Archive for the “technology” 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.

I watched with interest as Barnes & Noble released the Nook, an electronic book reading thing that’s pretty similar to Amazon’s Kindle.  I immediately thought of Microsoft’s Zune music player, released well after Apple’s iPod had pretty much conquered the world.  There are some interesting similarities and also some differences.

Dominant Design

There are several models of iPod, ranging from the no-screen Shuffle to the all-screen Touch.  As with mobile phones, each of these styles is pretty well-established and I think it’s safe to say that the last time either category got real innovation was when Apple delivered the iPhone and then the iPod Touch.

The dominant design of an ebook reader seems to have crystalized with the Kindle and to a lesser extent, Sony’s reader products.  Black and white e-ink screen, super-long battery life, small or absent keyboard, book-like leather covers optional, and so forth.  In this respect, the Nook, like the Zune, adds maybe some incremental improvement, but little of substance or lasting advantage.

Complementary Assets

Most people agree that the first iPods were not that great as devices, but that it was the iTunes store and the integration of the two that won the day for Apple.  This comparison is more interesting for the book readers.  By the time Microsoft released the Zune, the iTunes store was huge and dominant, and Apple computers were gaining share against Windows boxes on the back of iPod and iPhone sales.

In the book world, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have pretty much the same assets.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a new book exclusive to either store, at least not with paper books.  Ebooks might turn out different, but at least for starters, it seems the two companies have the opportunity to offer the same media selection to their ebook reader customers.  Amazon’s store carries far more than books and music, and that might turn out to be important as they put more Amazon-dedication shopping machines into consumers’ hands.

Network Effect

If you can build a network effect into a product, you have a good chance at getting your users to do some serious marketing for you.  Social networks thrive on invitations, and they’re more useful as more of your friends join them.  Reading and listening to music are somewhat solitary pursuits (I would argue that the iPod and before that the walkman made music solitary when it had been quite social and that greedy music execs have prevented any device I know of having a second headphone jack) so it’s an interesting question how or if ebook readers can go viral.

Both Microsoft and Barnes and Noble tried making their challenger devices more social.  Microsoft’s “squirting” allowed you to send songs via wifi from your Zune to a friend’s Zune for three plays.  The songs you squirt are still available to you to listen to while they’re squirted and it seems you can squirt as many songs to as many friends as you like.  That seemed to have been too little too late.  Apple was allowing DRM-free downloads of some music, and three plays (with a three day time limit) seemed stingy.  Plus, with the wifi sending method (as cool as that might be) you have to be physically near your friend to squirt. And let’s not get into the wisdom of calling this “squirting.”

I speculate that Barnes and Noble did some focus research on heavy readers (like book clubbers, for example) and came up with a sharing feature that’s more like what we do with paper books.  As I’ve blogged before, I think lending and sharing paper books is a viral part of both reading and friendship.  With a Nook, you (the Nooker?) can loan an ebook to a fellow Nook owner (The Nookee?) for two weeks, during which time it is unavailable to you to read.  Seems pretty fair and similar to the reality of paper.  But then I read that Nook loans can be disabled on a book-by-book basis by the publisher, and even when enabled, allow only one loan of a given title – ever.  Not only does that fail to take full advantage of the capability of digital books, it adds a restriction that doesn’t even exist in the paper world.  Disappointing First Sale Doctrine Fail.

It seems unlikely that the Nook could win the day on the basis of the sharing feature, even if it did everything I want it to, but the hobbling of that feature looks like just another indicator that the Nook will go the way of the Zune – not gone, but forgotten.

As you may have noticed, October was a pretty poor month posting-wise here at limeduck world headquarters.  I was therefore quite excited to see a new inbound link in my dashboard.  I followed it and found another example of an all-too-common blogging phenomenon: grabbing peoples’ photos to illustrate your posts without permission or attribution.

Since the post was about being laid off from working at a bakery (and as of this writing, the author is still unemployed), I felt sort of bad dropping a stink bomb in the comments. I can’t stay mad at the unemployed knitting blogger, but I can complain that this practice is widespread in personal and even corporate blogs, and it really must stop.  I often cite Fair Use, but this is not it.  Fair Use is, among other things, publishing a portion of  a copyrighted work to illuminate a discussion or review of that work.  The attribution is clear because you’re discussing that work.

Blogging about how frustrated you are by  your cell phone carrier (a common enough blog topic) does not mean you can just search the net for “frustration” or “cell phone plan” and clip one of the image results for your post.  You’ve got to make an attempt to find out the copyright status of the image and do the right thing.

I’m sure you can find times when I’ve done it wrong (do let me know, I’d like to fix them), but here’s what I try to do these days:

• Try to use my own work as much as possible
• Sample others’ works when discussing them, but keep it clear what’s quoted and keep images and media small/short or embedded
• Use product images when discussing those products
• Always link the image to the source (source web page, not source image) and attribute with at least <alt> text, preferably caption or nearby copy

Copyright and Fair Use are not quite fully adapted to the internets yet, but I’m trying to hold up my end.  I hope other bloggers will think a little more about their image-acquisition habits.