BlitzLocal

BlitzLocal Blog | Sharing online marketing tips and tricks

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:53 +0000

This handy tool uses Facebook’s authentication to download information about your personal Facebook usage. This is NOT the same as analytics for Facebook pages. But it does use the same permission requests you’d need to play Farmville or a related game.
For those non-geeks out there, the Wolfram Alpha search engine does computation. Put in math problems or ask the GDP of France in a Google-esque search box.
Go check it out and watch it lay bare who your friends are, when you’re online most often, and what things you talk about most.
Type in “Facebook report”.
Click “Analyze My Facebook Data”. Click “Allow” when the app requests permission.
Enter your information when prompted.
Click “Analyze My Facebook Data Now”.
Allow some time to gather data.
At the top, it shows your basic information on a slightly deeper level.
Your posts are broken down by time period, amount, and type.
Then they are broken down into immense detail.
Statistics about your friends’ interactions with your posts are shown, as well as what your top posts are.
Detailed check-in and app activity are also displayed.
You even get a time breakdown based on what you use to access Facebook.
Information on photos and tagging are all displayed.
Your friends are displayed by their gender, relationship status, age, location, and more.
You also see a visual interpretation of your network, color-coated based on occupation, school, local area, etc.
When Google’s Panda update started targeting on-page optimization that were considered low-value—with special focus on duplicate content and outbound links that appeared to be spam—it caused quite a controversy. Now, the most recent Penguin update, which targets primarily inbound links and links that are particularly identified as unnatural, controversy has once again arisen. Many businesses on are now seeing their traffic, search engine rankings, and even a significant amount of income drop with amazing speed. And just like what happened with the Panda, many are complaining that they’re being targeted unfairly.
The problem with many of those who complain is that they really have no clear idea what the term “ethical SEO practices” mean or what they constitute. This is particularly true of small businesses; this is why many people think they’re being unfairly targeted by Google’s updates—they don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. Take the case of an online business that has derived its ranking from the start by using tactics such as article spinning, using inbound links from networks, and buying links: for years the business owner may have used these tactics without realizing that they go against the primary mission of Google, which is to provide its users with only the most relevant search results. One of the reasons for the business owner’s failure to realize this fact is that his online business may have been doing quite well until the Penguin update. Also many businesses underestimate the importance of hiring a white hat SEO company to handle their accounts properly and in the end they got what they paid for.
The fact that you continued to enjoy good rankings, good traffic, and good sales even after the Panda update was launched doesn’t necessarily mean you can just relax and expect to be saved from the Penguin update as well. After all, the very reason why these updates are launched in the first place is for Google to be able to provide their users with the best answers to their queries. Imagine yourself being the one searching for something on the Internet. You wouldn’t want to do a Google search only to be victimized by the manipulative use of SEO services, would you? The best way for site owners to ensure good rankings regardless of what updates Google comes up with, therefore, is to make sure they follow only ethical SEO practices.
The problem lies in the fact that not all webmasters are SEO professionals. This means your webmaster may not really know how much is too much where search engine optimization is concerned. Even if you read Google’s updates and guidelines, they still wouldn’t do you much good if you don’t know the basic rules in the first place. That’ll be like cooking with a list of ingredients, but no cooking instructions. Making even the slightest mistake could ruin the entire recipe. To further aggravate the situation, search engine algorithms are so mercurial that what works today may not necessarily work three months from now. This is why it’s very important for you to keep up with the latest algorithm changes.
To make it easier for you to deal with the Google Penguin and any other further updates, here are three important things the Penguin should have taught you by now:
1. Diversity and balance are the key
The reason why Google’s Penguin update focuses on penalizing “spammy” sites is that Google wants to improve SERP quality for the benefit of searchers. If you want to get on top of search results pages, therefore, you either have to buy an AdWords spot there or come up with exceptionally good content for organic rankings. More importantly, you’ll have to forget about shady SEO tactics. Remember that saturating your title tags with keywords, using low-quality back links, and unnatural inter-links are the top targets of the Google Penguin. You should also learn how to mix up the types of content on your site. You can learn more about balancing your page look and feel with content, here.
