Can anyone tell me what happened here:
I’m 33 years old and I’ve included that information in my FaceBook profile. So, why am I see seeing this ad?
Is this a case of an advertiser setting up their campaign incorrectly?
Is FaceBook’s advertising imprecise at fulfilling advertiser’s demographic targeting requests?
Is this advertiser intentionally advertising to 33 year olds about a really cool new network for the 35+ crowd?
I recently got back from a trip to Argentina and Uruguay which allowed me to update my WhereIveBeen map in Facebook. And drink some wine, eat some beef, and get some sun.
While I was gone, I see that Facebook has announced their plan to give members more control over how they group their friends. Once grouped, you can decide who gets to see what, who can leave wall comments, and other fun stuff.
Let’s face it: not all Facebook friends are created equal. Some are online versions of people you hang out with every week. Others are people with looser connections to your daily life. Or coworkers.
This is a very good thing because the lack of control was getting to the point of causing Facebook to eat itself alive. For many, Facebook starts out as a way to keep in touch with close friends. It’s all about having some fun leaving each other updates, sharing photos, music tastes, etc. But then you find yourself connected with people who aren’t in on every joke and don’t necessarily understand your sense of humor. What do you do then? Start censoring yourself a bit, which takes the fun out of Facebook.
But, if you can prioritize your “friends” (an highly abused term in social networking), you can use the Facebook network for fun and less-fun functions.
Marty Weintraub from aimClear Search Marketing Blog has become fed up with the mundane noticed some of his casual friends are pumping into Facebook, and he’s not going to take it anymore.
The challenge is, he still want to be their friends while avoiding the incessant documentation of every event in their daily lives.
How does he find the balance? By using the Feed Preferences tabs to throttle the types of updates you’ll receive in your news feed after logging in:
If hyperactive casual friends (you want to keep) are inadvertently Feed-bombing you, use Feed Preferences to specify up to 20 friends NOT to receive news feeds from at all. You will “only get stories regarding these people if nothing else is available.” There are also sliders which proportionally scale the level, across ALL friends, of incoming Story Types including Groups, Photos, Notes, Relationships, Friends, Wall Posts, Profiles, Status, and Posts.
This looks like a good tip. I’ve used the unfriend strategy in the past to avoid updates from heavy users, but this may be a better option.
Why does Facebook convert profile email addresses to images from text?
I noticed this while visiting a friend’s profile where I realized he, sadly, changed his email address when he changed ISPs (dude, seriously, stop using email addresses tied to your ISP).
I tried to grab his new address so I could update his contact information, but no, I couldn’t grab it because it was an image rather than text:
Why do they do this? Who are they protecting? I only have access to the email addresses of my friends and others who’ve opted to allow public access to their profile information, so I don’t understand how this could be a spam prevention strategy.
Any theories?
Why does Facebook convert profile email addresses to images from text?
I noticed this while visiting a friend’s profile where I realized he, sadly, changed his email address when he changed ISPs (dude, seriously, stop using email addresses tied to your ISP).
I tried to grab his new address so I could update his contact information, but no, I couldn’t grab it because it was an image rather than text:
Why do they do this? Who are they protecting? I only have access to the email addresses of my friends and others who’ve opted to allow public access to their profile information, so I don’t understand how this could be a spam prevention strategy.
Any theories?
I have been testing out the FriendCSV application mentioned on TechCrunch yesterday. FriendCSV allows you to download a .csv file with some - but not all - of your Facebook friend’s contact information.
One thing I found interesting was the comparison between Facebook UserIDs and birth dates. It looks like Facebook userIDs are handed out sequentially, so you can get a feel for when someone’s joined based on their userID.
My ID number is 500910058, so you can decide for yourself whether that gives me any Facebook cred.
To find your UserID number, click the Profile link and look for it in your browser’s address bar:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500910058
I plotted Facebook UserID’s against the birth dates of my Facebook friends and ended up with the following chart:
Birth years run from oldest on the left to youngest on the right.
The lower right quadrant makes up the early adopters. But in the case of Facebook, the early adopters were also the only people with access to the site: college students. In my friend’s case, this group is mostly made up of recent college graduates.
The lower left quadrant seemed strange until I spot checked it and found friends who were in grad school over the past few years.
I don’t have an explanation for the gap between Facebook UserId numbering 200-500 million. Any theories? Did Facebook arbitrarily bump up their UserID sequence at some point? It kind of looks like they may have reset it to 500,000,000 based on the line of friends at that level.
