Archive for the “media” Category

Everybody loves advertising, so I figured I’d share some tips about advertising on Facebook that have accumulated on my plate after a few different jobs and consulting projects using them.

o. You can get started with Facebook ads on the cheap. Anybody can run ads on Facebook on a CPC or CPM basis (and I’ll wager that they’ll roll out CPA after a while) with a few dollars and half a clue.  Results improve with additional dollars and clue.

1. Facebook ads are not behavioral, and they’re not search ads either. In the main, you can target Facebook ads at facebookers based on what’s in their profiles – location, age, relationship status, gender, employment, stuff they like, etc. This info is self-reported and subject to the categories that Facebook has created. This is not the same as search ads that target people based on what they just an instant ago typed into a search engine.  Adjust your expectations accordingly.

2. There’s some serious freshness bias. I’m willing to bet that the first (full) day you run an ad, you’ll get more impressions and more clicks than any other day after that.   I don’t know for sure why that is (or even if it’s universally so) but I suspect that the ad serving system is biased towards newer ads.  It’s also possible that the Facebook community gets immune to your ad very quickly.  In any case, I find that making small modifications to you ads on a weekly or even daily basis can help mitigate this effect.

3. It’s got nothing to do with advertising, but you can use the Facebook ads interface – for free – to do some quick and dirty market sizing. Just go in as if you were creating an ad, and play with the targeting options to get exciting factoids like the number of people on Facebook who are single, in your geographic area, and like dogs.  You can get all that info without even writing any creative or paying for any ads.  But be careful about generalizing this info as Facebook adoption isn’t uniform around the world or across demographics.

4. Help is available – for a price. Facebook has some ad service people who will talk to you if you’re buying at least $15k/month in ads. Furthermore, they will under some circumstances provide you with a “business account” – a separate login to the ad system that’s not linked to anybody’s individual profile, a definite plus for businesses.  On top of that, sometimes they can be convinced to provide a bulk ad upload capability.  This would seem to be in their interest as it lets customers run lots and lots of ads.  Note that in order to run ads promoting your fan page, you’ll have to make the business account a page admin, which you can do only by email address, since the business account doesn’t really have a profile.

So do I recommend Facebook ads? I’m not going near that question, I’m just sharing some things I’ve discovered.  Do your homework, test a little, double down if it’s working for you.  Advertising is key to Facebook’s world-domination revenue goals, and in the short time that I’ve been working with Facebook ads, I’ve seen them invest a lot in the capability.  While they still have some distance to go, they provide some opportunities that you can’t get with seemingly similar search ads on the more mature Google and Yahoo ad networks.  And, I might add, Facebook’s ad system is parsecs ahead of LinkedIn’s.

Your mileage will vary, but I hope you’ll share what you find too.

Well, here’s one thing that doesn’t seem to be in evidence in Sicily: a burbling startup scene.  I dropped in at Web Innovators 26 (it seems only yesterday I was at Webinno18) at the Royal Sonesta to check out the demos and pitches.  As usual, there were some “main dishes” that got longer demo spots and some “sides” that got 15 seconds.  All had tables and the big ballroom was packed.

Maybe it’s the recessionary times, but I noted that the companies on offer seemed to cluster around the more basic of human needs.  Not to say they weren’t smart and sophisticated ideas.  Here’s a rundown, and then I’ll get to the strange underwear theme that ran through the evening like an elastic waistband.

Birchbox, a “new concept in beauty retail” that sounds just a little bit like a fancy coffin.

Chargify, a recurring billing service for serial entrepreneurs who have better things to do than worry about dunning and fraud.

DoInk, a community of “artists, animators and doodlers” reusing one another’s artwork to create animations and drawings.  they ran away with the audience choice award by a wide margin, and many tweets reminded people to “show this to the kids.”

JitterJam, some “web-based social marketing software”

manpacks, just what it sounds like, automated underwear delivery for “busy men”

Milabra, a “Visual Intelligence Platform” that serves up ads based on the color and content of a website’s imagery. Smart MIT guys, cool technology, kinda sluggish demo.

RelayRides, like Zipcar but with your car. Or maybe like Circle Lending but with your car. I like the idea that they allow more driving with the existing fleet of cars.