In this image, the Biltmore website was able to achieve balance by distributing content evenly in blocks. Well chosen illustrations also added dimension to break the monotony of the site. – http://net.onextrapixel.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/biltmore.jpg
2. Strive to be as Pertinent as Possible to Your Audience
As long as you remain relevant to your target audience, you’ll always be safe from the pummeling these Google updates give errant sites. Take note that Google has recently introduced the Knowledge Graph, which is expected to hugely change the SEO game. Google is changing the way online search is processed; instead of depending heavily on keywords, search results are becoming more and more dependent on concepts that are relevant relative to each other. This means searches are moving away from its dependence on disjointed keywords. What this means for site owners is that the quality of their outbound and inbound links will now be measured according to their relevance and usefulness as well as the importance of the information in relation to the user’s query. This makes it even more important for you to develop connections and authority in your chosen niche. If you haven’t already started, then now is definitely the best time for you to start community building, particularly since community members are usually the best sources for natural links. Community building is also an excellent tool for customer retention.
3. Provide Useful Content
Since you now know that your main focus needs to shift from shady SEO tactics to building your credibility, your target audience’s trust, and your authority in your niche, then you need to understand that the best way to achieve this purpose is for you to keep things real. This might mean overhauling your entire site content. What’s important is for you to start focusing on creating better content, especially in on-page and guest posts. To put it simply, you have to keep your site content clean, clear, and useful.
There is a way for you to avoid getting pummeled by the Penguin and even if you’ve already been hurt, you can still bounce back. The secret is in taking a close look at your site to identify what could have gone wrong and then making the necessary adjustments.
Top Mistakes to Avoid After Google Penguin
If your website has been heavily affected by the Penguin update, you may want to go all out on SEO. However, due to the update, some of the old tried and tested optimization tactics may not work as well as before.
If you are still doing the same things you have been doing before, then there are chances that you may be making some grave SEO mistakes, which may even drive down your rankings even more.
1) You Are Using the Same Anchor Text – Using the same anchor texts, like “click here” or “find out more” or “click the link” may not do well for your website rankings. However, using these kinds of keywords would make your anchor text profile look natural. Use your brand name in the anchor, as well as your domain name. The key here is to link as naturally as possible by using natural keywords, and avoiding being aggressive.
2) Spun Content – In the past, the more content out there, which linked back to your site, the better it was for your rankings. However, eventually, article directories became breeding grounds for poorly written articles, which were posted just for the sake of links, and we saw plenty of spun content, which absolutely made no sense. Spun content that do not make any sense and are posted for the sake of placing links will definitely get you penalized by Google.
Spun content is very common but is not helpful for your SEO success at all.
3) Over-Optimizing – Back in 2010 and 2011, over-optimizing was a very popular thing. People used keywords as many times as they could in a blog post or article. Today, however, over optimization does not give your site that boost and appeal to Google like it used to before. So, avoid forcing keywords in the first and last sentences when they look unnatural, and avoid unnecessarily underlining, italicizing, and bolding the keywords because these do not provide any added value to your site.
4) Spam Blogs – Using spam blogs can also be bad for your rankings. Spam blogs are basically blogs with poorly written content. Most posts for spam blogs usually do not have any sense, typically contain a wide range of disconnected topics, and are posted only to put links in them. Real blogs that want to rank in search engines need to have a clear focus and should have excellent content that people will take time to read.
5) Spam Commenting – Some people prowl popular niche blogs and post spam comments. However, this may not work at all. Spam comments include all comments which are placed to simply drop links and do not contribute to or provide any real value to the blog readers.
Some examples of blog spam comments. Image credit.
6) Ranking Using Only Popular and Paid Blog Networks – Plenty of sites which were dropped by Google Penguin used popular blog networks. Instead of using paid blog networks, you may want to use article marketing instead since this continues to be a solid method for site ranking.
