socialmediocrity

Interesting to see a bit of hype about Kotex’s “campaign” on Pinterest. Their well produced video, showing what they did, explains it far better than I could, here

There’s a couple of very interesting points to this. Firstly, the campaign wasn’t actually “on” Pinterest at all, yet perhaps everyone wants to be associated with the latest network-du-jour that it is inevitable that some will claim this. The organisers simply used Pinterest to find the 50 recipients, but as they go on to point out, recipients not only posted on Pinterest, but also on Facebook and Twitter, and no doubt other less association-favourable networks too.

We also thought the results were interesting. 50 recipients were contacted, and of those an intriguingly “almost” 100% posted about their gift. From those posts, 2,284 Interactions were identified, presumably referring to likes, comments, etc. If we assume 50 users participated, and that they all used all three networks to post (Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter) and that they posted once each on each channel, that’s about 15 interactions per post on average. 694,853 impressions were also recorded, although given the variety of networks being monitored, that can mean a number of different things, but lets take that on face value.

On the face of it then, not exactly mind-blowing in terms of the impact it had. This perhaps provides some insight into the relative value of social channels,and the degree to which they are useful in marketing terms. The propagation of the content was actually quite limited, and although we don’t know what expectations were, this didn’t feel like a completely free campaign to execute. Shipping costs alone would have been a couple of hundred dollars.

So how do we establish the value? Short term, we can slightly crudely look at the facts. We have 50 users, generating 2,300 interactions and 695k impressions. Taking Facebook’s media costs as a guide, and even assuming these impressions are premium value impressions, that’s a media value of about $2,500. If all of those interactions were clicks to the brand, the value is probably about the same.

Of course, what we can’t place such a direct value on is the creation of “almost” 50 brand advocates, and perhaps this is the longer-term value building role of social marketing campaigns. But if we think that’s hard to place a value on, then it only gets harder when we introduce other variables, that will occur over the longer time frame we are referencing, such as fatigue rates of an individuals’ advocacy, or the increased risk of a poor experience. The long term value of this advocacy building will be lost if it is not supported by continued investment in the product or the service.

Hard to place a value on then, and given these results and multiples of interaction and impression, I wonder if the Kotex team, or more poignantly the MD, will be quite so enthusiastic to do it again, or to make it an even larger exercise to increase it’s impact. The returns don’t seem to justify it in the short term, but as part of a longer-term strategy, it could be just the beginning of the real understanding of the role and value of social in a marcomms strategy and it’s contribution towards the positive projection of the brand.

I was recently sent the tipp-ex digital campaign by a non-digital friend of mine – a clear sign that either I am no longer at the bleeding edge (anyone who knows me, this is your cue to comment in a light-hearted manner here), or this type of thing has gone, how do you say, mainstream?

http://www.youtube.com/tippexperience

A nice enough campaign, but a distinctly similar experience in the main to the subservient chicken, which remains one of my all time favourites. So a decent enough idea, but in no way new or original.

And to execution,  I tried a few things to find that the range of actions / videos available and was disappointed with the 404 error video (and that there’s only one of them), and the frequency with which it appears. The limit on the actions that have been shot is too tight, and the way the word connection occurs is light-weight too. “Plays Twister With” gives me a shot of RoShamBo being played, “shears” gives me nothing, “races” gives me nothing – in fact about half of my suggestions failed to deliver a result.

And what occurred to me most of all by the end of it is that as a campaign, by the end of it, all I actually remembered was the bear and hunter. The product or brand it was meant to be promoting is lost almost immediately as at no point after the intro video does the product itself feature. Burger King’s (TM)  Subservient Chicken was, in my opinion, much better executed and being presented in the guise of a web cam, represented a far better creative treatment.

What is a real shame is that I can’t forward links to the phrases or words that I have used to my friends, so that they can see how clever I am, or that I have “discovered” a funnier, naughtier, clever clip included in the campaign – instead anything I share is back to the top end of the campaign – which really counts against it as far as “social” is concerned.

Of course, the reason for spoofing the YouTube setting is no doubt to somehow claim this is another great success for “social” marketing. I’m old enough to remember when YouTube was the platform of choice for viral marketeers, but something tells me  history will record this as a great triumph for social marketing.

I’m a big fan of social advertising. I like the idea that advertisers can use that information to give me increasingly relevant ads.

However, as mush as I tolerate, nay, embrace this new model, I can’t abide lazy creative.

Take this example. It talks to me as a fan of Liverpool FC. Bingo. Targeting achieved. I am one. Every bit of one.

But where it fails is the message. Apart from ending the question in their title with a full-stop instead of a question mark, their copy doesn’t seem right somehow.

Call yourself a copy-writer?

Yes, I’ve got the official shirt (two of them, actually).

Yes, I’ve got the hat (even the missus has one, reluctantly)

And yes, the scarf too (again at least 2 of those)

And yet somehow, somewhere, in the mind of a senseless out-of-touch advertiser or copy-writer, the hat-trick has not yet been completed.

Now last time I checked, a hat-trick in football constituted three goals. I remember Robbie Fowler scoring the premierships quickest ever (just over 4 1/2minutes against Arsenal in ’94). Liverpool won 3-0 so he definitely didn’t score more than three.