Moving to the top quadrants, the far right is pretty light, since basically anyone of college age had already joined Facebook.
Things seem fairly well dispersed among age ranges - in my case, from the 1940’s through the 1980’s - over the time Facebook has been open to everyone.
Should social networking sites make it easy to import updates from other social networking sites? Yes and no.
On the Yes side, it makes it easy to consolidate one’s social network updates from your blog, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, etc.
On the No side, it causes serious redundancy issues for online friends who happen to follow you on more than one service.
For example, I have a friend who’s a blogger, Facebook, and Twitter user.
He’s integrated the blog-to-Twitter plugin for Wordpress, so every time he posts a new post to his blog, I get a Twitter update about his latest blog entry. The tweet shows the post title, which is generally underdescriptive, along with a TinyURL I can click to see wha his 3-4 word Tweet is all about.
I’m already subscribed to his blog in Google Reader, so Twitters about new blog posts are redundant. Yet there is no way to turn off the blog-to-Twitter tweets without unfollowing him on Twitter.
In this case, I unfriended him on Twitter since he was putting out much better quality content on his blog and the majority of his tweets were reblogs.
I’m also friends with ths guy on Facebook, and guess what? He’s syndicating his Twitter posts into Facebook as well, so my Facebook news feed gets hit with his Twitters, which means it gets hit with links from his blog posts which hit his Twitter account, which end up in Facebook.
Worst case scenario:
1. He publishes a blog post
2. Causing my phone to vibe with a new Twitter message pointing to a URL.
3. I click that URL, sending me to his blog.
4. Within the hour, I get a new link in Google Reader telling me about the same blog post.
5. I then get another new new item in Google Reader from Twitter of recent Twitter posts that’s redundant to #2. I realize this one is redundant but I don’t want all of my Twitter friends coming to my phone but will take them in Google Reader.
6. I then log into Facebook to find the same Twitter message I saw back in #2 in yet another location.
7. He could also syndicate his blog into Facebook so I could see the same post yet again.
There are four solutions to this that I can think of:
1. Social networking sites and RSS reader applications could all get together and work out a solution where all but the site where an item is read first would pull the duplicate message.
2. People should stop publishing their content in a redundant manner.
3. Use Yahoo Pipes to filter out redundant content from friends.
4. Use a yet to be created Firefox Greasemonkey script to block redundant updates in Twitter or Facebook.
I’ve realized that I’ve been guilty of this too by using the Twitter application in Facebook. I removed it after coming to the realization that my Facebook friends are already following me on Twitter for the most part, so I’m creating redundant content for most of my friends.
Steve Rubel from Micropersuasion has been looking at this issue lately and described the aggregation as “lifecasting.” I think his definition of that term would be something along the lines of a aggregated look at all of the content a person generates online. If someone wants to hear every nugget from Rubel from a short Twitter through a well thought out blog post, you can follow him at www.steverubel.com. This may work well for many Rubel fans since his content tends to revolve around work with a little sports thrown in.
For people who publish to the web on a larger variety of topics, I think Rubel’s version of lifecasting will fall short. For example, I may write about technology here, things that interest me from politics to Britney Spears on my personal blog, about shoes hanging from powerlines on another blog, and about hamburgers with cheese on the inside on another blog. Consolidating all of this into a lifecast would please no one since the topics are too diverse to be of interest to anyone but me.
However, it’s possible Yahoo Pipes could come to the rescue by making it possible to filter web user’s lifecasts down to the content that interests them, or by filtering out the stuff that doesn’t.
Would this post have made any sense a year ago?
Read/Write Web has a great writeup about the NY Times’ new Facebook application.
Josh Catone points out that it’s better than some other newspaper based applications in that it acts as a tool that drives people back to the newspaper’s site:
New York Times Launches Facebook App
The New York Times has taken a different tactic, however, and done a lot to nudge users toward their content. First, of course, by creating an app that seeks user engagement on a daily basis. Unlike the Post application, which you use once then wear as a badge on your profile, the NYT app encourages users to interact with it every day as fresh news quizzes arrive.
That’s a great point. In many ways, it reminds me of Michael Feldman’s Whad’Ya Know? on Wisconsin Public Radio (and syndicated onto many other local public radio stations). That show quizzes callers about the news of the week on the top news and quirkiest news of the previous week.
If the NY Times is able to recreate that type of competition within Facebook, which then makes people reliant on the Times for quiz material, they should have a winner.
