Facebook Hotties as a business training tool?

OK, I admit it. I don’t use Facebook only for business/networking purposes. I do play the occasional game. As a matter of fact, I have become fascinated by one of the applications available on Facebook called You’re a Hottie, and so should you!

Basically, you buy and sell hotties (other Facebook users) to make money and increase your Net Worth. It is quite addictive in itself but it has more to it than meets the eye.

In order to be successful, you need to be able to recognize a “good deal”, a hottie whose value you can increase and sell back at a profit. This means you have to understand the Hotties market, pick-up on buying and selling trends, and know when to buy and when to sell. You can check to see recent trades on any hottie of interest to help you decide if this hottie is indeed a hot property or simply overinflated.

You can increase your hotties value by petting them (groan) once every 24 hours, or by placing them in a manor. Manors increase the value of your hotties quickly but you have to buy the manors and incur maintenance fees that cut into your cash flow. But before you crank up the value of your hotties, you need to understand offer and demand for the Hotties market.

You have to judge how much you can increase the value of a particular hottie so that he/she will sell well on the market. If you don’t increase the value enough, you will make only a meagre profit on your investment. On the flip side, increase the value too much and the hottie in question could become unsellable, too expensive for the market. Another wrinkle - since the pictures are pulled from the user’s profiles, they change when the user changes his/her main picture. This means you also have to decide whether this picture is likely to stay for a while or change often. That hottie in a bikini could quickly become a shot of a baby, or of the family pet. All this to say that you are going to need to develop a buying/selling strategy, test it out, and make adjustments accordingly.

Marketing is very limited. You can offer your hotties for sale to other owners using a button and then, only once a day. You can also give them a nickname which basically provides you a space to put teaser text so others will want to buy your hottie. Since you only have about 12 characters of space, you need to write killer short copy. This alone is great business practice!

Is this application going to turn you into a cutting edge business man/woman? No. But it is a great mental exercise that will help keep you sharp and hone your business acumen. It will also help put you in the right state of mind. Opportunities come our way regularly - the trick is in recognizing those opportunities and seizing them when they present themselves. And that is how play becomes pay!

Tip: When considering buying a hottie, check to see if the present owner has bought this hottie more than once recently. This might mean he/she is emotionally attached to the hottie and will buy him/her back from you (a quick profit for you) if you buy the hottie from them. (Do check if they have sufficient funds to buy the hottie back though!)