Trustmarker, a provider of “digital trustmark networks” which are, um, those things, you know, like verisign, but your own. I think.

Marketeers have heard endless variants on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the philosophy of selling “medicine, not vitamins”  but I thought this was largely (not entirely!) a refreshingly down to earth bunch of startup ideas.  What’s more basic than entertaining kids, feeling good about how you look, building trust, and getting around town cost-effectively?

But those concepts are as often as not boring or undifferentiated.  And that’s probably why what’s arguably the most absurd of the ideas – manpacks – was the one that everyone, even the other presenters, was taking about.  As the Lorax pointed out, you do not need a thneed, and as I am pointing out, if you’re too busy to pull together some underwear, you need to re-think your business.  But the image of busy (or more likely, lazy) men ordering a tailored internet subscription to their, um, unmentionables, has a strange appeal.

Manpacks is the youngest of the webinno companies – the only one founded in 2010 – and it’s already got a bunch of press.  I have no idea if it has or deserves any customers.  Maybe it’s just a brilliant publicity stunt for some other business, but it helps us ask two good questions…

1. does your business actually solve a real problem?

2. have you built a story around it that would make anybody care?

I started the passover season with the first five plagues of social media, and despite a considerable transportation delay incurred by of all things a flood, I’m back with a few more plagues this Sunny Easter morning.  To refresh your memory:

1. Spam
2. Corporate Blogs
3. Self-Appointed Experts
4. Accumulationism
5. Constant Partial Attention
6. The Echo Chamber. Dance all you want on the grave of print, but at least when you went to the newsstand to buy your favorite rag, you had at least passing exposure to the headlines on the covers of opposing rags.  Creating personalized newsfeeds and groups of friends and followers lets us indulge our weaker impulse to attend only to those with whom we already agree.
7. Social Media Exceptionalism. Exceptionalism as you may recall from the last couple hundred years of United States politics, is the belief that your thing is, well, exceptional, and therefore “does not need to conform to normal rules or general principles” [wikipedia] – this is more or less a continuation of PR Exceptionalism and Brand Exceptionalism, two great “we can’t/shouldn’t measure this program” belief systems.  I’ll grant that social media is by nature more measurable and that many practitioners are making good efforts to measure it, but exceptionalism still kicks in when the measurements don’t live up to what we hoped and we decide we must have underinvested or decide to call the program experimental. No more excuses, no more faith-based marketing, I say.
8. Social Media Purism.  Or maybe I should call it Puritanism.  The idea that Social Media is All You Need and the related idea that It Cannot Be Mixed or Diluted with Other Modes and Methods have the ugly tang of fanaticism about them.  The flavor of the month is tasty, no doubt, but it’s not the only one.

Just two more plagues to go.  Stay tuned and stay ducky.

Tonight is the start of Passover, a holiday celebrating the struggle for liberation with foods designed to remind you of suffering and enslavement.  At one point in the traditional Seder, participants recite the ten plagues visited on Egypt , spilling out a bit of wine for each one in token commiseration for the suffering the plagues brought.

The canonical plagues are:

1. Blood (water turning into blood)
2. Frogs (lots of frogs, everywhere)
3. Lice
4. Beasts (like wild and marauding ones)
5. Livestock disease
6. Boils
7. Hail (sometimes described as mixed with fire – eek!)
8. Locusts
9. Darkness (all day)
10. Death of all first-born children

Perhaps tonight social media peeps will hold back a tweet or ten in recognition for the suffering visited upon us by social media, social marketing, and all the attendant hoohah these past few years.  Here are five, and I’ll serve up five more within a week.  I have the full list pretty well figured out, but I’ll happily take nominations.

