Antonieta Gómez posted this picture on the Starbucks Facebook page along with a message saying: "Hot Dark Cherry Mocha for sure!", Silvia Hidalgo liked it.
You might already be aware, but there’s this website called Facebook … it’s quite a useful tool – here’s just a few practical applications:
You can stay in touch with friends and family, share photos of your experiences, arrange and be invited to events, perv over pictures of your friends in bikinis on their summer holidays, start pointless single issue campaigns that four people will join out of sympathy … oh, and you can tell the world that you ‘like’ a certain drinks manufacturer.
Now, there are various merits in all of the above (however seedy in one case), but the final option, I just can’t understand.
Recently, Seattle Coffee giant Starbucks surpassed 10 million Facebook fans, ten million … that means the equivalent of the population of London went out of their way to find the Starbucks page, click a button and share their passion for coffee with the world. In doing so, they opened their ‘news feed’ to the company, meaning every time Starbucks say something, they get to read it … oh joy!
In addition, Coca-Cola have 6.8m fans and energy drink manufacturer Red Bull have been gifted internet wings by the best part of six and half million people giving them the cyber thumbs up.
But what does anyone get out of publicly advocating these corporate behemoths?
The answer it appears is … er, well nothing, really.
A cursory scan of the Starbucks Facebook page reveals very little worth writing home about. There’s a brief blurb about the company (which for ‘fans’ is probably not necessary), a few pictures of coffee cups and a little information on the Starbucks Card … which I believe is some sort of loyalty system. The majority of the activity however is taking place on the ‘wall’.
Here, one can find two types of message:
The first, canny Facebooker’s looking to promote themselves or their product … let’s take ‘Nadine Bliss’ for example who posts a rather risqué bikini clad photograph and writes:
Hi!I’d really like to meet a guy who can make me want more and more of
him I am energetic and I can surely give you pleasure for as long as
you need,Just ask me anything if you wish to know more! Checkout my
photos up on www.xyzwebsite.com
Jessica Solari (who is also depicted in a bikini, amazingly) writes a similarly non-caffeine related message:
Test this:Go to www.xyzwebsite.com and see that it happens when they enter the ad of the second hotel, you can’t believe it!
So, you catch my drift, there’s a lot of bikini ladies on the site … but hey, everyone’s got to make a living.
Far more disturbing are the people who are using the site in the manner for which it was intended.
Update after update, minute after minute reads:
Double chocolatey chip frappichinos are all I drink in the summer nothing else but that!
i ♥ green tea lattes
I just love the classic vanilla latte. ooh but of course I get soy milk. mmmm
chocolate cream chip & vanilla frap. my favorite !! 
OK, we get the message, you like Starbucks, enough …
…but they continue faster than you can read them, people just saying inane things about coffee …
Have they drunk too much, are their minds racing? This is madness. These people are suffering from a collective hysteria … why don’t they read a book, paint a picture, get a haircut, learn taxidermy … do something, anything but this …
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But over on the Coca-Cola Facebook page, there are millions doing the same thing, always boring and usually littered with errors of spelling, grammar and syntax, the caffeine fiends (albeit another brand of the good stuff) relentlessly punch phrases into their keyboards:
Ive Drink Coke Everyday!!!!!
I love coca cola:D
I was raised on “Country Sunshine”.. AKA Coca-Cola!
i got 24 leters of coke for a party.
I am ashamed to say that one of my friends is a member of this group … I felt I had no option but to purge him … he is gone, and hopefully soon forgotten.
I won’t bore you with the details of the Red Bull page, but you can imagine the high level philosophical debates taking place over there as people struggle to express their unadulterated joy for the energy drink with the most-est.
So, what’s it all about … I really don’t know? Is this the future, filling our brains with caffeine then telling everyone how happy we are whilst sitting in a darkened room before crashing back to reality with a headache and wondering why we keep getting messages from Starbucks?
If only people were as bothered about famine, war and freedom as they are about sugary caffeine related treats, surely the world would be a better place …
… but, if you are one of the twenty or so million Facebook fans of these three companies and you are not for turning, you can always follow Beehive City on Twitter and Facebook, our content (I’m told) is often (not always) more stimulating than a chocolate chip frap doused in Coke and garnished with Red Bull …