7) Using Free Directories – Article directories used to be very popular a long time ago and they were the go-to places to find helpful information on the web. However, they became loaded with poor and uninformative content, which is why Google has forced them to take a backseat. Good directories categorize and classify effectively so people can find helpful information easily. However, there are free and poor directories which do not classify their content and also accept poorly written content. These will not help your site at all.
Aside from these mistakes, there is one thing that you should remember. Google dislikes spam. Keep this in mind regularly and remember that any practice that constitutes spamming or providing spam-like content to readers will definitely not be good in the eyes of search engines.
So, take at look at your current practices or the SEO services of your provider and determine if they are currently making any of these mistakes. If they are, then you should stop doing these and use more helpful and relevant SEO tactics instead.
Read Up and Keep Yourself Updated
The key to search engine success is to play by Google’s rules, which changes from time to time. So read up and update yourself about the newest Google updates because a good tactic today may be an SEO mistake tomorrow.
See you at the top!
Traian, the guest author of this article, is the Director of SEO and co-founder of Pitstop Media Inc, a Canadian company that provides top rated SEO services to businesses across North America. To invite the author to guest post on your blog too, please contact www.pitstopmedia.com.
We plotted out every team’s fan count, engagement rate (social metrics), win/loss record, average attendance, merchandise sales, and the population of the city the team plays in (real-world data), looking for correlations and patterns. Ultimately, the best metric was the ratio of average attendence to fan count, though looking at Merchandise sales and standings was also enlightening: The Yankees have the most fans by far (8,474,881). This is not surprising. They have the biggest city (pop. 8,175,133), the highest merchandise sales, and the third best record in the league (60.3%), and have been a consistenly winning team for generations.
The Nationals have the least fans (230,581), which is somewhat surprising, considering they have the fourth best record (58.5%) and a relatively big population (601,723, compared to say, St. Louis’ population of 319,294).
There is no significant difference in the frequency or quality of the posts made by the Yankees and the Nationals.
The teams with the best merchandise sales (New York and Boston) are also the two pages with the most fans, and have the best attendance-fans ratio (0.5 : 100 and 0.7 : 100, respectively; the average is 1 : 25).-With very few discrepencies, the top ten teams that sold the most merchandise correspond with the ten teams with most fans (I.e. NY is #1 in merch sales and in fans, etc.).-Teams with inflated fan counts (NY, Boston, SF, etc.) likely have many fans that don’t live where the team plays.
The ratio of Yankees fans to Mets fans (8,474,881 : 626,869) is far more extreme than the ratio of average attedance (41,570 : 27,458).Team pages do a good job of posting photos, questions, short messages, occasional contests, videos, etc. One possible area of improvement would be to focus more on posting before a game than only doing recap posts.The team with the highest engagement by far is the Dodgers, who have won 61.8% of their games this season. The teams with the next highest engagement rates, the Mets and the Angels, are not ranked as well this year (both currently at 53.6%).
There seems to be a stronger connection in the fact that two of the teams with the best engagement rates are the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels (37.2% and 26.8% respectively). The Mets have a 27.5% engagement rate, and it can be presumed that the Yankees’ highly inflated fan count leads to low engagement. Most of the teams with above-average engagements rates are among the larger cities in the league (LA, New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Fort Worth).
There are of course, large cities with poor engagement (Toronto or San Diego, for example), but the only real standout is the smallest city in the league, Pittsburgh, with a high engagement rate.of 27.7%, the 6th highest in the league.
The Dodgers are third in merchandise sales, but other high sellers have poor engagement rates such so that the metrics don’t correlate. Boston, number 2 in merch sales is third to last in fan engagement.
We compared attendance to population, and then compared that to engagement, but data did not correlate well.
There seems to be a difference between people who go to games and people who engage on Facebook. For instance, Atlanta is a small city (pop. 420,003, the 9th smallest in the league) with high average attendance (29,852, well over the league average), and yet the team’s page has an engagement rate of 11.21%- far from remarkable. Cincinnati is another example. They have a killer attendance-population ratio (27,163 : 296,943) and has the second worst engagement in the league- 1.62%.
If you’re a data monkey and would like to see the numbers for yourself, You can check it out here. You can also check out the technology we used to get these numbers and get your free trial over at Blitzmetrics.com
Credit unions tend to have fewer fans than large national banks making higher engagement rates easier to attain. 8 of the top 10 in terms of fan count are banks.
Chase: 3,364,793 fans, Capital One: 2,556,273 fans, American Express: 2,470,220 fans