1. Spam.  OK, social media didn’t cause spam,but it didn’t stop it or even reduce it.  We have to contend with actual malicious content as well as content that’s merely obnoxious, such as oversharing or overtweeting.
2. Corporate Blogs.  Companies trying to cash in on the authenticity and openness of social media have created some of the least authentic blogs in the universe.  I know, I’ve written some of them. Sure, you can use a blog for PR and for link building and for SEO, but hey, guess, what?  You can also use it to share what’s really going on in your company.
3. Self-Appointed Experts.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and people seem to want experts to explain to them how to use democratic, user-generated media.  Seems to me they miss the point, but I hereby appoint the self-appointed social media experts a plague.
4. Accumulationism.  OK, I probably just made that word up, and if I didn’t, I probably misused it.  Anyway, the mis-measurement of social media success or influence by the number of followers, the number of links, the number of friends, the number of posts, and so forth is pernicious and misleading.  Feh.
5. Constant Partial Attention.  Mobile devices are as much to blame as social media proper, and this was a problem with email before, but it’s gotten so much worse.  The need to even try to consume the torrent of microdrivel prevents people from focusing for even a minute on any one thing of import.

Well, that should keep you all busy as you attempt to discreetly update your facebook status while digesting the meginah.  Stay tuned for five more plagues over the rest of the holiday.

As you may know, the first rule of my book club is, well, I can’t tell you the first rule.  One of the other rules is, when it’s your turn, you pick the book and that’s the book.  No discussion, voting or appeals are needed.  Sure, there’s sometimes some friendly wrangling, but when push comes to shove, we read what is chosen for us.  Last month, it was a lesser-known early work by Herman Melville, Mardi, and a Voyage Thither.  The relative obscurity of this work provided some challenges and opportunities, as it’s pretty much out of print, but also out of copyright.

Having exhausted the obvious first choices of public libraries and used bookstores and come up empty, I decided to see what else was out there.  Regular and online bookstores had or could order the book, but at 300+ pages each for two volumes, I thought this might finally be the time to look into electronic readers.  The idea of carrying hundreds of books around in a few ounces of electronics never appealed much to me, but the idea of carrying around one very large book in a smaller form factor was starting to make me think again.

Kindle, Nook, iPod, iPad, PC – no shortage of reading devices, each covered plenty well by pundits worthier than I.  But what about the media itself?  It turns out that there’s something called Project Guternberg, a collection of free downloadable ebooks, generally ones that have landed in the public domain after their copyrights expired.  There’s also Google Books of course, where you can read but not generally download books.  Reading books on a 5 pound laptop wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

After some poking around, I found what I thought would be a terrible solution, but the price was right.  I downloaded the free Mobipocket reader for my phone and picked up the Melville at Project Guternberg.

As it turned out, I read 350 pages of turgid 19th Century prose a few pages at a time on my two-train commute over the course of a month or so.  It wasn’t ideal, but it was certainly convenient.  I could read with one hand while holding on for dear life with the other.  I didn’t have to worry about losing my place and even in a very crowded train, the device was small enough that I didn’t worry about elbowing fellow passengers while using it, and it was easy to slip back into a pocket without wrangling a book or larger device into and out of a bag or case.

I wondered if there was hope for paper.  And then I met Paige.

In the back of the Harvard Bookstore is a Rube Goldberg contraption consisting of two different printers, a couple of computers and a clear plastic box containing some very sharp blades and pot of boiling hot glue.  It’s called Paige M. Gutenberg.  Get it?  It’s a book machine.  In goes paper, ink, glue and a digital file, and out comes a perfect-bound book in a couple of minutes.  It’s a wacky marriage of cyber- and steampunk. You can smell the glue when you stand near it. I had to try it.

After some consultation with the staff, I learned that you first have to select (which generally means buy) the digital file from a variety of sources, and then once the machine is warmed up, the printing and binding takes just a few minutes.  Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the files of Mardi were as costly, perhaps more so, than the pre-printed books.  But in the spirit of investigation, I paid $30 for volume two and watched Paige crank it out.  The print quality was great and the paper stock pleasant.  The cover (also printed on the spot with a different printer on different stock) was a little on the cheap side, and the binding was not quite perfect perfect binding.

All in all, if you really need it right away or it’s out of print, this is a great thing. But I fear it’s years late and more than a few dollars short in holding back ebooks.  Sure, it makes high(ish) quality printing and binding on demand available to small-time authors or artists, but even a five minute wait at a bookstore compares poorly with near-instant delivery to a computer or handheld device.  And if you insist on paper, you can often get cheaper and higher quality books shipped in a few days – even same day in some cities – from the giants of ecommerce.

Still, I’m glad there are options, especially because those options are evidence of interest in the business of publishing which means people are still reading, and that’s good.