Your new Facebook page is the first step you will be taking to turn your persona into a brand as deluxe as an Hermès bag, as synonymous with good taste as Cristal champagne, and as popular as Google. Remember, though people love Google for its integrity, as expressed in its unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil,” you, unfortunately, are not a corporation worth hundreds of billions of dollars, i.e., your personal motto should be “Admire most those who help you most.”
Think of your new Facebook page as the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteenth-century calling card. Two hundred years ago, when a gentleman came to town and wanted to announce his arrival, he had his servant drop a card at the home of the person he wanted to suck up to. If he was especially eager to make that person’s acquaintance, he would fold a corner of the card to indicate he had dropped it off in person.
Think of the message you want to send as your cyber calling card. The details, quality, and good taste of your new Facebook page will determine what we call your friendability.
Your new Facebook page should not make you seem as if you’re boasting, but it should convey the distinct illusion that you know many more fabulous and famous people than you actually do, and that those reading your page should friend you now while you’re still accepting friends. This is your chance to offer those who have reserved judgment about you a virtual look at who you really are—virtually.
Even though you removed your Facebook page back in Chapter 4, those humiliating photos of you could still come back to haunt you. If, for instance, your old page revealed that you like former New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, Dr. Phil, and Snuggies, you now need to distance yourself from the loser you once were and the friends who tagged you in photos that make you look as large and undesirable as a secondhand sofa left on the side of the road. To avoid the possibility of your past coming back to bite you in your cyber-ass, now is the right time for you to change the name of your brand. If you were a Barney, you might want to become a Bernard. Wouldn’t you rather be Françoise than Francie? Or, if you’re feeling bold, give yourself a new surname as well. More than one of the reigning single socialites currently cashing in on their aristocratic lineage in New York wasn’t born with the last name she is currently using to sell herself. We would be glad to give you her initials, except we fear we would be sued. Happy with your name as it is? Add a new middle initial, and if photos of the old you do resurface, you can explain that your old self is a distant relation you haven’t seen in years.
By now, if you have been following our advice, you should have a collection of selfies, photos of yourself with important people you have never even met, as well as pictures of you with the two Big Fish and Turtle who have become your NBFs. Post one of each on your page and if, for example, the three strangers you’ve taken selfies of or had yourself photographed standing next to are, say, Salman Rushdie, Ryan Seacrest, and Fran Lebowitz, when your Turtle and Big Fish friends check out your page, they’ll not only see themselves with you but they’ll also see you hanging with Salman, Ryan, and Fran; chances are they would like to meet your celebrity pals and will send you a Friend Request.
A social climber should never send a Friend Request even if he or she does get lucky enough to actually meet Salman, Ryan, or Fran. And remember, even if a somebody you have been desperate to connect with for months tries to Friend you, always wait forty-eight hours before accepting the invitation.
A social climber should never appear desperate and/or needy, especially if he or she is.
Naturally, your new friends will wonder why you have deemed them unworthy of a real-life introduction to Salman, Ryan, and Fran. The best answer to this question is, “They’re very private people.” Which, of course, will also make them wonder who else you know whom you haven’t yet introduced them to. If you’re pals with Fran, does that mean you’re hanging with Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter? And if you’re buds with Ryan Seacrest, maybe if they were a little nicer to you, you’d invite them along when you hang out with The Voice judges Adam Levine and Blake Shelton?
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #29
The ideal Facebook page should make you seem fabulous enough to be worth getting to know better, but not so fabulous as to be intimidating or to inspire resentment. You also don’t want it to appear that you are only interested in friending Big Fish and somebodies, which is true, but not something you should advertise.
Of course, this is a fine line to tread. One of the best ways to seem less superficial than you are is to post excerpts and/or editorials from foreign newspapers—The Guardian, Figaro, Die Zeit. You don’t have to be able to read them, just having their links on your Facebook page will make you seem more intelligent to others, and to yourself.
Facebook is your chance to add veracity to any elements of your backstory that you have exaggerated or invented in the course of making friends with Swans, Turtles, and Big Fish. If, for example, you told people your grandmother took you on safari in Africa, leaf through old copies of National Geographic for an old photo of a woman and a child with an elephant. Post it, with the caption “Me and Granny on the Serengeti Plain, 1983.” If you get comments that you don’t look like the child, tell them you’ve changed. That much is true.
It’s important that you do not try to supply pictorial evidence to support all the whoppers you’ve told and dead famous friends you have name-dropped since you started climbing all at once. Spread them out over the coming months as you update your status. Be subtle. If, for instance, you told people you biked across Tasmania with Heath Ledger, post a snapshot of two beat-up mountain bikes lying forlornly in the grass and simply write, “Heath’s bike.” Let them ask you, “Heath who?” Sometimes less is more when social climbing on the Internet.
