Targeting Your Facebook Ads

Far and away the most popular post on this blog in recent weeks has been one written back in February, “Do Facebook Ads Work?” The answer was a strong “yes,” and research since then, including interesting findings on ad formats by Nielsen, continue to confirm that. A recent article in Bloomberg Business Week recounts the interesting story of the Nike “Write the Future” ad that was huge during the World Cup and goes on to talk about the importance of Facebook friends and the “like” function to Facebook advertisers.
















To demonstrate, I wrote a hypothetical ad on Facebook; that’s Step 1. Step 2 shows the main aspects of the targeting process. The advertiser can target by location (essential; no one needs to reach all 500 million Facebook fans!) and by demographics—age and gender only. So far, not different from traditional media advertising, and it works like Google AdWords as far as the setup is concerned.

Then comes the difference! On Facebook, the advertiser can target by “Likes & Interests.” This shows Facebook’s own description of a user profile. The implication seems to be that this is all data that the user has provided on the profile page. Not exactly. Every time the user “Likes” a friend’s post new data is created. What else? It’s not entirely clear exactly what/how other data provided by users like location data is collected and used. Prof. Eben Moglen of Columbia University Law
School says Facebook is “spying for free all the time.” You can read a summary of a recent speech in which he lays out the privacy concerns, but that still begs the question of exactly where the marketing data comes from.

The richness of the data is not in question, however. Nor is the usefulness of the Estimated Reach tool. Each time the potential advertiser adjusts any one of the targeting filters, the ER changes, so the exact effect of each descriptor is known. That data alone can tell you a lot about potential market size in a given region—no cost except expenditure of your time. Farther down on the targeting page, not captured in the graphic above, is the ability to target to your page (or groups) own members and, separately to their friends. Using the ER tool on your own page can give you fascinating insights into the composition of your fan base. Do you see a new market segment representing an opportunity you were not even aware of? Or do you see that you don’t have as many people from your target segment as you wish and need to run a campaign to get more friends.

All this creates a rich stew of research and advertising opportunities. You can access all this information from the Advertising text link at the bottom of your Facebook page, whether you are an individual user or have a business page.

The final piece of good news is that you don’t even have to buy an ad to experiment with the options. Why don’t you give it a spin???

Threadless--Marketing Success through Community

Isn’t it what we’d all like to achieve—having our customers do the work for us? We all know it’s not that easy, but t-shirt site Threadless has built a community that powers both product development and sales. Read about it in Chief Marketer’s new e-magazine.

It’s another of those edgy sites that got started almost by accident. They made a lot of mistakes in the early days, when it was described as a “crowdsourcing” model. Today they are careful to describe it as a “community” model, pointing out that crowdsourcing implies a random group of individuals while a community has to be carefully nurtured.

Threadless does that on its own site








on Facebook; this is the New Tees! page












on Twitter.


There are two things you notice immediately.

Ecommerce. Threadless is selling t-shirts on both Facebook and Twitter. Did you know you could do that? Facebook has a Marketplace although you pretty much have to know it exists in order to be able to find it. (Why doesn’t Facebook work on its navigation structure???), Steven Walling of ReadWriteWeb tried the Twitter version and he has issues with it—worth reading!

Privacy. Once again, there is none! I didn’t go as far as Steve Walling did on Twitter, but I did click on the box to find out what was required to sign in on Twitter. What I found was a box requesting permission for Twitter Tees to access my Twitter account. I don’t do that (at least I thought I didn’t). The permission box says you can revoke the permission by going to your Settings page. I looked at my Settings page; there are two apps there that I apparently have given permission to, neither of which I remembered—scary!

On Facebook I found two interesting issues. The more perplexing one is that I was on the New Tees! page yesterday. Today, when I went on again, I found a comment box with my account picture beside it beside every product; and no, I didn’t give either Facebook or Threadless any permissions. When I went to the Marketplace page I found a row of pictures across the bottom—Facebook friends of mine from around the world who are using Facebook Marketplace. They are all connected to me, so I guess that’s ok. I do have a bit of a problem with the fact that they captured my visit and, in effect, reported it publicly. However, I choose not to be upset; it’s what you should expect on Facebook.

