socialmediocrity

WTF?

Facebooks fan page ads have taken another turn.

Mitchell and Webb being bumed off

Instead of just asking me to become a fan, I am now told that one of boys is bumin off to this too.

Whatever that means.

Anyway, clicking on the link simply displays which of my “boys” is “bumin off” to this. Turns out it’s one of my be-yatches.

What a strange turn-of-phrase Facebook uses sometimes.

In something of a follow up to an earlier post, Facebook-tastic. Let’s all be fans of everything, it seems Facebook have taken things further.

Or it’s broken.

I was slightly bemused by this.

I don’t know if there is some undefined relationship between the Farm Tavern, a publilc house in Brighton popular with my friend Kate, and the artist Martha Herbst, also from Brighton it seems. But on further investigation, there doesn’t appear to be an obvious one, or at least not one involving Kate. Looking at Martha’s 63 fans, Kate is not amon gst them yet, even.

We’ve seen time and again that micro-targeting is far less effective at increasing response rates if you don’t also micro-message the audience, and once you remove the relevance in this manner, it is easy to see why. This is nothing more than an untargeted ad for Martha Herbst, with a random picture of one of my friends on.

It seems to be a backward step and somewhat puzzling if it is a Facebook initiative, though I would be intrigued to see the results these are generating. Of course this could be what happens when adding Social Actions to your campaign goes wrong, and if that’s the case it is perhaps something Facebook need to protect their users against.

With advertisers complaining of low response rates from Facebook’s ad platform, and yet some advertisers clearly getting strong enough results to inundate me with offers to meet a new mate tonight, how do you crack the problem?

What got me started on this subject, enough anyway to put ePen to ePaper (heck, I do this everyday talking to clients, I just don’t always write it down), was this post on the subject on mashable (which I normally hold in high esteem):

How can Facebook Crack Its’ advertising problem?

Quoting Goldstein and his parody of the consumer-attention-arms-race, the article falls way way short in it’s understanding of how and why consumers respond. Let’s walk through and see if we can correct it.

The author claims there are two main reasons a consumer clicks:

• They see an ad, they recognise it’s an ad, and it is relevant, or
• They see an ad, they don’t recognise it as an ad, but it’s relevant anyway, so they click.

So what’s wrong with this? Hmmm.

Well, if we go back to basics, I remember there being taught three motviations for response in marketing. And in no particular order:

• Fear,
• Greed, and
• Sex

There’s a lot of guff talked about behavioural targeting, contextual targeting, but most campaigns, and the reasons for their success can be boiled down to one or more of the three basic tenets. No wonder, then, that the majority of ads I see on Facebook are trying to sell me a dating service, something to make me more attractive to the opposite sex, or someway to get money – even if that’s is only temporarily in the form of a payday loan.

To be honest I don’t think consumers take the time to acknowledge whether or not what they are seeing is an ad. If they’re viewing 45 pages per visit, they haven’t got time to make that judgement. If it is relevant enough though it will cut-through any response-inertia the consumer might have and compel them to respond. And this is the job of the advertiser. It’s not going to be easy, and many agencies won’t be used to it – especially those working for larger, well-established brands – but it is what we get paid for, afterall. New media opportunities often require new approaches.

And so we go on to look at the two advertsing types mentioned: search advertising, and movie trailers.

Firstly, let’s get one thing straight. Search marketing and display advertising on Facebook are two very different animals. Just because the phrase “keyword” comes up in both doesn’t make them directly comparable.

Search is prompted. You search for something because you have a mind to. Again, going back to basics and considering the Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action process, we can place most search activity, and especially that being run commercially by advertisers expecting a sale conversion, to be firmly in the latter Desire / Action parts of the purchase process.

Facebook ads, on the other hand, start much much earlier in the funnel, and therefore offer much greater potential in terms of volume if consumers actively add their interests. These are opportunities to put your message in front of people you believe might have a greater propensity to find your product or service relevant to them. The ads can have multiple outcomes: increased awareness fo a new product or product launch, interest generating (which may lead to increased searches), but also Desire and then Action through direct response.

Let’s take the other example, and use it as a working study. Let’s say we’re launching a new movie. Not Harry Potter, not Star Wars. In fact this movie has never ever been heard of ever before. It is not adapted from a novel, nor a TV show. Who is going to search for it in Google? And what if it doesn’t win awards at Cannes? Then what?