These three banks account for about 85% of the market share
Since engagement percent is calculated with fan count in the denominator, smaller pages tend to have higher engagement.
YOUR Community Credit Union with 39.01%, while TDECU has 23.89%
Banks hold the top seven spots for highest Share of Voice (% of interactions across the industry).
Citi has 22.41% SOV, BOA has 16.8% SOV although it should be noted that BOA suffers from more negative sentiment than most other banks. Wells Fargo is at 15.92% after that there is a steep decline; American Express has 8.33% SOV.
Which is better: Fan count or engagement?
Catch 22. We want to raise both!
Use sponsored stories to:
Page Like Story: Build fan base
Page Post Ad: Push good content to friends of fans.
Content:
Most of these banks heavily rely on pictures and questions that encourage users to respond. Both banks and credit unions try to show that they support their local communities by giving away scholarships or sponsoring some charitable events or functions.
The biggest difference between banks and credit unions is the more socially successful credit unions generally offer far more incentives like giveaways and other promotional strategies that are then publicized on the wall for the whole community to see. Trips to Hawaii, $1,000 giveaways every day, etc, can be very powerful tools to foster community online.
Customer Relationship Management:
Complaints, even in financial institutions that are thriving in social media, are commonplace throughout the industry.
The faster a customer service representative responds to complaints, the better.
YOUR credit union has an average response time of 21.36 minutes
Usually complaints are responded to in the first hour. Otherwise others tend to jump in and express their dissatisfaction as well.
Action:
Credit unions need more fans and banks need more interactions. The credit unions need to use ads in tandem with their giveaways to attract more fans and more account holders. Banks should take a cue from credit unions and offer better incentives for participation.
To succeed in social media you must engage your fans and build relationships that go deeper than a transaction. Facebook gives you a chance to humanize your brand and makes it easy to educate and entertain your customers. If done correctly, your fans will become your advocates spreading not only awareness, but endorsement as well. This is called Engagement marketing and it is one of the most powerful ways to build interest and brand loyalty in your products. Think about it, how much more likely are you to see a movie a friend recommended rather than one that is just advertised on TV? So how do you fuel engagement marketing? The best way to learn is from others who have already done it, in this case, that would be Niche Modern, a company that specializes in modern lighting fixtures and lamps.
Niche Modern recognized the chance to connect with fans and replicate their in person customer service skills by engaging fans on their wall and building a vibrant community of loyal supporters. Of course it’s easy to engage with fans when they’re stroking your ego but what about customers who are disgruntled? Niche Modern responds by empathizing with them and then doing whatever they can to resolve the issue and then leaving the post on the wall. This shows the community that they care about their customers experience and will do everything in their power to rectify any grievances.
How do you post engaging content? There is no magic bullet to produce engaging or viral content, if there was, everyone would be doing it. That said here are some tips: pictures and videos generally work better than just words, ask questions that encourage your fans to respond, post exclusive offers and understand your fans with Facebook Insights. With your posts be succinct, 100-250 characters is a good rule of thumb. Post at least twice a week, creating a content calendar will help.If you’re just posting to your wall less than 16% of your fans are going to see the post but with page post ads that number can shoot to 70-80% of your fans and can be done on a shoestring budget.
Use ads to find fans. Entice them by showing them value and targeting the people that are most likely to be interested instead of just blasting your message across Facebook to everybody. A combination of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories as well as Page Post ads, to keep your current fans engaged, will be the most beneficial strategy for attracting fans and keeping them coming back. The ads may find the people but it’s the social component that will clinch the like.
You don’t need to be some conglomerate or multinational corporation to excel at engagement marketing; anybody can do it. A vivacious Facebook community offers a variety of tangible benefits: people are 51% more likely to buy a product after liking them on Facebook, fans report visiting and purchasing an average of 2x more than non-fans, more in-store traffic can be generated with exclusive Facebook coupons, you will have a new feedback channel to poll customers, you will have increased participation in promotions. Ultimately engagement marketing boils down to four steps: build a Facebook page, connect to fans with ads, engage fans with quality content, and influence the friends of your fans. Although the ROI may be difficult to quantify, if done correctly the end result will pay off in spades for a long time to come.

