Maybe the keenest to exploit social media are local entrepreneurs. They are the most consistent and visible users of social media in their age group. A successful business owner can pay well over €100 a month on their mobile phone subscriptions, have two or three smartphones, send hundreds of text messages a month, talk for a few hours on the phone every day and use the mobile internet heavily. They know they should be always available and prompt on the phone, and be able to reply to text messages well after midnight. Those who have started a new business in a very congested market – such as a fashion outlet, an optician’s, a café or a bar – are most active online and invest regularly in their online presence. This is seen as mandatory to create those networks that the established businesses already have.
Perhaps this is why on Facebook many well- established entre-preneurs in Grano do not make a clear distinction between their pro-fessional and personal life. It is standard practice for a middle- aged
entrepreneur to have a Facebook profile for their business rather than an individual profile or a Facebook business page. In many cases such a profile is also used for more private matters. For example, the owner of a fish shop uploads photos of impressive ships and nautical sports down-loaded from the internet, together with promotions for fresh fish and photos of his 12- year- old daughter on the same profile, called Pescheria La Balena (The Whale Fish Shop). This creates a somewhat surreal effect where business is mixed with personal detail, daydreams and private stories. In particular, running a private fish shop means that most days there are a couple of hours when there are no clients. Marcello, the owner of La Balena, does most of the heavy work in the early morning before opening the shop: he unloads the fresh fish delivered by his cous-ins who are fishermen in Grano Porto, prepares it and displays it in the glass cooler, together with the fish that is left over from the previous day and the frozen fish. In his always cold and damp shop he keeps his large- screen laptop on the edge of the small box where the cash register is, always logged on to his Facebook profile. In most of the idle periods Marcello browses the internet and waits for somebody to chat with on Facebook. Whenever a client enters his shop he rises promptly from his tall rotating chair and takes up a position between the large double- sink and the cooler, greeting and sometimes continuing a previous conver-sation or anecdote. Marcello works in a professional manner, talking in detail with each client and trying to make them stay longer in his shop and buy as much fish as possible.
Marcello has created a Facebook account specifically for his busi-ness and finds it normal to spend time on the internet at work rather than at home, where he prefers to spend time with his family. His work involves a limited set of business partners and clients, and therefore he does not really need social media or mobile phone to stay in contact with them or to advertise his business. For Marcello, Facebook is just a compromise between his need to explore the world and to express that he runs a business. Before being a fishmonger, Marcello worked at sea for 15 years for different Italian and Greek ship- owners. He used to be mainly a sailor, but also occasionally managed the boats. So, he has always been used to working by himself, to the permanent sensation of liberty and of to the limitlessness of the sea. When he decided to retreat to the cold white tiled walls of his fish shop, he found he desperately needed the internet. Marcello’s Facebook page is dominated by blue: the deep blue of bright skies and the darker nuances of endless seawater.
These are contrasted with the elegant silhouettes of white ships and sail boats, swimming dolphins and large fish. For Marcello, Facebook does
not only counter the monotony of his work and fuel his need for vitality and freedom; it is also an active part of his life. It is the repetitiveness of sea photos, the banality of short comments and conversations, and the occasional creeping in of his daughter that make Facebook a crucial part of his existence.
Bigger entrepreneurs use social media in a very similar way.
Alessandro owns one of the three most important bars in the modern square. His business is extremely demanding: he not only sells coffee and drinks, but also pastries, panini and mini- pizzas, and has further specialised in producing crêpes and ice cream. He never closes the bar before 22:00 and during the summer he can stay open well after mid-night. He is always rushing between the multitude of suppliers, clients, various state institutions and his own family. For example, some of his clients often ask him to prepare their coffees himself using his personal recipe that mixes 60 per cent of Arabica beans with a secret mix of other different types of coffee, at the same time as having to look after his bar, make regular orders for his wife’s fabric shop and prepare the weekly musical events that he, together with eight other businesses in the square, sponsors during the summer.
This frenzy of activity is reflected in his expansive use of technol-ogy. In summer he pays around €2,000 a month on electricity because of high- consuming equipment: three cooler cabinets, one freezer, an ice- cream machine, a high- performance air- conditioning system, two slot machines and a flat- screen television that plays a music channel most of the day. For himself, Alessandro has two smartphones and a basic feature phone; he runs a personal Facebook profile with more than 1,300 connections and a Facebook page for his bar with some 900 followers. His own profile is much more used than his business page: Alessandro is quite a popular character and feels he does not really need a business page. Also asking people to ‘like’ it could be quite embarrassing, he feels.
Like many other small entrepreneurs in Grano, Alessandro long ago stopped making a very clear distinction between friends and cli-ents; between friends on Facebook and contacts on his mobile phone;
or between friends on Facebook and veri (real) friends. His universe is just too abounding to try and do this. So he often sees all the various media he uses as one big single entity. For example, many of his pri-vate comments go on Facebook and he picks up news from Facebook in private conversations. Alessandro does not try to adapt his online presence to one single social status of entrepreneur, member of com-munity, husband or parent. He is rather the sum of these parts and most
people in Grano know him simply as Alessandro and his place as Café Alberi.
Now Marcello and Alessandro use private media for their personal relationships in different ways. While Marcello, who has more time on his hands, calls his wife and some of his brothers daily, Alessandro pre-fers to text on WhatsApp as he finds this quicker and more efficient. As such, in a way, their behaviour is closest to that of teenagers: they are driven by their numerous contacts and by their own curiosity to use Facebook intensively, while they do not have a clear daily routine in terms of when they use it. For example, Alessandro alternates periods of intensive Facebook postings with periods of inactivity and uploads to Instagram just a few of his best photos from Facebook. Like teenagers, entrepreneurs use Facebook to tell people much more about themselves than most people do in Grano. The reason is that commercial activities can be seen as opportunistic and mercantile, especially in this period of economic downturn, so small entrepreneurs need some level of personal detail to humanise their Facebook presence.