Facebook and PR

A colleague and I attended the first ever Facebook Developer Garage in London last night. They've had a few in San Francisco and other places but this was the first one over here. 200 places and they were all snapped up on the Facebook group pretty quickly. I had to ask really nicely to get my colleague added to the list but they managed to let a few more join.

I have to say though that this was not the best organised event in the world. The sound system was terrible, the video conference to the US didn't work properly and the organiser wasn't able to tell half the venue to stop talking in the background. The other disappointment was that we were wanting to hear Facebook experts talking about how to make cool applications and launch viral marketing campaigns in Facebook. That's we want to do here. Most of the speakers, however, just seemed to be sponsors of the event who were talking about what their companies do. Wasted opportunity guys. If the next event isn't better organised then I think your attendees might stay at their computer screens in the future, poking each other. You had to poke some people just to stay awake last night.

One thing I did find interesting, however, was that when I was speaking to several people whilst waiting at the bar, or waiting for the sound system to be rewired, it wasn't just all programming geeks as I envisaged it might be. There was a surprisingly large amount of marketing and PR people there. All eager to utilise the incredible networking capabilities of Facebook, no doubt. Obviously a lot easier than buying an expensive database of email addresses.

Very exciting place to be right now though. Stay tuned to see our upcoming Facebook applications and viral campaigns coming soon.

Comments

[alex]

interesting, we've just finished launching our rebtel application, reb me. for subsequent development it was very clear to us that the community would have to be involved. we're pretty heavy users of facebook ourselves, so to us it made total sense to be where we feel our community is, PR and marketing aside.