So we are left with two questions; does Twitter offer the opportunity to create a stable e-commerce platform. You’ll have to stay tuned on that one. Second, are you comfortable—more important, will your customers be comfortable—with Facebook’s stated policy of linking everyone to everyone and everything? It goes back to my oft-repeated warning to be careful what you do and what you expect your customers to do.

Threadless has made a great business with their community-based model. I’d be willing to bet that their Facebook and Twitter sales account for only a small part of their total revenue. Customer engagement and customer acquisition are fundamental on the network platforms and sales are a by-product. That seems to describe the scene at present; it could change over time.

What should clearly grow, however, is the importance and value of a vibrant customer community. Cam Balzer said in Forbes recently:

The secret isn't growing a huge fan base. We have 100,000 Facebook fans, but those fans have all come to us organically. We believe the more organic the growth, the more loyal the fans, the more likely they will be repeat customers.

Amen to that—whichever platform you are talking about!

OpenSocial Attracts "Friends"

When Google’s OpenSocial debuted in November of last year it attracted a lot of attention. It was positioned as Google’s answer to Facebook’s open platform. When I wrote about the social graph and related apps in February I noted that Facebook had over 15,000 apps that members could use on Facebook or sites. When I looked today, it had over 20,000. The industry quickly realized that Facebook was onto something when it opened its platform to developers so they could write these apps. Google was not to be left behind.

Just before OpenSocial debuted in November, Michael Arrington wrote a post on TechCrunch that proved to be prophetic:

Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.
In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

Given the incredible success of the Facebook open platform, it was big news on Tuesday when Yahoo! and MySpace opted to join Google’s initiative, forming the OpenSocial Foundation. Several smaller networks had already signed on.

A lot of this is written for developers who have to do the work of creating the apps. It isn’t DIY for most of us. What does it actually mean to marketers? Charlene Li of Forrester has a graphic that portrays it well.
She calls it ‘relationship mapping” and explains that the technology will help us keep track of all our important relationships. Now we have them in separate places. The social networking APIs will help us to organize them in a single repository. According to Google, developers “can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network's friends and update feeds.” In plain terms, organize them all in one place and keep them up to date. I haven’t seen any mention of Charlene’s vision that they could monitor frequency of use and regulate access, but Facebook’s open platform and OpenSocial are first steps. Who knows what will follow?

And that’s what marketers need to think about. This suggests both convenience and loss of privacy for the user. It also makes it possible that one of your network “friends” could use an app that accesses data in a way that you didn’t/wouldn’t approve. However, the fact that you are connected on the network gives her app access to your data.

I suggest that there are two issues. The first is that this particular horse is already out of the barn. User agreements like Facebooks already make that sort of data sharing possible. The second is that most users, even young sophisticates, don’t seem to really understand that. What will they say when they do?
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Parsing Facebook User Data Policies

Read part 1 here.
Third Parties and Facebook Data. Continuing on down the Terms of Use we find a section on Third Party Websites and Content that is inclusive, although once again they try to exclude offensive material and protect intellectual property. Just below that is a section called Share Service. This is a direct quote from that section:

Company offers a feature whereby users of the Site can share with others or post to their own member profile, videos, articles and other Third Party Applications, Software or Content from, and/or links to, Third Party Sites through the Service (the "Share Service"). You acknowledge and agree that your use of the Share Services and all links, User Content or Third Party Applications, Software or Content shared through the Share Service is subject to, and will fully comply with the user conduct rules set forth above and the other terms and conditions set forth in these Terms of Use.

Does that mean that “perpetual, irrevocable and distribute. . .for any purpose” apply here? I’m not a lawyer, but that’s what it looks like to me. It goes on to talk about Use of Share Links by Online Content Providers. Are these the 15,000+ widgets shown on Friday’s post? That’s what it sounds like to me. Here’s what it says:

By including a Share Link, Online Content Provider automatically grants, and represents and warrants that it has the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use the Share Service in order to link to, use, copy, publish, stream, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), summarize, and distribute the content, links and other materials of any kind residing on any web pages on which Online Content Provider places the Share Link.

