PardonMyFrench

Revisiting Facebook for Online Advertising

You long time readers know that I've had a love-hate relationship with using Facebook as an online advertising buy; that is specifically buying banner ad space and not for using it for connecting with customers-supporters which I always believed it was extremely useful.  Facebook with its low CPM rates and lack of targeting options coupled with boring ad units put it extremely low on my media recommendation list.  That is until recently. I've become very bullish on Facebook advertising and hope they make more targeting options changes.

On the right is a screen shot of a make believe ad buy (actually it was a real one but I

 can't who it is really for).  So, let's take a tour and describe  what I like about Facebook for advertising and what I think they should still change.

1) The geo-targeting works fine if you want to target by city, state, or country.  However, there aren't zip code, county, or MSA options plus I could really use a bulk upload.  I'd imagine Facebook will be changing this in the future.

2) Other demos like male/female, targeting on a user's birthday, education level and whether you are in a relationship and if you are interested in males or females provides some interesting targeting options especially if you are a dating site (for example) or need to target based on marital status.  Interesting targeting but really this is left over from their college only Facebook days.

3) Now the Keywords is where it gets very interesting.  You have to be a keyword wizard and you have to understand that these keywords are not the kind you would normally search on but really kind of like groups within Facebook of what people put on their page.  The main problem I have with this is that if you enter in more than one term Facebook looks at it as an OR instead of an AND.  For example if you wanted Republicans who like Obama you can't (see below for the exception),  You'll find 2.9 million Facebook people who have Barack Obama on their page but when you add in Republican you get about 3.17 million which is just adding in Republicans to Obama's total.  This is good targeting, but an AND function would be much better,

4) The workplace targeting is very interesting especially if you are going after a certain company.  This is unbelievably cool

5) Connection targeting really only works if you are the Facebook admin so you can target your own supporters or if you want to exclude them.  This is how the Barack Obama admin can target their large fan base and then use keywords to further segment them out.  That's how they could find Barack Obama Republicans.

6) The CPMs or CPCs are dirt cheap still - at this level I like using CPMs so I make sure my ad is shown.  The ad units are not their new sexy units which are usually reserved for their large customers (this should change too soon) and the media is not on a user's home page but on their subpages.  Again this is kind of a bummer if you don't have multiple thousands of dollars to spend, but still quite the non-premier options are quite good now.

I think Facebook is a good tool right now especially with their targeting options and dirt cheap CPMs.  I do hope they make some improvements to their keyword targets by making it an AND and not an OR plus provide the option for lower spenders to get on a home page or get better ad units.  At that point with those three changes, Facebook would explode for the small advertiser.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Skittles.com Revamp - Genius or Did Mars Spend too Much Time at Hot Dog Johnny's?

Twitter was all the rage this morning with the revamp of Skittles.com because it seems the folks in Mars' marketing division revamped the site so it is a 300x250 ad unit with a picture and links.  When you roll over the boxes it can either expands into landing pages or pops up a Twitter search results page or even Skittles's Facebook page. 

Unfortunately for Skittles I didn't see too many flattering posts.  Most people thought the revamp of the site was a hoax to drive traffic.  A lot of people thought that their marketing division spent too much time at Hot Dog Johnny's because they are relying on Twitter for consumer generated content or Facebook.  The Twitter ones could be particularly damaging because people  can post (or did post) unflattering comments that can appear on their homepage.  Or even worse, the frequent downtime of Twitter could display a Twitter apology.  Of course the classic web designers think it is an awful execution.  Me?  I think it is brilliant for a product just like it.

5 REASONS WHY SKITTLE'S REDESIGN IS BRILLIANT MARKETING

1. How much site utility did they have to start, none?  Yes that's right.  Why would anyone go back to this type of site?  Sure if there was a promotion, it would generate traffic, but this is candy.  How many times are you going back to look up the calorie value?  Sure if they had recipes, you'd get better traffic, but for candy? Zero.
2. Twitter Provides Sporadic Customer Updates.  Again this is a low involvement product.  How often are you going to Tweet how great the greens are?  Sure they could be taking a beating today from so called marketing gurus, but after the first few days blow over, they'll have Twitters world wide generating content for them.
3. Facebook Tells You Which of Your Friends Are Fans Too.  Yes.  When you look at the Fans on their Facebook page, you'll more likely than not see some of your Facebook friends who are also fans reinforcing for you that they like Skittles too.  That's an awesome feature because they just turned your Facebook friends into product ambassadors for Skittles.
4. No More Website Content.  No need to figure out how to update the content often.  Let Twitter and Facebook do it for you.  The rest of the site is media information, product information, and contact links - basically low involvement stuff that changes infrequently.
5. Websites Can Be Subservient to CGC.  People will spend a lot more time on their Facebook and Twitter pages (Google too) than they will ever spend on a CPG site like Skittles.com.  So instead of trying to pull people away from pages they'd rather visit, Skittles figured out how to keep their website front and center by making it a DHTML overlay.