Our Online Local Marketing Strategy | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:53 +0000

BlitzLocal provides our clients with every tool necessary to run a profitable internet marketing campaign. From engineering to analytics, we will help you grow your business and generate more revenue. We specialize in helping you reach clients in your local community through the internet.
Don’t waste time with cookie cutter solutions. We fully customize each campaign to suit our client’s needs and help them stand out above their competition. Your success depends on working comfortably and efficiently with a knowledgeable analyst you can trust. Blitz Analysts have over 100 hours of training, followed by internship and continuing education, coaching, and support. Get the power of BlitzLocal working for you today.
What We Do
What Makes Us Different
Reputation
Clients

Press Kit | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:53 +0000

If you are interested in interviewing Dennis Yu, or plan to write an article about Dennis Yu or BlitzLocal, the following information and media may be of interest. Feel free to embed or link to any of the resources below in your article.
Bio:
Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal. He has helped brands grow and measure their Facebook presence and is an internationally recognized lecturer in Facebook marketing, having been featured on National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News, AllFacebook, CBS Evening News, and KTLA-TV. He has spoken at Search Marketing Expo, Search Engine Strategies, Web 2.0, The American Marketing Association, PubCon, Conversational Commerce Conference, Pacific Conferences, HostingCon, Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Convention, UltraLight Startups, MIVA Merchant, and other venues. Yu has also counseled the Federal Trade Commission on privacy issues for social networks.
Dennis has held leadership positions at Yahoo! and American Airlines. His educational background is Finance and Economics from Southern Methodist University and London School of Economics. You can contact him at dennis@blitzlocal.com, his blog, or on Facebook.
Images:
Quotable Quote:
“I strongly believe in the metrics > analysis > action process when running marketing campaigns. Metrics and reports that are not actionable are a waste of time. Metrics reflect what has changed significantly since the last time the numbers were crunched, analysis considers why those changes took place, and action involves the steps you’ll take to improve those metrics.” — Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal
Videos:
SEO and Social Media in Sydney Australia at SMX with Dennis Yu – The InterZone TV
How Rosetta Stone Successfully Leverages Facebook
SEO Strategies For Small Businesses Go Local & Get Social
Podcasts:
Facebook Advertising Interview with Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal (42:25 minutes)
Previous Speaking Engagements
Dennis Yu – Speakers at OMS Online Marketing Conference, Online Marketing Training Courses & Online Marketing Best Practices
Speaker: Dennis Yu: Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2011 – Co-produced by O’Reilly Media & UBM TechWeb, March 28 – 31, 2011, San Francisco
PubCon Speaker Dennis Yu Speaker Biography PubCon 2010
SMX Advanced Seattle 2010 – Who’s Speaking
SMX East 2009 Who’s Speaking
Dennis Yu ‘s conference talks and presentations | Lanyrd
Speakers – SMOC – Social Media Optimization Conference
Articles and Guest Posts From Around The Web
Facebook Tips, News, and Info:
How To Use Facebook’s New Power Editor For Ads
How To Succeed At Facebook Advertising
Dennis Yu gives Facebook optimization tips for hosting companies
How to run an effective Facebook campaign for $5
Making a Facebook Page? Avoid this Deadly Mistake…
Facebook Insights and 7 deadly Sins to Avoid
Dennis Yu offering a little PPC love
A Fatal Mistake in Facebook Marketing | Search Marketing Insider
Why Most Brands Are Inadvertently Wasting Money on Facebook
Why B2B Marketing is Facebook’s Best Kept Secret
How to Use Influence to Supercharge Your Facebook Presence
The price of a Facebook fan for media companies
Killer Facebook strategies for publishers
How To Trick People Into Becoming Your Fans On Facebook
How To Steal Your Competitor’s Customers On Facebook
10 Facebook Advertising Tips For Brilliant Marketers
THE Single Critical Factor For Successful Advertising On Facebook
How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term
11 Killer Ways to Increase Your Facebook CTR
HOW TO: Grow your Facebook Page by 17% in 1 week!
Supercharging Facebook Fan Pages with Ads and Applications
7 Killer Facebook Advertising Tips from ASE09
How To Make 45K a Day Scamming Facebook Ads
Surprise! Moms Are Hardcore Gamers!
Facebook Testing New Reviews Ad Format
Beware Of The Viral Like-Jacking Facebook Pages
Facebook Advertising Interview with Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal
Can You REALLY Trust Your Facebook Friends?
Facebook Games Invite Spammers To Play : NPR
#SESSFO Sneak Peek: Facebook Marketing Interview
How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession
More Facebook posts on BlitzLocal blog
Case Studies:
Going From ZERO To Popularity – Real Examples
Videos Posted by PubCon: How Rosetta Stone Successfully Leverages Facebook
The Secret To How JVC Gained 35,000 Fans In 30 Days
How A 13 Year Old Gained 16,000 Fans In 96 Hours
How We Got To 40,310 Facebook Fans In 4 Days
SEO
SEO: 9 tips for optimizing a nonprofit site
I will do a SEO analysis of your site for FREE!
SEO Value of Article Aggregation Sites
Is SEO A Scam?
More SEO posts on BlitzLocal blog
PPC
Google bans 30,000 advertisers—and how this affects you
Parallax : Calculating Technology’s Future: Adsonomies
More PPC posts on BlitzLocal blog
Markets, Models and Profits
Asians in Advertising: BlitzLocal – Dennis Yu
Huge Money In Asian Markets
How Billionaires View Wealth (And How To Avoid Financial Disaster)
The Ultimate Local Ad Agency 2010 Fiscal Model?
Evolve Or Die: 2010 Local Ad Agency Fiscal Models
$1.1 Billion Dollar Judgments Against YOU for Being Part of Latest Online Scams
Analytics:
GoogleAnalytics vs. Omniture: Independent Analysis
Strategies:
Online Lead Generation, Aug 2010 Issue