Your Facebook page is you. Make it worthy enough, and someone might invite you to join the thinking snob’s version of Facebook, ASMALLWORLD, an invitation-only network capped at a mere 250,000, which promises to make you “feel at home anywhere.” Tellingly, it was conceived by Count Erik Wachtmeister, the son of the former Swedish ambassador to the United States, while he was wild-boar hunting in Germany, and is designed to put members in touch with “a community of global nomads who hang out together,” i.e., people who inherited enough money so they don’t have to have a real job. There’s no question that it is truly a small world; when we first met Count Erik in New York in the eighties, he was a hard-partying Big Fish whose popularity with fashion models earned him a nickname that our lawyers have advised us not to repeat. The point is, if Erik can rebrand himself, so can you.
In principle, we are against any virtual venue for self-promotion that doesn’t give the fledgling climber a shot at the top. However, if you do con someone into inviting you to join ASmallWorld or any other überexclusive site, your membership will only add to the veracity of your embellished exotic backstory and enable you to meet even more advanced social climbers than yourself. Remember, there’s nothing like watching a roomful of great Mountaineers in action to teach even the most experienced climber new tricks.
Tweeting Your Way into the Winner’s Circle
Tweeting has revolutionized and democratized social climbing. Next to your charm, your iPhone, Droid, Samsung Galaxy, or whatever is the single most essential tool a climber possesses.
Say you’re at a party for Prada’s new strapless heel, or Mark Wahlberg’s latest movie. If you write in 140 characters or less why the shoe or the film is fantastic and attach a picture of yourself having a fabulous time at the launch, you’re not bragging to the ether that you got invited to an exclusive event, you’re sharing your life and turning your friends, both real and virtual, on to a product you think is wonderful.
More important, subliminally you’re also saying your brand—i.e., you—is a product on par with Prada or Mark Wahlberg. If Ashton Kutcher can get over fourteen million people to follow his tweets, why can’t you?
If your answer to that question is a self-pitying, “Because he’s Ashton Kutcher and I’m not,�
� you need an attitude adjustment.
Stop making excuses for yourself and get creative. All you need is your iPhone, a little ingenuity, and some imagination. Say there’s a gala for a Mark Wahlberg movie premiere sponsored by Louis Vuitton/Chopard/Hewlett-Packard. If you’ve been doing your homework, you will observe that the press and paparazzi photos of the somebodies, celebrities, and Big Fish at last year’s gala were taken against a blue backdrop plastered with corporate logos. While people who have been invited to the gala are getting dressed to go to the gala, you get dressed up, too. Put on your tux or slinkiest cocktail dress. Now take a photo of yourself and superpose it against the Louis Vuitton backdrop you’ve lifted from last year’s photos of the event. Once you get one that makes you look good and seems believable, wait until the party you aren’t at and haven’t been invited to is just getting good, then tweet that you “# LV” or Mark Wahlberg’s movie is a “must-see” and attach the photo you’ve created of yourself on the red carpet.
Now, don’t answer your phone until the next morning, leading all your friends, virtual and real, to believe that while you’re sitting at home alone all dressed up with no place to go, you were in fact too busy having an awesome time at the party to answer.
The next morning, after you read about the after-party on “Page Six,” turn your phone back on and tweet that you’re too hungover to tweet the details of what a fabulous time you had last night with all the celebrities you now know attended the after-after-party at the Standard hotel’s Boom Boom Room.
Remember: When tweeting yourself into fantastic events that you weren’t invited to, always gush positive and instruct the ever-growing number of people who are following your virtual but truly fantastic life to immediately go out and buy the shoes, see the movie, and purchase whatever products the sponsors are selling.
Do this often enough, and convincingly enough, and eventually those sponsors, and their PR flacks, will start actually sending you invitations to the kinds of events you need to go to to make your real life live up to the virtual life that has spawned the person you now have genuinely become.
Instagramming from a posh, desirable, elite location is your way of substantiating the authenticity of the lifestyle you want people to think you’re living but cannot yet afford to live.
Say you’d like to be perceived as the kind of person who lunches at Nobu but lack the wherewithal to afford even a single slice of their signature sushi. All you have to do to make people think you’re having lunch at Nobu is to stop by at lunchtime, tell the maître d’ you’re meeting friends but don’t know the name the reservation was made under, and sit at the bar. Take an artful snap of a nearby plate of Black Cod with Miso, tweet how delicious it looks and how hungry you are and that you’re lunching at Nobu.
Do this often enough, and you not only have a shot at becoming the kind of person who can afford to have lunch at Nobu, you’ll also lose those pounds you put on while sitting around your house eating chips and onion dip while pretending to go to premieres you weren’t invited to.
Pinterest a pic of a 1964 Ferrari Dino you see parked on the street and post, “Love this Ferrari ’cause it reminds me of the one Mom drove me to school in.” With the Internet, it’s all up to you, and people will think you’re almost as cool as your mom.
Worried about getting caught? Or leaving a cyber-trail that will be used against you when all the social climbing tricks we’ve taught you are about to pay off and you’re on the verge of getting engaged to Prince Harry, or being made partner at Goldman Sachs? Post your confabulations with Snapchat and the self-promoting lies you post about yourself will be permanently erased from cyberspace after ten seconds.
Undoubtedly there will be newer and more effective cyber tools to help you climb by the time you’re reading this book.