I wrote a post a while back asking if you really need a website and it appears the good folks at Mars read a fellow Warren County/Morris County's blog post (Long Valley is about 10 minutes from Hackettstown).  Sites that won't update their content often or don't provide utility to bring people back on a regular basis should pay close attention to Skittles.com. 

Do you always need a website or should you just rely on Facebook and Twitter for your content?  Very interesting question and I wish Skittles.com a lot of success.  I think it is brilliant.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

2008 Election Recount Part 4 - Why Weren't We More Social?

This is part 4 of my series looking at the 2008 Presidential Election.  Past posts are: Part 1 The Palin Effect, Part 2 Monday Morning Quarterback, and Part 3 The Death of Microtargeting.

So one of the questions that everyone likes to ask or write about is why didn't Senator McCain's team embrace social networking?  My answer is, well we did but we were challenged by money, people resources, and our own supporters.

First a little disclosure.  It is no secret that I am not a believer in using social networking sites for PAID online advertising.  That's especially true for MySpace which is where I believe good advertisers go to die, especially if they do direct deals with them.  Facebook, I have a little more faith in, but I am hard pressed to recommend them for advertising too.  YouTube I love and I've run campaigns there; I especially love YouTube because they are powered by Google which always makes me happy.  So, standard display advertising is a waste of money on most social networking sites, but I do (and did) believe they are critical for involving supporters and pushing CRM messages.  OK, so what do I think happened.  Three things....

1. No Money - as much as social networking costs next to nothing when compared with advertising, it still costs money to develop widgets and content.  When compared with Senator Obama, we were at a significant disadvantage.
2. No People - social networking done correctly needs people to do the outreach.  Unofficially I've heard that Senator Obama's eCampaign totaled around 95 and Senator McCain's totaled around 15.  At that level of disparity you have to make choices by prioritizing items.
3. Different Supporters - While I believe there were quite a number of people that supported Senator McCain that would spontaneously create videos, Senator Obama as well as Congressman Ron Paul had a much larger pool of people that would create content.  Here's a screen shot of videos when you search on YouTube for Barack Obama and John McCain (filtered out crap).  Other than "Dear Mr. Obama" and "Obama's Citizenship Problem" the number of positive McCain supporter videos are nowhere to be found and even if they were further do on the list, they would not have nearly as many video views.  Heck, even our best professional fan video - Raisin' McCain by John Rich only generated 152,000 views.

McCain's team had a Facebook page and we pushed messaging through it added widgets, and had 600K+ supporters.  To put that in perspective, we had 3.85 times as many supporters as Hillary Clinton.  Yes, Obama was a monster when it came to Facebook but then again you could argue he had inside help to get him started. We did some advertising in Facebook and for a very small micro-target it performed great, but didn't scale.

We used YouTube from the very beginning.  When the campaign imploded during the Primary season we had to use YouTube to push out video ads.  Web videos was a key strategy for us especially before we won New Hampshire.

The blogosphere was also very important but it was a tough row to hoe prior to wrapping up the nomination and then it took some time after that.  The vast majority of Republican blogs are very conservative writers and those are our activists.  It was BRUTAL during the Primary season.  Town Hall bloggers were rough, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Race42008, and so on.  I should know because I monitored posts.  I made comments.  I reached out to bloggers.  I mixed it up with people.  I interacted with Mitt Romney's army of supporters and took on Ron Paul's zealots.  Town Hall's Hugh Hewitt DROVE ME FRIGGIN CRAZY and years later I still find it difficult to read his posts. 

I marshalled bloggers to help John McCain win TechCrunch's Tech President endorsement.  Heck, who do you think put John McCain's SecondLife together just in case?  If you were one of my Twitter followers in the last month of the campaign you saw campaign posts from the Daily Briefing.  We pushed out widgets, video contests, tried donation gathering from MySpace, Yahoo! Answers, MySpace Townhall, etc and etc.