Startup Companies | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:53 +0000

A colleague recently told me of his plans to dominate his particular niche. The competitors in his space have deep pockets, massive ad budgets, and are well-connected in the space. These competitors have a clearly inferior product, though it can be argued that nobody exactly smells like roses in this niche. So “Paul”, we’ll call him, felt that having a better product that was priced competitively, could win in the market. I’m not revealing who “Paul” is, since it’s the concept that’s important, not the particular individual. Here is why that strategy alone doesn’t work. May it serve as a lesson to any other budding entrepreneur who wants to go after Fortune 500 clients.
The graveyard of failed startups is littered with the bodies of companies that have gone after the Microsofts, Cokes, and Proctor and Gambles of the world. Why not? The reasoning is that just one Coke as a client can be worth 1,000 little clients, and is perhaps even enough to sustain your venture all by itself. Unfortunately, when you have one big customer that accounts for most of your earnings, they can also jerk you around; more on the “Wal-Mart” problem later.
Some people call this the problem of the elephants, deer, and rabbits. It’s sexy to go elephant hunting, but the trouble is that it takes a team to kill the elephant. That team may have to wait for months on-end before getting anything; often starving in the process. It takes sophisticated tools and plenty of unpaid labor to get an initial meeting, much less deal with all the various levels of decision makers needed to get your first dollar.
Rabbits are small, plentiful, and easy to catch. These are the small businesses that have $10 a month for your software, but can be such a pain to service that you get a case of “rabbit starvation”. Yes, it’s true; if you live in the woods and subside only on rabbit meat you will starve, since wild rabbit meat is so lean that it takes more energy to process than it’s worth.
So in true Goldilocks fashion, the rabbits are too small and the elephants are too big. And thus, startup advisors say, you should chase deer—medium sized, not too hard to catch, and enough meat to make it worthwhile. Trying to serve the middle, however, is like trying to be everything to everyone. With no focus in the marketplace, you are unable to differentiate and unable to dominate a niche.
Back to “Paul” again; he has had minor success selling to elephants. He is personally well networked, and one of the best salespeople I’ve ever met. But he is just one guy and there is only so many of him that can perform magic. It’s not scalable. Further, the $10,000 proof-of-concept deals don’t seem to materialize into $100,000 deals, despite what the Excel spreadsheets to the board might represent.
He may have spent (gambled) $50,000 in energy to get the $10,000 deal. And the big brands that he’s dealing with know this full-well, and are happy to take advantage of the discounts their name can leverage. It’s like the prom queen that can be mean to the adolescent boys; teasing each of them into an endless stream of favors. And it is here that startups die.
In engineering projects, we know that you have to multiply the estimates by a factor of 3. If they say it will take 5 weeks, then you can assume 15 weeks is a more realistic estimate. Same is true of sales. That deal that is 60% likely to close is actually 20% likely to close. And instead of 2 weeks, it will be 2 months. You might be ready to go, but the main client contact may be slow to respond to email, the accounting people have some arduous PO process, or some new person wants to evaluate your software—starting the clock over.
Meanwhile, you’re burning cash. It’s not like you can put payroll or your rent on hold. What you’ve expended so far is a sunken cost, so you just keep going like the gambler who bets double or nothing. Even if you get the deal, you might not be paid until you complete the work, plus net 60. So if the project takes 90 days to complete and you’re paid 60 days after completion, you have to float 150 days of cash. If the pre-sales process took 90 days, you’re now looking at 240 days; not an uncommon cycle to close a big deal.
In those 240 days, anything can happen. Facebook or Google comes out with a product or feature set that eliminates the need for your product. The company you’re dealing with has a re-organization, so your internal champion isn’t the decision maker anymore. Maybe you lost a key engineer—hey; lots of places are notorious for folks who are disloyal, jumping to whatever the sexy thing of the moment is. Your board or investor begins to pressure you, forcing you to spend more time on convincing them that you’re “so close” to hitting it big, while actually taking your focus away from execution.
Napoleon had his Waterloo because he overextended his supply chain. In other words; the clock ran out on him. If you’re going after the big boys, it’s easy to underestimate what it takes to win. Mind you, self-service software is a different matter—we’re talking about selling deals to household brands that are used to dealing with big agencies who will roll out the red carpet with not a penny of cost on their side for months.
