BRANDING | Palo Alto BNB

Building Recession Immunity in the Age of Social Media

I’ve used social media for a few years now, since the Summer of 2014 when my old friend and fellow submariner Jeff Marcey told me Facebook was the way to go to promote my business.

Before, like many people who resist change, I had a very prejudiced attitude against social media and platforms like Facebook but knowing my friend is usually ahead of the curve with his ideas, I decided to take a first step.

All of those years I spent in relative isolation in my former corporate engineering space, I was hard at work though not involved with the world of the social media, those apps that were altering the minds of the new generation of socialites and professionals.

Staying in isolation from the influence of the internet doesn’t allow exposure to the advantages offered by smart phones and the apps that power them – and, yeh, it doesn’t help being turned off by the sight of so many people postured with zombie-like face to Iphone, an idiosyncrasy on a pandemic scale, evidence that we have not reached any kind of zenith in human development.

Nevertheless, with the crash and burn of the smoking remnants of my corporate career in 2017, there has perhaps been no better circumstance to entertain and develop new ideas like running a BNB! (This option wasn’t obvious, only after not succeeding at other efforts to build a survivable income).

Now, from my experience, there is no better platform than Facebook that I know of that is more useful for organizing reunions. For me, It’s been a labor of manly camaraderie without any kind of financial intentions. We’ve already managed to help gather many shipmates from the submarine I served on (USS Bremerton SSN 698) of which many have attended a couple of successful gatherings.