That should drive potential developers to the Developer Terms of Service page, which is also quite extensive and technical. It seems to repeat the same data policies. There are many links, none of which I investigated.

Finally, I took a look at the Privacy page (from the top nav bar; the Terms of Use is one of the text links at the bottom of pages). This page allows users to set several parameters for the sharing of their data with other Facebook users. It’s user-friendly and when I’ve tried, it has worked as described. The introductory statement is designed to make users feel comfortable:

Facebook wants you to share your information with exactly the people you want to see it. On this page, you'll find all the controls you need to set who can see your profile and the stuff in it, who can find and contact you on Facebook, and more.

However, it is not their Privacy Policy, which is another text link at the bottom of pages. It is also extensive. This is a short quote from the lengthy Information We Collect section:

If you choose to use our invitation service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for information needed to send the invitation, such as your friend's email address. We will automatically send your friend a one-time email or instant message inviting him or her to visit the site. Facebook stores this information to send this one-time invitation, to register a friend connection if your invitation is accepted, and to track the success of our referral program. Your friend may contact us at info@facebook.com to request that we remove this information from our database.
Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.
By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.

There are lengthy sections on sharing information with third parties and advertising that I haven’t quoted. They are worth reading. Facebook’s Beacon service for advertisers has generated considerable controversy. This is the current statement:

Facebook Beacon is a means of sharing actions you have taken on third party sites, such as when you make a purchase or post a review, with your friends on Facebook. In order to provide you as a Facebook user with clear disclosure of the activity information being collected on third party sites and potentially shared with your friends on Facebook, we collect certain information from that site and present it to you after you have completed an action on that site. You have the choice to have Facebook discard that information, or to share it with your friends.
To learn more about the operation of the service, we encourage you to read the tutorial here. To opt out of the service altogether, click here.

From my perspective as a marketer, not a lawyer, Facebook seems to be honest in describing its policies, and the documents are detailed and inclusive. Does anyone believe that teenagers will read the material—only a tiny portion of which is quoted here? If you do, I have time-honored bridge to sell you.

Marketers should give these issues consideration from several perspectives. Do you want to participate in advertising on Facebook itself? There are numerous ad networks that serve the Facebook applications (widgets, etc.); that’s another alternative. Recent articles from Randall Rothberg of the IAB and Esther Dyson, IT maven, are both ad-friendly and give worthwhile perspectives.

Put all of it together and two things emerge. One is that marketers need to tread carefully as they consider advertising on social networks; both the contextual and the data privacy issues are troublesome. The second is that marketers may want to build their own networks. We’ve been doing that with email addresses. Why not extend permission-based activities to relevant networks? Either create your own or partner with an established network that is relevant.

Whichever of the several ways you choose to go, think carefully about how you want to inform and prepare visitors for the kind of advertising they will see or receive. We all want to do targeted advertising. But behaviorally-targeted advertising can get downright creepy—“How do they know that about me?” We don’t want to creep-out our customers!
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Visualizing the Social Graph

One of the fun things about doing research for a blog like this is that one thing leads to another. Yesterday I briefly mentioned the term “data visualization” in the context I think most marketers use—how can we transform mountains of raw data into graphics we can use for understanding and decision making? At least, that’s how I’ve thought about it ever since statistics and marketing research courses.

But I ran across a couple of sites that reminded me of something else—the “social graph.” With the rise of MySpace, Facebook and specialized social networks, it’s a concept that has been much discussed over the last year. My personal opinion is that it is not different from the idea of social networks that many of us remember from sociology courses; Wikipedia has an article that describes the sociological concept. Chris Brogan has a brief video that does a good job of tying the two concepts together and Mitch Joel has a thoughtful post on the subject. The Economist had a contrarian view last fall.

“Social graph” is clearly the term used in the social networking space, so I’ll stick with that. We are all part of multiple networks today, for better or for worse. Even for us as marketers, some of it is personal, as when I posted my travel photos on Flickr and invited friends to view them. Others are clearly work; probably most of the people who read this are on LinkedIn or some other professional network. Some would be best described as research. I continue to maintain that all marketers should have multiple accounts on sites like Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and other new media sites. We should join some groups and visit from time to time. How else do we know what’s going on? Having it filtered through employees or our teen-aged children is just not the same thing.

