Is this the future of SOCIAL MEDIA? Find out what U-Space is on C-Level with Chris DeBlasio with Guest entrepreneur Tobin Brogunier

The Chris DeBlasio Podcast

Is this the future of SOCIAL MEDIA? Find out what U-Space is on C-Level with Chris DeBlasio with guest Tobin Brogunier of U-Space.

- Today on C Level, Tobin Brogunier, the founder of USpace, stops by. We talk about social media and privacy. Tobin, thanks for comin' by. So we're gonna talk about privacy, social media, a lotta stuff, but tell me a little bit about you first.

- Well, my background is actually in humanities, not technology. I graduated with a degree in English Literature from Oberlin College in 1995, which makes me old officially. And middle old.

- Middle old, yeah, yeah.

- So with a focus in fine art. And my career has been actually in editorial and commercial photography. So that's been the majority of my career. I worked in Brooklyn for seven years. I worked in Minneapolis, Minnesota for about seven years. And then I moved down here and found out that commercial photography had no future and went directly to social media. So I just started creating camera content for social media. And from that work doing social media I, well, I became one of the people working on the backend of the Facebook boosted advertising system, and I became a Facebook, a social media marketing person.

- And so you're developing all this content and you're leveraging social media. So what was this for like ads? How are you putting this--

- So when I, when I kind of, when I moved to Georgia the commercial market, I moved for love so I didn't have my base of, commercial base. 'Cause your network is where you move. And so I moved outside of my network and into a small market. And being inside of a small market what the local businesses wanted was a lot of content. And they wanted, so I would, I would shoot mostly events or I would shoot fashion or whatever and just dump a lot of content onto their Facebook page and then people would tag themselves and they'd use it organically.

- So tell me a little bit about the hat.

- So the hat is, I just wanna, just quick background because I am not a ranger technically, but I'm an honorary ranger 'cause I have friends in north Georgia who are rangers, and two weekends ago they invited me to the ranger open house at Camp Merrill. And it was awesome 'cause I saw guys jumping out of helicopters and I saw four paratroopers land in the exact same spot from 12,000 feet all in sequence about every 20 seconds. It was amazing. So my friend, Steven, who lives in north Georgia, is a ranger and he invited me down. And I've kind of been an honorary ranger for a couple years. So I thought I would buy the hat, but technically, so it's, okay so the ranger motto, to be clear, is lead the way. And I do feel like I am part of that spirit because I feel like, I feel like USpace is pushing, is leading the way into the next iteration of social media. We're social 2.0.

- So, you're doing your photography, you're leveraging social media, so how did you kinda stumble into your concept with USpace?

- So I started marketing, when I became, when I did local marketing I realized that if I'm gonna do all of this backend and go through the labyrinth Byzantine user interface of Facebook's advertising platform that is barbaric and impossible to understand, if I'm gonna go through all of that pain and suffering of non-user-friendliness, then I'm going to market high end items. So I moved to Asheville, North Carolina to work for a furniture company that sold high ticket items, like starting at 1500. So if I could, if you're selling social media and you sell a couple of dinners, the person running that business doesn't care. It's just not enough conversion.