I remember Peter “good-touch-for-a-big-man” Crouch’s perfect hat-trick, also against Arsenal, in ’07. Liverpool won 4-1, but Peter Crouch only scored 3 of them.

But our learned advertiser, which I trust is the banking partner concerned and not the club themselves, is determined to sell me the mythical fourth constituent of every fan’s memorabilia “hat-trick” – a club-branded credit card.

The proliferation of self-serve ad platforms around social networks and pother web properties has brought advertising to the masses. Any and every small business, entrepeneur, start-up hopeful can reach the audience they want to without the rigmarole of finding a creative agency, or even just a bloke with Photoshop.

Ever since Google’s AdWords platform, advertising has become something of a DIY-ers dream.

And therein lies the problem. For all the good that feels like it brings, there is pain to be had, especially for the user. Take our first example, in a series that I suspect might run for many, and which sister-site www.micro-targeting.com has started exposing already.

Let's see. £30 in 10 mins. 60 mins in one hour...30....60....90 ...oh bllx, £500 an hour.

The title is enticing enough. £500 per hour? Well that’s £1,000 before lunch time, even for a late starter like me.

But hang on a minute. What’s the catch? In just 10 minutes I could earn £30. Woo Hoo! You can stick your job whe….hang on one cotton-picking minute.

FAIL.

…to be continued.

see also Advertising on Facebook just doesn’t add up

With new figures showing Facebook overtaking MySpace in the US we’ve begun thinking again about Facebook’s ad revenue model. Of course a recession is always going to cause trouble and concern for ad revenue business models, but with a public platform available, we can begin to get a feel for their actual income.

According to Compete.com, the US user base has just exceeded MySpace’s for the first time, with 59.7 million unique visitors, versus MySpace’s 59.5 million. Google’s AdPlanner appears to show MySpace barely holding on to it’s lead, but it clearly won’t be long before they too will be proclaiming the beginning fo the end for MySpace too.

Of course there’s been constant speculation about the real value of the business ever since the Microsoft investment, which was rumoured to value it at a remarkable $15 billion. Leaked memo’s, emails, and recounted conversations since have reportedly shown that even some shareholders placed some more realistic valuations of $3-5 billion on it.

Heck, we’ve even had the valuation estimated on the Whopper Sacrifice application, placing a tongue-in-cheek $1.8 billion valuation on the community. Before Facebook banned it , of course. And not for the low valuation it appeared to place on the business either.

But whilst I might be over-simplifying things enormously, there’s enough information in the public domain to make an educated estimate.

Google AdPlanner tells us that, worldwide, and to the nearest billion, Facebook attracts 29 billion page views per month, and this is rising steadily.

We also know that, whilst it may vary from country to country and page to page, there are normally 2-3 ads on each page viewed on Facebook. Some pages have no ads on them at all.  So for the purposes of a non-scientific estimate it is probably safe to assume an average of 2.5 thoughout.

That gives us an ad inventory estimate of 72.5 billion ad impressions. every month. And rising.

Of course all the page views in the world (and let’s face it, they do seem to have most of them) are only valuable if you can secure advertising for them all, and at high enough rates. So where would we find out the rates Facebook are receiving for their inventory?

OK, no more rhetorical questions. Although the ad platform shows lower figures rates right now, they do vary, and of coruse much of the ads are not placed through the public platform, but in guaranteed delivery deals. What we can see is that at an average CPM rate of $0.50, if that is what they were achieving around the world on average, would give them ad revenues in 12 months of $435 million. Even if the user base continues to double every 12 months, the next year will generate approximately $630 million.

Of course if they’re not attracting those CPM rates, and let’s be clear that these are not the rates quoted at the time of writing for any markets on the public ad platform, then revenues will be significantly lower, and the same goes for the growth estimates. Sooner or later the rate of growth has to slow down, even for Facebook.

So with an ad revenue income estimate of $630 million, the valuation becomes clear once you determine whether you cup is half-full or half-empty. And of course which version of their costs you are prepared to believe. Alternative income streams should not be ignored entirely, siuch as sponsorship deals, and broader content deals, but with renewed prominence of the virtual gifts business that generates c. $40m per year income, Facebook could be generating $700m in 2009 if they get it right, the vast majority still coming from ad revenues.

Let’s assume costs of $250 million per year, leaving $450 earnings, then a $4.5 billion valuation would not be so obscene. $15 billion, even now, would be.

The key to moving forwards however will be in attracting advertisers, and finding ways to deliver excellent ROI for those clients in order to keep the ad dollars rolling in, at a time when advertisers are looking to reduce costs and slash marketing budgets.

Can advertising on Facebook standup to dominant low cost channels such as paid-for Search, and begin to make itself a regular feature on a marketer’s media plan? The smaller advertisers and marketers are making it work, but not until the larger worldwide agency groups find their way, and bring their clients to the party will Facebook see any great acceleration in it’s ad revenues, and until then their valuation will be debated and speculated over repeatedly.

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.

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.