Well, apart from putting it straight to DVD, and on to the dustier shelves at Blockbuster, here’s a thought. Why don’t we work out what pother films it is a bit similar to, and then go and tell fans of those films about it? Rocketology? Not really, but it seems to have escaped most advertisers that Amazon’s recommendations engine is really rather effective to and to simulate that might eb a nice idea.

And so we go on to the subject of timing. Are we really to believe that as advertisers we are increasingly held hostage to the whims of the consumer, who will only respond when they want to? OK, yes, the consumer has far more control these days, but the essence of timing if you’re launching a new product is about the launch date. Of course the launch date itself will have been chosen very carefully taking account of many other factors, but when it comes to promoting it, then I’m sorry, Mr (or Mrs) Consumer, the launch date is the launch date, whether you’re ready to respond or not.

I’m also not entirely sure that ads based on my status update wuld be very effective either. On a practical level, my status doesn;t always reveal anything particularly useful about me. It often refers to this blog in a vain attempt to drive traffic. So what are you going to advertise to me? And what do you advertise to my friends, who are perhaps more typical, with status updates like: “is as good as it gets”, or “is never going to beat Wendy”.

And to respond directly to the example given, I find I am a fan of PJ Harvey, regardless of whether I have just listened to one of her tracks or not. Same goes for Seasick Steve, Voxtrot, Team9, and the multitude of other artists in my music interests. Give me stuff about these artists and more like them, and I will likely be interested regardless of when I last listened to them. Anything more would risk being creepy.

In summary, our author states that relevancy (presumably he means relevance – AARRGGHH!), timing and desire must all be in place for your campaign to be successful. Well, I have evidence if any were needed that this isn’t the case with campaigns we have run or designed for clients. The whole point of advertising is to intrude, is to be invasive. Jon Bain of Latitude once retorted as such at an IAB session some years ago on rich-media, whilst the rest of the room was debating the intrusiveness of pop-ups and overlays, and la-de-dahs. Advertising is intrusive, it’s our jobs to be so, now get over it.

Relevance: Yes. As advertisers we have a responsibilty to make messages as relevant as possible, and to encourage (and reward) consumers for actively telling us what their interests are. Do this and the basic Greed-driver (remember that?) will kick in as consumers clamour for more of the things they like.

Timing, not so specifically. There is an opporunity to use Facebook ads to build awareness amongst small target groups, as we have seen through client campagns, and as discussed here.

And desire? Surely a big part of the job of advertiser is to drive Desire amongst users? If we wait for them to want our product, then what are we going to do with the rest of our time? I dread to think.

This morning the apparent relaunch of Lexicon. It’s been clunky on Firefox, but I got it to work better on IE, and the link on the advertising homepage seems to be broken, but I finally managed to browse around here: Facebook Lexicon

The fundamentals remain the same, insofar as the list of terms remains restricted. Clearly there’s much more value in being able to type your own terms, but that doesn’t appear to have been reintroduced just yet. When Lexicon first hit the scenes you were able to create your own term or terms to monitor, but that was replaced with a predefined list not too long after launch.

What is interesting about New Lexicon is the greater depth of data and insight available. As well as being able to see the number of individual posts on any given subject, we can now see the number of individuals generating those posts, and also the proportion of posts containing that term.

Facebook has gone further though by also providing much deeper analysis of what those people look like.

Under demographics, we can break these stats down by Gender, Age and Country of the users concerned, which begins to get useful (especially if the terms themselves become unrestricted)

Age breakdowns are provided in bands, and country breakdown appears for now to be limited to the major English-speaking countries in terms of Facebook user numbers: US, Canada and UK.

On top of these fairly standard insights though are some far more interesting, and distinctly more web two-point-oh insights.

Associations goes someway to understanding the other topics being discussed alongside the topic in question. IN some respects similar to Amazon’s recommendations engine: People who discuss “Politics” also discussed “President”.

Keyword associations

Sentiment reports will be familiar to anyone that’s ever seen buzz-monitoring reports, and undoubtedly it’s limitations will be similar. However this report does at least go someway to giving us an extra dimension over the original lexicon, and some indication of positivity – essential to a brand if they want to understand the direction of the effect they are having on conversations amongst their consumers.

Topic sentiment

The new Pulse report begins to give brands and advertisers some guidance on what other keywords and interests might indicate interest in any given topic. This can easily become very useful, especially in utilising the micro-targeting features of the ad platform in refining which users you might want to target with your message.