So when people say John McCain's team wasn't social, they are wrong.  We were very social.  Did we run into the greatest use of social networking marketing in the history of the internet in the form of Barack Obama? YES. 

If we were more social would we have won the election?  No.  We still had to deal withan unpopular President, the economy, and money problems.  Senator McCain's eCampaign Team was VERY SOCIAL and any marketer should be jealous of what we accomplished; that is unless you were on Senator Obama's campaign.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

So Do You Actually Recommend Facebook for Online Advertising

I've had about two Facebook moments just today alone for two different clients.  One client was looking to target the youth segment and the second client wanted to push widgets-applications out to a wide audience.  For both clients I didn't recommend buying online ads in Facebook for reasons that I've given in the past (more on that in a second).  Then I get back from my meetings in the city (my new favorite drink is Tanqueray 10, tonic and two slices of lime) and read this article in Fortune called Finding cracks in Facebook and I had to smile.  Not because of any Facebooks woes because clearly they are a leader in social networking, but because of this line:

"Facebook ads can sell for as little as 15 cents per 1,000 impressions (CPM) - compared with the estimated $13 on Yahoo properties. And even at those bargain prices, marketers are reluctant to spend money on a venue where users aren't paying attention."

I'm hard pressed to buy any ads on Facebook for exactly this reason.  I believe that social networking ads are online wallpaper especially for acquisition and even branding tactics.  And even at 15 cent CPMs it would be a stretch to recommend them.  Sure going after the youth market they are still the best place to find concentrated web surfers, but how good are those ads even at such a low rate.  15 cent CPMS with low click rates or acquisition is just what it is - cheap eyeballs and the vast majority of marketers have moved passed this.

I don't know why Facebook doesn't want to embrace what they are to a lot of marketers.  A great place to engage customers, evangelize supporters, push information, and have users show their love by posting badges and widgets.  It is a great, effective, and efficient tool for communicating with customers especially with the younger generation who increasingly uses email less and communicates via message boards.

The pressure started coming down when they wanted to monetize that traffic.  Sure partnering with Google to place paid clicks ads is an awesome tool and that model works because Google serves the ads based on relevancy.  Plus a lot of Google users don't realize that if you don't want your ads served on partner search sites you have to opt out of it.  It is a great monetization model, but then extrapolating that for display ads is another thing where CPMS are believed to be higher. 

However, it is hard to push CPMs up when you serve plain display ads without video.  They seem so outdated and cheap, plus you can build them yourself without much creative experience.  Those ads show that and contribute to their wallpaper feel.  For example, I logged on tonight and here are the ten ads that were served to me:

1. Verizon (placed probably by an ad network)
2. Great-prizes.com correctly messaged to men over 34 (Facebook flyer)
3. Savvy-daddy.com correctly message to me (Facebook flyer)
4. All American Dish (Facebook flyer)
5. NPD research correctly messaged to over 34 (FF)
6. Some 30 Year Old Millionaire ad (FF)
7. Puma ad for Like.com correctly targeted to men (FF)
8. Myeasyrewards.com (FF)
9. Same as #8
10. Vacation homes

While they got the targeting correct for most of the ads, this isn't hard to do based on the profiles.  The ads themselves are shall we say on the cheesy side of ads and would be hard pressed to be considered branding ad units.  I built a few ads, didn't turn them on, and you know what CPM rate I was told to bid? 32 cents!!  That's right 32 cent CPMs and if I wanted CPCs around 69 cents.  The CPM IS DIRT FRIGGIN CHEAP, especially when you take into consideration their advanced targeting that seems to actually work.

It would be hard for any major marketers to justify spending marketing dollars for something like this.  I don't want you to think Facebook has zero value, just when it comes to branding and acquisition.  For customer relationship management and evangelizing your base it is great, for advertising I'd recommend passing unless you are on the very low budget scale.  I think Facebook's new COO and former Googler Sheryl Sandberg has much longer to go to develop a new ad scheme aimed at the billions that marketers spend on branding ads every year. "I'm hopeful that we play a significant role in pushing the envelope [with] awareness building," she says. "How we get there, I don't think we know yet." 

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Is Twitter via Twitbin Killing Professional Facebookers?

