not family, not spouse, not anyone. That way, you only see content you want in specific groups you’re in, and your other interests without any of the crud & time waste you don’t want to see.
Facebook’s algorithms are surprisingly good like that.
And several others I’ve shared this tip with have also had the same experience.
Yes, it is still a social activist-converged platform.
And no, I do not recommend relying on it for business.
But it can be a useful arrow in your marketing quiver for relationship building.