In what appears to be another recent change to the ad guidelines, it is now acceptable to advertise alcoholic beverages on Facebook.

Clause 12 refers

Ads for Alcoholic Beverages

• Adverts must all be targeted to people 21 years old or older in the US, 19 years old or older in Canada, 18 years old or older in the UK, and 21 years old or older everywhere else. All Facebook Pages viewer restrictions must be set at 21+ regardless of the country they are in or targeted to. In the case where a user’s age cannot be determined, the advert cannot be displayed to the user in question.
• It is recommended that the ad creative contain text that promotes drinking responsibility. Acceptable examples include “Drink Responsibly” and “Drink Smart.”
• No ad should include content that might appeal to (or mislead) minors by implying that the consumption of alcoholic beverages is fashionable or the accepted course of behavior for those who are underage.
• No ad creative promoting alcoholic beverages should include any person under the age of 21 or be suggestive of the presence of minors.
• Adverts may not portray or promote intoxication. Adverts should not induce people to consume alcohol in excess, make references to the intoxicating effects of alcohol, depict activities that encourage excessive consumption or that encourage drinking at a rapid rate, or suggest the strength of the alcoholic beverage being advertised.
• Adverts may not promote any giveaways as a reward for purchasing the alcoholic product.

Although they make some attempt to retain some degree of decency, they don’t really go any further than the law in the retrospective territories.

So the breaking news is, it’s OK to sell alcohol to adults, according to Zuckerberg.

Another means of attracting advertising dollars in a time of economic crisis. How much longer do we think the stance against tobacco products, adult material, and firearms will hold out?

If you take the time to read Facebook’s ad guidelines you could be forgiven for thinking that they were being overly-protective of their users. In amongst the normal “nothing illegal” clauses, there are a number of more interesting, and perhaps intriguing clauses, that perhaps say more about the founders ideals than any long-term stand against good old fashioned good fun.

Clause 9 gives us a list of stuff we shouldn’t do:

We do not accept advertising referencing, facilitating or prompting the following:

• Tobacco products
• Ammunition, firearms, paintball guns, bb guns, or weapons of any kind
• Gambling, including without limitation any online casino, sports books, bingo, or poker
• Ringtones
• Software downloads, freeware, or shareware
• Scams, illegal activity and/or illegal contests, pyramid schemes, or chain letters
• Uncertified pharmaceutical products
• Adult friend finders or dating sites with a sexual emphasis
• Adult toys, videos, or other adult products
• Web cams or surveillance equipment
• Web-based non-accredited colleges that offer degrees
• Inflammatory religious content
• Politically religious agendas and/or any known associations with hate, criminal and/or terrorist activities
• Political content that exploits political agendas or uses “hot button” political issues for commercial use regardless of whether the advertiser has a political agenda
• Hate speech, whether directed at an individual or a group, and whether based upon the race, sex, creed, national origin, religious affiliation, marital status, sexual orientation or language of such individual or group
• Content that advocates against any organization, person, or group of people, with the exception of candidates running for public office
• Content that depicts a health condition in a derogatory or inflammatory way or misrepresents a health condition in any way
• “Get rich quick” and other money making opportunities that offer compensation for little or no investment, including money making schemes positioned as alternatives to part-time or full-time employment

I find the third bullet the most interesting, as the more time I spend on Facebook, the mire it appears as though it is jointly sponsored by Sky and Betfair – Betfair Casino, Betfair TaiKai, Betfair Sports betting. You name it, Betfair are advertising it. I guess they didn;t read as far as bullet 3 when they accepted the ads.

As fors software downloads, although they are treated in a separate and expanded section within the guidelines, this too is somewhat overlooked. I know for a fact of at least one advertiser whose service requires you to download their client, and yet they seem to have had their ads accepted. And does this exclude the likes of Skype, who currently require you to download software? Presumably Firefox couldn’t promote themselves if they wanted to, and all those ads for microsoft and MSN. Do their sites really not have software downloads on them?

It would be great if the guidlines and rules were so simple as to write them down in a few bullet points, but it seems as though they are verging on the uncompetitive if some online casinos are more equal than others, which appears to be the case right now.

Through extensive use of the Facebook ad platform, and no small amount of chance, I stumbled upon (not literally) the fact that Facebook have slipped another targeting feature in to their ad platform.

The public platform is suggesting that we you now target users by their job description. Which of course could be something of a boon to B2B advertisers, and a distinct advantage to recruitment advertisers of course. The phrases have begun appearing in the keywords

I’m not sure it will be enough to reverse the CPM decline the ad proliferation has caused, and especially not in this climate, but definitely a positive move. And like dynamite, it can benefit users and advertisers and Facebook alike, as long as it is used responsibly. Facebook themselves will need to maintain their vigilance, and avoid any temptations to allow it to be exploited harmfully.

And of course it is not only B2B advertisers that stand to gain. It is probably the greatest indicator of an individuals income level too, which makes the targeted groups all the more interesting to more niche and high-end advertisers.

The platform will begin to get very interesting when Facebook begin to separate some of these targeting variables, and we can begin to genuinely micro-target users based on multiple interests, job titles, and fan page affiliation.