This isn’t something that’s going to reach iLike potential, but there are plenty of newshounds who could be attracted to this sort of thing, building closer loyalty to the Times and increasing daily page views (and ad impressions) from those users.
Facebook seems to be getting around to taking a play from MySpace.com’s play book by opening up their user’s profiles to search engines like Google.
Arguably, this isn’t new news, since we wrote about it here back in May, but in reality, Facebook has less pages indexed by Google today than they did in May. Three months ago, Facebook had 276,000 pages indexed by Google compared to MySpace’s 19,600,000. Three months later, Facebook has 102,000 indexed pages:
compared to MySpace’s 23,700,000:
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a site with 23 million pages in Google’s index is going to get more free traffic from search than a site with one hundred thousand indexed pages.
As Om Malik explains it, Facebook’s plan is to make public profiles of their 18+ year old users available to search engines. This will cause millions of Facebook pages to rank high in search results for personal names. Since so little comes up on searches for most individual’s names, it seems likely that Facebook will begin to dominate search results for the names of their users almost overnight.
In fact, Facebook is better positioned to rank competitively for personal names than MySpace since Facebook users are MUCH more likely to use their first and last names in their profiles.
Is this a good thing? Yes, unless you don’t want to be found. Of course, is that’s the case you probably shouldn’t be publishing content under your own name anywhere on the web.
Blogging can be a powerful marketing tool for businesses with interesting stories to tell. I believe this is especially true in businesses where building a personal relationship with propsects or showcasing one’s expertise has the potential to translate into sales.
A few industries where this has proven to be particularly effective include:
1. Real estate - builds personal relationships between agents and prospects. Rain City Guide and St. Paul Real Estate Blog are two examples.
2. Software - Microsoft has been able to build closer relationships between Microsoft’s software developers and the developers who user Microsoft products to build applications. I’ve seen less success with Microsoft using blogging to communicate with consumer end-users of products like operating systems and Office software.
3. Authors - Blogging has proven to be a great way to build an audience for a book, keep the conversation going with readers, and drive pre-sales of future books. Speaking engagements come out of this as well. Seth Godin and the guys behind Freakonomics stand out here.
I haven’t seen much success with direct to consumer companies that aren’t known for personal relationships. For example, while Wal-Mart interacts with millions and millions of people a day in their stores and on their website, it’s a rather impersonal relationship. People shop their stores based on price and the convenience of finding everything from Kleenex to tropical fish and guns under one roof.
Of course, this doesn’t stop companies like Wal-Mart from testing the waters with things like blogging or Facebook sponsorships. For the cost of trying things like this, they’d be stupid not to.
Jeremiah Owyang from PodTech.net has taken a look at this subject in recent posts on his blog including one where he compares his blog’s Facebook group audience with Wal-Mart’s:
I’m checking up on the group, and have noticed that the group size is very low, in fact only 934 members. The Web Strategy Group that I promote is at 1500 members in just a few weeks longer, and it’s certainly a much smaller ‘brand’ than Wal-Mart.
Personally, I don’t think Wal-Mart’s marketing success can be measured by its Facebook group membership. Neither can the web success of other large consumer serving companies like Mobil or Xcel Energy. These are companies that easily ignore Facebook’s existance.
Adding someone as a friend or joining a group on Facebook is an act close to an endorsement of that person or business. Wal-Mart, and companies like it are basically utilities in the eyes of typical Facebook users. You use them because you need them, not because you love them.
What Wal-Mart will probably learn from their Facebook experiment is that they’re not cool; just like friending your parents isn’t cool. However, it’s not bad to be not cool as long as you’re respected and deliver on promises. In the case of Wal-Mart, the promise they should be pushing is, “we have cheap crap for your dorm room, from school supplies to aquariums.”
On the blogging front, Wal-Mart should NOT open up to the world. Can you imagine purchasing people from Wal-Mart blogging?
“Hi, I’m the guy who demanded such low prices on [insert product here] that your town’s main company packed up and moved production to China. Now you know why your dad can’t help pay for college.”
Bad idea.
As we’ve seen, Wal-Mart’s PR firm has struggled with this in the past by going as far as creating fake blogs supposedly written by customers about how much they love parking their RVs in Wal-Mart’s lots. Just face the facts: if you have to fake it, it’s probably not a good fit.
In summary: Understanding your customer’s relationship with you - rather than your relationship with your customers - is key to successful marketing.
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