I've had a love-hate-back to love relationship with Twitter.  It went into the serious love relationship when I downloaded Twitbin for Firefox.  Twitbin puts the updates on the left hand margin of my screen so I have an ongoing dialog running and can get news updates, friend updates, and other internet thought leader updates during the day.   It really makes it easy and removed one of the challenges I had with Twitter which was to open another tab and hit refresh to see what was going on.  It is like having an unlimited IM friends list without the annoying blinking when someone wants to find me.  However, Facebook for me is getting pushed aside.

This isn't to write that I think there are flaws with Facebook.   I just think that Twitter solves a lot of professional issues with Facebook.  To me the updating features in Facebook was what made it so interesting to the non-college aged crowd.  You can post updates of yourself and then see updates from your friends, however Twitter is Facebook updates on steroids.  The links that get posted on Facebook are easily pushed out on Twitter without all of the annoying content or images that take up space;  Twitter - you have 140 characters to push your message out.  Sure Twitter is text based, but you can always get a link to pictures and videos. 

Now we Professionals can keep our Rolodex LinkedIn product and couple it with Twitter to get into the update mode without having to resort to Facebook which to me has become inundated with gadgets, join requests, and gaming requests; so much so that I really don't understand the point of joining a cause that requires me to take no action.

Between my blog, RSS reader, LinkedIn, and Twitter updates I keep that professional internet feel all while participating in the update world with other professionals.  I'm starting not to miss Facebook.  Now if only some of the companies using Facebook to push updates out will turn to Twitter; that would be the unobtrusive, short text way to go.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Facebook Ads Get Kicked Up a Notch

Three interesting articles this weekend and in no particular order....

1. Techcrunch goes into details about Facebook's new advertising plans that they will announce on Tuesday in ad:tech.  Basically an expanded network on and off properties and the potential to combine purchases and actions off the Facebook platform and display them in your news feed.  That's almost mind blowing to think your Amazon book purchases can appear on your news feed for your network to see.
2. BusinessWeek looks at (surprise) declining click rates across the internet and it includes a quote from fellow internet Oldtimer Kevin Lee "Targeting will come in to rescue all forms of digital advertising."
3. And Cnet writes about more of Facebooks advertising and targeting plans

That's certainly a lot of articles on Facebook who continues to rival Google for news and changes to their advertising platform.  Notice the lack of any marketing buzz these days for MySpace which I've stated over and over again that it is nothing more than the Web 2.0 version of Geo Cities.  I've pretty much stated (and did so at a conference on social marketing) that buying banner ads on a social network is almost a complete waste of marketing dollars.  The vast majority of ads that I see in Facebook today are cheesy network buys that are probably worth at best a CPA; personally, I always asked to remove consumer generated content from any network buys.  However, even without Project Beacon (from Techcrunch) there is hope in the Facebook ads when you use their flyers or get access to their targeting selects.  I've seen better ads lately and unscientifically here's what I'm seeing tonight on 10 page refreshes

1. Untargeted acne ad
2. Potentially targeted pharma ad (drug for kids problems)
3. Crappy untargeted MSN search ad
4. Untargeted college intern ad
5. Untargeted Vonage ad
6. Untargeted JC Penny ad
7. Untargeted acne ad
8. Untargeted Vonage ad
9. Facebook flyer partially targeted to 30+ singles (I'm married)
10. Untargeted Monster.com ad

Clearly Facebook figured out that right now they are selling ugly wall paper which their users are most likely ignoring en masse.  Using the available data in Facebook to work on targeting is definitely a welcome step.  Project Beacon however "kicks it up a notch". 

One of the great parts of Facebook unlike Google, MySpace aka Geo Cities, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and all of the other pretenders is that Facebook makes it fun and easy to blast updates to your network.  They import my blog and tagged articles, when I take an action on Facebook it is broadcast, when I meet a new friend my network is notified, and I can send a blast note out to the entire group.

Now off-Facebook actions like book and CD purchases can be broadcast.  This provides powerful word of mouth marketing and testimonials without asking you the purchaser to write a post.  It can be broadcast to your network giving the product owners and website owners free advertising.   Couple that with Facebook demographics, movie ratings, etc and if Facebook can actually make sense of that data for the vast majority of stupid advertisers they have a real shot to solve the consumer generated content advertising challenge.

