By Reid Rosefelt
In May of 2012 I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to see what kind of Facebook Community I could create over the course of three months. I created a page called “Save the Supreme Court–Re-elect Obama.” I did this because I was concerned about what might happen to the Supreme Court if President Obama lost, but I was also thinking about it as an experiment for promoting a documentary, something I had done as a marketing consultant, for films like “The Island President.” I could be getting ready to make a film about the Supreme Court, and using Facebook to promote that would involve essentially the same work– utilizing targeted Facebook ads to assemble a community of people who were interested in the activities of the Court.
I gave myself a budget of $100.
My hundred bucks purchased a wide variety of tiny ads that turned up hundreds of thousands of times on the Facebook pages of people I felt might be interested in the Supreme Court, or had progressive politics. My $100 took me to about 800 members, but then I found myself unsatisfied and hungering for an even thousand. I threw caution to the wind and splurged on another twenty bucks to get there.