Other interests of the users

The final addition, a US map displaying the geographic spread of the users by state, is of course interesting to US brands and campaigns, etc, and it will of course become increasingly useful as they extend this to cover other countries and regions.

All in all, this looks to be a hugely empowering move, exposing much greater insight to advertisers, although the real value will only come if and when they allow unrestricted terms to be searched and analysed. Perhaps instead a premium service for particular brands is in the offing, as this represents a huge revenue opportunity for Facebook themselves given the scale of the conversation-poll they are able to conduct in real-time.

I’m not sure whether or not to believe the latest post on the Groundswell blog, People dont trust corporate blogs. Some sort of oxymoronic joke by Josh Bernhoff?

Does a forrester blog even count as a corporate blog? As a newbie-blogger perhaps I should count myself in the 39% that would trust it even if it was. And should we even be worried about the opinion of people who don’t read blogs?

On that last point, and taking a quick review of some of the figures published, and combining that with the Groundswell background, if 69% of US users are Spectators, according to their social technographics profile tool, then take the fact that 24% of (US) blog readers (or Spectators) trust them, then the lower figure of 16% “of all users” is roughly the same users diluted by the additional 31% of users. It could be that it is underplaying or masking the actual trust amongst people who actually read blogs.

Reviewing the rest of the survey through this lens would place corporate blogs somewhat nearer direct mail or corporate email, and this feels intuitively more likely. Compare the results for the Blog Readers groups in each example. I am not sure that the insight here is that blogs are any more or less trust-worthy as a medium of corporate communications, but that trust in corporate messages is low regardless, it seems, of the medium through which it is delivered. The same holds true for social network sites or profiles from a company or a brand.

Of course, without full access to the data (nor the time to evaluate it more thoroughly) I would never claim authoritatively that the insight is wrong. But as they say, there’s lies, damn lies, etc….

Anyway, for the sake of argument, let’s assume (most of) it can be trusted. What the survey, conducted in Q2 2008 (pre-koobface virus, et al), also tells us is that the medium trusted most by all groups is the email from someone you know.

What I then find remarkable is that all groups claim to trust consumer ratings and reviews (presumably these are largely from anonymous people or user IDs) more than they trust social network profiles from people they know, and more than they trust information from search engines.

Most pointedly here, for me is that communication between two people known to each other is affected by the medium (email versus social network profile), and apparently quite significantly. Perhaps this is syptomatic of the recency of social network profiles, and users still becoming familiar with them. It would be interesting to see if these trust figures improve over time as SocNets become an increasingly familiar mode of communication between friends, and of course what, if any, negative impact the recent security issues on sites like Facebook will have on users’ trust.

Let’s hope Josh and the Forrester team follow up this study, and allow us to revisit with a comparable study in 6 or 12 months time so that we can see what happens to user trust as the social mediums mature.

I was surprised to hear that Sweemo had taken the beta handcuffs “well and truly off”, on the grounds I hadn’t come across them at all during their beta stage. Intrigued, I took a quick look around the site.

The basic premise seemed jolly enough – a place where people offer sweet moments to one another. Quite what defines a “sweet moment” remains something of a mystery, given the range of things (or moments) on offer. For me the description implies something of a kind-hearted and small offering, so to be confronted with the offer of a VIP table at the Playboy party in London for £4,700, however tempting, struck me as neither sweet nor momentary.

I was disappointed though to find that the other “sweet moments” we were meant to be “offering one another” came with, typically, a not insignificant charge on them. Probably a misunderstanding in the way I had read the words, but I was expecting a Trade-a-Favor type of service, where we disposed of cash, and offered each other favors, or well-intended offers of help or service in return for the same.

You can imagine a person to person version of this (such as TAF’s) being incredibly successful, though like most things it perhaps awaits a killer application. Amongst friends and partners, of course the shackles can come off somewhat in terms of what can be offered, and perhaps porivate and closed groups is what the service needs.

Anyhow, back to Sweemo.

Unfortunately I left disappointed. A case of over-promise in my opinion, as what has actually been delivered seems to be a somewhat convoluted mashup of eBay and Red Letter Days. Apologies to the team that have doubtless worked hard on it, but the basic premise struck me as being flawed, and I can’t see myself rushing back. Unless I need that table at the Playboy party in a hurry of course.