The other thing I like about Facebook's ad changes is that anyone, regardless of spend or importance can get access to demo targeting and ad construction.  This makes it very Google-like and helps the small advertiser to get access to their user base.  Clearly they are moving in the right direction.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Politico, Compete Study Rains on Social Networking Parade

Political news site The Politico just published a study it completed with Compete.com which looked at web surfing behaviors of people who visited the current crop of Presidential contenders' websites.  While some of you readers might be saying to yourself, oh great another political marketing post that I'll just ignore, I think you should spend a little more time studying the article and the results.  If a political marketers has challenges with social networking, then perhaps maybe you should rethink your strategy too.  The article called Campaign seek measure of internet success has some great quotes in it and a link to a table to run some of your own comparisons.  Here are some highlights from the article...

• Some of the more newsworthy efforts have focused on campaign-created MySpace, Facebook, Meetup and YouTube pages — and so far, the payoff has been difficult to measure.
• But the results reveal interesting online habits among the politically attuned. A significant number get their news from mainstream media versus political blogs. YouTube, meanwhile, is one of the most reliable ways for candidates to communicate directly to voters. But the candidates’ official Meetup, Facebook and MySpace pages appear less effective at that.
• Half of those tracked by Compete visited MySpace in September, and 54 percent visited YouTube. Nearly two-thirds went to Wikipedia, a quarter logged on to Facebook and 7 percent visited Meetup.
• Meetup, the darling of the 2004 election cycle, barely registers with any candidate other than Internet phenom Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas)
• Two percent checked out the candidates’ MySpace pages, and 1 percent hit his or her Facebook page.
• YouTube is in a different league, with 16 percent of its readers visiting candidate-specific pages
• The political readers captured by Compete were much more likely to get their news from a mainstream source than from political blogs. Forty-eight percent went to CNN, followed by Yahoo News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fox News, USA Today and, to a lesser extent, Politico.

So are these social networks all hype?  Well for politics I think they are over hyped, but they do serve useful purposes in connecting people.  While for advertisers, they provide a cheap and often free way of advertising.  Plus, the word of mouth potential of course is always there.

However (and that's a big however), as an acquisition vehicle I don't think the majority of advertisers have quite figured out how to use them.  Sure for every Ron Paul advertiser there are thousands of other advertisers that don't have the right message or product to move the social networking needle. 

This study clearly shows for the majority of political advertisers that they should put the spending back towards more traditional internet mediums.  Besides that I think advertisers should really think of social networks as a CRM vehicle (yes I wrote that).  That's really where your strategy should be moving towards and less of an acquisition vehicle.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Google to Facebook: If We Can't Buy You, Then Join You

I thought this announcement by Google in the post called Google News Goes Social was a brilliant move on their part.  Google created a Facebook application that lets users have news and customized searches appear on their profile pages.  Of course it also lets the user share any results page.  As you know, MSN bought the right to monetize inventory and when Facebook opened up to allow new applications, I guess the folks at Google seized on this opportunity to create an application that can help drive some of that traffic back to the mother ship.  Brilliant plus a little evil to boot.

Following that announcement, Steve Rubel posted this today under the title Schmidt Hints AdSense Maybe Coming to Facebook Apps that Eric Schmidt would like to have their ads in those applications so you can bet to see Google monetize more of that traffic without really getting into bed with Facebook.  Clearly Google has a purpose to get at that traffic which doesn't seem to be slowing down as proven by Bill Tancer over at Hitwise.

I wonder what Facebook is going to do about a potential increase in ads and how much will that piss off their users who are still predominately around college age.  Sure a bunch of us 30+ professionals have jumped on board realizing how much more interactive using Facebook is compared with Linkedin, but at the end of the day Facebook is still driven by the 18-30 crowd, right? 

Witness the ads that you find on the small left hand skyscraper.  Most of them are untargeted, network buys, but when they are targeted it seems to be at a macro level and not geared towards any profile data or behavioral targeting data.  Frequently the ads are filled by Virgin Mobile, Dating sites, Pimple Ads and those are the professional ones not the ones made using the Facebook Flyer platform.  The Facebook Flyers at least seem to be more targeted because I saw one for The Rutgers Network and then another one (dating) targeting 30+.  Check out this screen shot of some ads.

Anyway I think the battle over Facebook is far from over and that includes who gets to power ads in their pages.  I wonder how long before MSN starts barking about the Google Facebook App?

PardonMyFrench,

Eric