The really cool thing I ran into is a set of applications listed on Mashable.com that allow users to visualize networks of various kinds. These are only two of the 16 applications they list:


That lead me to check out similar applications on Facebook. I’m not a serious user, I’m a research user, so I was astounded to find that there are over 15,000 apps that Facebook users can put on their sites. Here are some of the currently most popular—notice how many of them connect users with one another. No wonder that WSJOnline reported this week (subscription required) that MySpace had opened its platform to allow developers to build apps for it! Lack of this “fun stuff” may be one reason MySpace has fallen behind Facebook. If you are into diy, Google recently announced a Social Graph API that allows users to build graphs from publicly-available data and connections.
Finally, it made me stop and read the Terms of Use and Privacy Police on Facebook. That’s a subject in and of itself; I’ll return to it next week.

The implications for marketers and advertisers are clear. In the past, we had to conduct segmentation studies in order to identify homogeneous groups of customers and prospects. Now users are doing it themselves. How far should we go to take advantage of the social groups that are forming on the web? That presents troubling issues of privacy and trust that marketers need to consider openly and carefully.
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GPS Meets Mobile in New York Taxicabs

This video is a light-hearted look at a GPS-driven system for taxi passengers in New York City. Apparently the system has also been authorized for testing in a small number of cabs in Boston. I haven’t been exposed to it in either place, and I’d like to try it out. I’d also be happy not to have to be sure I have enough cash when I take a taxi in either city.View the video here.

GPS in our transportation systems has not been without controversy. New York taxi drivers initially threatened to strike over the system, which was viewed as costly and a potential invasion of privacy. The strike didn’t happen, but the drivers still don’t sound happy about it.

I was reminded what happened in Massachusetts last year when GPS systems were mandated for all snow plowing contractors. They also were not happy and threatened to strike going into the winter season—not acceptable to Massachusetts residents. So the state put off the requirement for a year, but as far as I know, the GPS systems are going to be required of all contractors this season.

As you view the video, think about the advertising opportunities it opens up. As usual in mobile, Asian countries are far ahead of us. I found another light-hearted look at taxis, with Japan and Singapore having especially interesting applications.

If this gives you an idea for a last-minute Christmas gift, CNET is keeping an eye on what’s available!
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Beginning the Do Not Track Debate

Recent announcements by AOL and MySpace imply diametrically opposing stances on tracking of website users. AOL is supposed to be readying a Do Not Track service on their site, although it is not yet on either their main site or listing of betas. MySpace, on the other hand, plans to offer advertisers a targeting service based on the profiles and behaviors of users. TechCrunch has early details and a screen shot of the interface for the service called SelfService by MySpace.

While publishers are taking varying approaches privacy organizations including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and others have submitted a proposal for a Do Not Track rule. The Federal Trade Commission held hearings on the subject last week. They have posted the transcript in the form of webcasts on their site. Yahoo had a nice graphic of what the rule would look like a few days ago.

And no, I haven’t listened to 2 day’s worth of webcasts either, but they are well organized to locate subjects or speakers of particular interest. The usual suspects are, of course, arrayed in the usual formations—privacy advocates vs. advertisers and web publishers. The proposal is worth reading, especially page 4 on the recommendations for the rule. The NYTimes online notes that while Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL/Time Warner spoke at the hearing, MySpace was there only as an observer.

One thing that caught my eye was an element of user-generated content in the hearing. The Stop Badware.org project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School has sponsored a Cookies Crumble Contest and votes on the winning video were taken at the hearing. A first for the FTC. . .maybe for Harvard Law also?

Considering how slowly other privacy initiatives have moved since 9/11, this is a debate that is likely to continue for some time. While it does, technology will continue its inexorable progress.

I’ve watched the privacy issues for many years. I would call attention to the Do Not Call legislation. Could the industry have forestalled actual legislation by being more transparent and accommodating to the wishes of the public? Should the Internet industry begin (yesterday) to inform users in an open and understandable manner what they are doing and why they are doing it? History suggests it should!
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