So here are some key insights to help you avoid a prolonged death—to have a decent shot at success versus running out of gas.
Law #1: Enterprise software is not bought, it is sold. Companies don’t just walk up to you and say they want to order the #2 meal, supersized. Expressing interest after reading about you on TechCrunch is a long way from getting your first penny. Enterprise software is sold via a network of experienced sales reps that have inside connections at the client company. That rep may have been an agency player with a big black book or someone who was internal until recently. If you don’t have teams of folks who can navigate these landmines, you’ll be constantly scratching your head as to why you got so close, but some inferior vendor won the day. You’re column fodder, buddy—the client was happy to waste your time to get you to fly in and pitch, just so they can say they talked to 3 other people before selecting the vendor they had in mind all along. Moral of the story– don’t enter a battle that you haven’t already determined you’ve won via inside connections. In other words: never go into an RFP situation blind.
Law #2: Ask for a token payment. Sure, you might be dealing with someone from General Motors. But does that person have power to sign a check? We no longer do custom work for free or do a ton of free consulting. If they want a proof of concept, we charge a nominal fee. Even if it’s only asking for $1,000, the prospect’s reaction to this will be quite telling if they are serious. Case in point—one of the largest newspapers in the world wanted our help with Facebook marketing. They wanted every PowerPoint presentation we have ever done, some one-on-one meetings on-site, and some technical help to troubleshoot. We were flattered. But when we popped the question, they balked. I knew this person’s boss, who told me that this person was preparing a strategy to present as their own. This person was just swapping our name for his name and taking credit with no intention of engaging with us. It happens all the time. Watch for it now and you’ll see it often. A payment of a few thousand dollars is a gesture of good faith between both parties. And if you are looking at doing a partnership with a larger, more established company, be wary of “partners” that want you to take all the risk.
Law #3: Decide if you are positioning yourself as cheaper or better. You can’t be both. Even if you are, the marketplace won’t believe you. Plus, you’d be leaving money on the table if you can justify yourself as being of higher quality. Would you trust a heart surgeon that is offering surgeries this week at 50% off?
Law #4: Triple your prices. You’ll lose some customers, as you should. But the ones you lose are likely the ones that are causing you the most headaches which, in turn, prevent you from focusing on the guys that are happy to pay you more. Spend time on the customers who love you. Don’t abide by the squeaky wheel management philosophy. If you have 30 clients paying you $5k a month each on average, wouldn’t it be so much easier to have just 10 clients paying you $15k a month?
Law #5: Ignore the armchair quarterbacks. Often the most well-meaning of family and friends will insist on giving you advice. While you trust their friendship, it doesn’t mean they can weigh-in on complex business decisions. How much of your precious time are you selling to folks who aren’t going to buy your software or can’t help you refine your offering? You’re talking to the wrong people, though many enjoy the entertainment of verbal jousting at your expense.
Law #6: Sell through a partner. If you can’t afford a sales force, leverage the client base on someone who already has a Fortune 500 client base. That’s what BlitzLocal does with Webtrends, who opens doors for us that we would never get on our own. In fact, we get to work with existing clients who have Webtrends as their analytics provider, which makes deals so much easier. It’s a win-win for everyone.
So that’s what it takes to go after the big boys. If you’re not extremely lucky, you need the cash, connections, and focus to weather lengthy sales cycles. So think twice if you want to get Nike as a client. They won’t even let you publicly mention them as a client if you do, so the referral value may be less than you anticipate. But when you can find those particular clients who are partners that care about your success, too—then you’ve found a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
If you found this helpful, let me know in the comments below. If you want to argue, feel free to voice your opinion, too. I can’t promise I’ll respond, but I will certainly try to respond to folks who ask for help. You can also reach me at facebook.com/dennisyu.
About the Author:
Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook. BlitzLocal serves both national brands and local service businesses.

demo | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:52 +0000

BlitzLocal non-profits provides pro bono and discounted support for non-profits. We would like to offer you a WordPress theme completely free to help you build your non-profit website. If you want us to install and tweak it, we do ask for a nominal fee to defray labor costs. Click HERE to download it. View the …

demo | BlitzLocal Read More »