The important thing is to use any and all means at your disposal to make it seem that you’re having more fun in your virtual life than you do in your real life.
If you have a modicum of imagination, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and whatever is the next social networking tool to come down the pike, when worked in conjunction, will not only allow you to redefine yourself but are a venue to offer proof that you have the same taste and lifestyle as the people you want to get to know, even if you have not acquired the kind of friends who can help you live out those aspirations.
Put up enough flags in cyberspace and someone will salute you.
NETWORKING: HOW TO WIN FRIENDS, INFLUENCE PEOPLE, AND USE THEM TO TURN A PROFIT
In today’s postrecession economic hard times, social climbing for financial gain, aka networking, is a no-brainer. The origin of the expression says everything about the world’s hypocritical attitude regarding the social climber. One would expect an expression like “networking” to have come out of a bastion of capitalism like the Harvard Business School. But in fact the word was first concocted by radical sixties counterculture icon and social activist Jerry Rubin. Mr. Rubin coined this expression after his politics took a sudden right turn. Realizing that “wealth creation is the real revolution,” Rubin began to throw parties where the people he used to call “capitalist pigs” would be charged admission for the opportunity to meet other “capitalist pigs,” i.e., networking. Clearly, Mr. Rubin was too embarrassed to call his scheme what it actually was: Mountaineering for money.
Jerry Rubin’s reluctance to tell it like it is speaks to a basic attitudinal and philosophical divide that separates the two basic schools of entrepreneurial Mountaineering (networking)—those who maintain that they only social climb to make money versus those who insist they make money in order to social climb.
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #30
Those who claim they are only social climbing to make money are implying that there is something crass about social climbing, whereas those who maintain that they make money in order to social climb suggest there is something crass about money. In our opinion, both subspecies of networker are missing the point—social climbing should be both fun and profitable.
If you are one of those Mountaineers who feel the need to rationalize their climb with profit, you are still operating under the pernicious and hypocritically false value system that has demonized social climbing. To those readers we say: Stop hating yourself, come out of the closet, and take pride in what you are. Likewise, to those of you in the other camp who take false pride in boasting that you only make money so you can enjoy the pleasures of social climbing, we say, own up to your greed.
Strange but true, 99 percent of those same small-minded souls who will call you a brownnoser/asslicker/social climber for engineering an invitation that will allow you to enjoy the company of those more celebrated, famous, accomplished, or refined than yourself will turn on a moral dime and proceed to call you smart, clever, a go-getter for sucking up via tennis, golf, PTA meetings, etc., to get something as mundane as a raise.
EMPOWERING THOUGHT #31
The fact that monetary profit turns asslicking into networking says much about the voodoo of money. Following that twisted line of logic, the exchange of cash would make prostitution admirable and nonprofit sex, i.e., love, against the law. All networkers are social climbers but not all social climbers are networkers.
To us at The Social Climber’s Bible, there seems to be a conspiracy at work at the highest level of the entrepreneurial community. Talk to any Big Fish in the financial world, and the first boastful excuse they’ll make in defending their obscene salaries is that the world of finance, like America, is a “meritocracy.” Which, by implication, is a good thing. The only trouble with that line of thought is that is not what the word “meritocracy” means.
Look it up. It’s not a good thing. Especially not for social climbers. “Meritocracy” was a word coined to describe how the English class system in the mid-twentieth century was designed to keep the haves on top and the have-nots on the bottom.
Know this: Big Fish and Whales do not misuse the word “meritocracy” by accident
. They do it diabolically and deliberately. They have redefined a pejorative as a positive to trick you with a carrot that isn’t a carrot. Why? Because they want to be the only ones who know the system is rigged so that networkers who have networked into the right network win even if they lose money.
Why should bankers be the only ones to fail upward? You can be as good at making bad investments as they can if you’ve social climbed your way into the “right” network.
If you have been following our advice in previous chapters, by now you have undoubtedly made at least one new best friend who is a Big Fish businessman/woman. Well done. Yes, it has been pretty fabulous just being able to hang out with somebody who’s rich enough to spend more on wine at dinner than you make in a month. But honestly, aren’t you getting a little bored simply being a great guest?
Given all the fun and polite conversation you’ve invested in your Big Fish friendship, isn’t it about time you had something to show for it, other than that sunburn you got lying next to their swimming pool and all those blisters and bruises you endured playing endless games of tennis, golf, or touch football with your Big Fish and their children?
Do not be ashamed if you feel awkward or unsure about how to turn a purely social friendship into a business relationship that’s a can’t-lose proposition for you. All social climbers feel that way before they turn their first Big Fish into a cash cow. Do not feel guilty about exploiting your first Big Fish—how do you think they got their start?
Unlike the denizens of Wall Street who boast about eating what they kill, you are merely taking your much-deserved pound of flesh. Also know that if you not only make money off your Big Fish by persuading him to invest in an idea or business opportunity but actually end up enabling him to turn a profit, he won’t simply like you, he will love you!
The Social Climber's Bible: A Book of Manners, Practical Tips, and Spiritual Advice forthe Upwardly Mobile Page 13