With the financial crisis bringing the cost of celebrity sponsorship sharply into focus for many brands (Brand endorsement under pressure, MarketingWeek.co.uk, 3rd December), what implications could this have in the increasingly social web-wide-world we live in today?

Ever since the first TV reality show, we have witnessed the rise of the everyday celebrity. Think Jodie Marsh, Jade Goody, the slightly camp guy from Airport, amongst others. All of them have come from very normal backgrounds, but acheived celebrity status largely through reality-based shows. But ultimately they have all become celebrities in their own right, and have gone on to be managed and promoted as such.

So what impact have global-reach social networks brought about? Well, the debate about conumers as influencers has raged since Gladwell’s The Tipping Point gained such popularity, although the debate’s origins go back much further. But what we are beginning to be able to observe through social networks is the influence users exercise over each other, and by serving this we can begin to observe the context of that influence between any two nodes (or friends) in the network.

In essence, we are beginning to see the rise of celebrity within private networks. It’s always been there, and I do not suppose social networks have altered it’s occurence. But social networks have allowed any one user to exaggerate their celebrity status within their own network. Think about it. When you login to Facebook, you see a newsfeed, a summary of what your friends have been up to (on Facebook). And assuming you haven’t already carefully fine-tuned your notification settings, you probably filter these messages sub-conciously, reading updates from the friends you consider celebrity, and ignoring, or taking less time over those you don’t.

So imagine reading a review from two people in your network. It coud be about a new film, a new shop, a new album. Anything at all. But which one exerts most influence over you? Would it be the passionately written, more vociferous damning review by someone you barely know at all (and may never have met in person), or would you pay more attention to the moderately positive, slightly favourable review given by one of your networks own celebrities – your best friend?

Social actions attached to ads on Facebook certainly seem to take this into account: “click here, because your friend Joe did”. Or “become a fan of product X, because 5 of your friends are already”. It’s a compelling evolution and an interesting behavioural change for marketers to keep a watching brief over, and a keen eye on opportunities to genuinely amplify their advocates through these new mechanisms.

Curiously, Facebook’s ad guidelines allow for the promotion of sexually related items, but under clause 10, Targeting, stipulates

• Adverts with adult themes, including contraception, sex education and health conditions, must be targeted to individuals of at least 18 years old.

Good job no-one under 18 isn’t having sex then.

Surely this particular guideline is counter-intuitive, especially on the matter of sex education – frankly if you get much beyond 18 without any , you probably won’t be needing those contraceptives either. Or the STD advice.

In fact, I’m inclined to go further and say this is downright irresponsible to deny users under the age of 18 access to products and information that might save themselves from unintentional harm.

I’m not saying every pre-18 year old user is a teen-parent waiting to happen, but c’mon guys. You have the largest online community in the world, one of the “coolest” websites, loved and adored by kids and adults alike, and yet you’re so out of touch at times it’s literally unbelievable.

Ahem. My keyboard didn’t come with a “1/4″ button.

I blame Dell.

Fail.

Facebook appears to have launched an initiative to increase the engagement of its users in branded Fan pages.

Following the introduction of some Fan pages into the targeting available through the ad platform, this has the potential to improve, or at least increase, the available audiences to advertisers that want to target users based on keywords. However, a couple of examples show that the initiative is not limited to major brands.

Firstly, Axe, previosuly known as Lynx in the UK. The potential upside from the perspective of an advertiser is clear,a nd with over 40,000 “fans” it certainly offers a good opportunity to target users based on their personal hygiene interests.

Interestingly of the 40,000 fans the product has, one of them is already my friend.

As I mentioned though, it does not appear to be limited to large brands. Imagine my surprise, then, when the Fan page for Classic Studios, a business run by a friend of a friend popped up.

What’s interesting here is that, despite Classic Studios having just 9 fans in total, it seems that because one of those is a friend of mine, the chances of me seeing an ad for the Fan page is roughly equal.

Overall, the push will be interesting to see develop. Certainly at the moment there are some notable discrepancies in fan page interest, something that will doubtless be discussed in more detail another time. But for the time being this increases the value of building a Fan page on Facebook, on the grounds that what appears to be a free promotional initiative from Facebook will drive users.

Perhaps Facebook are bulding some stats to understand the metrics before they make it available as a paid-for ad placement, but for the time being at least, expect to see an apparent increase in Facebook Fan page activity. Or perhaps they are comparing the stats with the home page “engagement ” ads, to determine the relative response rates.