Page 14
FINISHING TALK
THE LAST WORD
THE GREAT FACE BOOK EXPERIMENT
Y ou may have thought the
same things I did when first
confronted with the whole Face
Book Phenomenon. You’re
thinking you don’t have the
time, or that it’s just plain stu-
pid, or maybe that it’s just for
kids. We’ll I’ve got news for
you…. You are right! Face book
can absolutely be an enormous
time-sucking black hole, much
like the Internet in general. But
I’ve recently proved that if its
power is directed and focused
toward a specific purpose, you
can direct the time and energy
into a rewarding experience.
Let me explain. When I first de-
cided to go forward and suc-
cumb to the peer pressure to
sign up, I felt that I had to
“justify” it in some way. I settled
on the justification being in this
article. I decided to use this new
form of social networking to see
how many metal finishing con-
nections I could make using
Face Book as the medium.
To take it a step further (like I
tend to do) I announced to my
office shortly after this experi-
ment began, that I wanted
them to participate, too. After
all, Finishing Talk’s forum is
based on the very same concept
BY: PAUL FISHER
of online social networking that
Face Book is—they both foster
and encourage sharing in many
ways including community, col-
laboration and business net-
working. So I announced to the
office that they could tool
around on Face Book at the of-
fice, as long as they always tied
it into something to do with Fin-
ishing Talk and the Metal Finish-
ing Industry.
We’ll, as some of you may have
guessed (and others may have
heard), this little experiment
didn’t go down without unin-
tended consequences. Within a
few weeks of the new “open
Face Book” policy going into ef-
fect, I quickly realized that oth-
ers around the office weren’t as
dedicated to my little experi-
ment as I was. They were
spending more time surfing and
chatting with old high school
chums on FB, than they were on
our own company Web sites. It
didn’t take long before I asked
my IT guy to block the FB ad-
dress from all computers in the
office except for mine.
OK – so now for the good re-
sults. It took me a while to
learn how to use the built-in
tools, but eventually I figured
out how to conduct targeted
searches for people with similar
interests. The first time I tried
this I typed “Metal Finishing” into
the search field not expecting
much, but low and behold it re-
trieved hundreds of hits!
When this happened I quickly
knew I was ready to finish this
experiment, and finalize this arti-
cle (and possibly move on with
my life). So I changed my status
(you’ll have to figure this one out
on your own, but it deals with
the “broadcasting your life” part
of Face Book) to “Writing an arti-
cle on Face Book and Metal Fin-
ishing,” and started sending out
friend requests to everyone on
the search results. I sent so
many friend requests that day
that I received a note from FB
asking if I was breaking their
“Terms of Service” agreement.
As this article is written, I now
have 400 new friends who have
an active interest in Metal Finish-
ing and Industrial Manufacturing
from all over the world. That
number is growing everyday
now, and I do mean from all
over the world. I actually had a
conversation with an engineering
student in Sri Lanka about metal
finishing a couple of Saturdays
ago. He turned around and
signed up for a membership on

VOLUME 2, ISSUE 4
Finishing Talk right after our
discussion. I found people at
shops that I already knew
about, like Pioneer Plating,
Meminger Metal Finishing, Com-
plete Metal Finishing, and Dana-
her. And then I found others
that were completely new to me
like Dragon Powder Coating,
Moore Metal Finishing, Acme
Metal Processing, and the Hol-
zapfel Group in Germany.
even found a couple of shops
right in my backyard that I’d
never heard of before like Preci-
sion Metal Finishing, LLC in
Abbeville, SC and Hot Box Pow-
der Coating in Charlotte, NC.
You can also meet tons of peo-
ple with the common interest of
metal finishing and industrial
manufacturing by joining the
various groups formed on Face
Book. Ted Mooney (The God
Father of Metal Finishing) from
Finishing.com has one called
Metal Finishing that I belong to;
there is one on Electroless Plat-
ing, Powder Coating, and there
is even one for… you guessed it!
Finishing Talk! When you get a
chance, sign up for the group
and I’ll introduce you to the
hundreds of other metal finish-
ing and engineering profession-
als who I’ve made friends with
over the past few months.
Of course I went ahead and set
Page 15
up a new “Finishing Talk Live” boards after this article is pub-
fan club through FB too. With a lished so our Finishing Talk
couple of clicks I was able cre- members have a chance to
ate an event and let all of my weigh in on this one.
new friends and fans know
Lastly, something else extremely
about the next filming date for
interesting that I discovered was
our next show - Episode 8. This
a number of younger generation
episode should have a pretty
metal finishing experts in train-
interesting audience. So far we
ing that we’ve all been looking
have fans from places like Af-
so hard for. To date I’ve made
ghanistan, Paris, Germany, Aus-
friends with nearly a dozen kids
I tralia and Mexico who have indi-
with ages ranging from 18-21
cated on our Face Book event
who are currently working in the
page that they will be attending
trenches and on the lines in
this live taping! I don’t know
various finishing shops around
what you’re thinking, but I’m
the world….. Who knew!?
thinking those are some dedi-
cated fans! I hope this experiment helped in
some way. Lord knows I’ve in-
The collaboration is already
vested more time into this arti-
starting to work too. Just yester-
cle than anything I’ve ever writ-
day there was a great question
ten before—including when I
about standardizing metal fin-
was in college. If you’re not
ishing processes posted on my
careful, Face Book can become
page that went like this.
just another time sucker like
“Question: Any insight into
YouTube, but if you do some of
standardizing a plating process
the things that I’ve shared here,
and training to the standard
you can get some tremendous
without losing the creative
benefits from this new social
knowledge? Example, if we
media.
asked the experts in our com-
pany on how to Electroless Ni
plate. We would most likely re-
ceive very different ideas on the
sequence of operation and
chemistry used...each method
may end up with a good plated
part.” I’ll be moving this ques-
tion over the Finishing Talk