Call Tracking | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:52 +0000

Call Tracking
Measure the success of your investment
BlitzLocal’s Call Tracking service is an exceptional channel for you to measure the success of your advertising dollars. Replace your land line number with one of our instantly assigned 800 numbers and feel privileged to know exactly how effective our services are. Each call that is made to your assigned number will be recorded for quality assurance, making you the operator of generated leads.
Play, pause, listen and learn where your customer is coming from.
The BlitzLocal Call Tracking dashboard allows you to play back every call from start to finish, download the call in an audio file, and hear your phone staff perform.
Hear AND Visualize the call.
Each call will be traced for measurable reporting. Not only can you hear the call, but the BlitzLocal Call Tracking dashboard will provide you with an analysis of call time, location, duration, and origin. Stay informed and optimize accordingly with the power of BlitzLocal Call Tracking software.
©2014 BlitzLocal, LLC

Facebook | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:52 +0000

We plotted out every team’s fan count, engagement rate (social metrics), win/loss record, average attendance, merchandise sales, and the population of the city the team plays in (real-world data), looking for correlations and patterns. Ultimately, the best metric was the ratio of average attendence to fan count, though looking at Merchandise sales and standings was also enlightening: The Yankees have the most fans by far (8,474,881). This is not surprising. They have the biggest city (pop. 8,175,133), the highest merchandise sales, and the third best record in the league (60.3%), and have been a consistenly winning team for generations.
The Nationals have the least fans (230,581), which is somewhat surprising, considering they have the fourth best record (58.5%) and a relatively big population (601,723, compared to say, St. Louis’ population of 319,294).
There is no significant difference in the frequency or quality of the posts made by the Yankees and the Nationals.
The teams with the best merchandise sales (New York and Boston) are also the two pages with the most fans, and have the best attendance-fans ratio (0.5 : 100 and 0.7 : 100, respectively; the average is 1 : 25).-With very few discrepencies, the top ten teams that sold the most merchandise correspond with the ten teams with most fans (I.e. NY is #1 in merch sales and in fans, etc.).-Teams with inflated fan counts (NY, Boston, SF, etc.) likely have many fans that don’t live where the team plays.
The ratio of Yankees fans to Mets fans (8,474,881 : 626,869) is far more extreme than the ratio of average attedance (41,570 : 27,458).Team pages do a good job of posting photos, questions, short messages, occasional contests, videos, etc. One possible area of improvement would be to focus more on posting before a game than only doing recap posts.The team with the highest engagement by far is the Dodgers, who have won 61.8% of their games this season. The teams with the next highest engagement rates, the Mets and the Angels, are not ranked as well this year (both currently at 53.6%).
There seems to be a stronger connection in the fact that two of the teams with the best engagement rates are the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels (37.2% and 26.8% respectively). The Mets have a 27.5% engagement rate, and it can be presumed that the Yankees’ highly inflated fan count leads to low engagement. Most of the teams with above-average engagements rates are among the larger cities in the league (LA, New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Fort Worth).
There are of course, large cities with poor engagement (Toronto or San Diego, for example), but the only real standout is the smallest city in the league, Pittsburgh, with a high engagement rate.of 27.7%, the 6th highest in the league.
The Dodgers are third in merchandise sales, but other high sellers have poor engagement rates such so that the metrics don’t correlate. Boston, number 2 in merch sales is third to last in fan engagement.
We compared attendance to population, and then compared that to engagement, but data did not correlate well.
There seems to be a difference between people who go to games and people who engage on Facebook. For instance, Atlanta is a small city (pop. 420,003, the 9th smallest in the league) with high average attendance (29,852, well over the league average), and yet the team’s page has an engagement rate of 11.21%- far from remarkable. Cincinnati is another example. They have a killer attendance-population ratio (27,163 : 296,943) and has the second worst engagement in the league- 1.62%.
If you’re a data monkey and would like to see the numbers for yourself, You can check it out here. You can also check out the technology we used to get these numbers and get your free trial over at Blitzmetrics.com
Credit unions tend to have fewer fans than large national banks making higher engagement rates easier to attain. 8 of the top 10 in terms of fan count are banks.
Chase: 3,364,793 fans, Capital One: 2,556,273 fans, American Express: 2,470,220 fans
These three banks account for about 85% of the market share
Since engagement percent is calculated with fan count in the denominator, smaller pages tend to have higher engagement.
YOUR Community Credit Union with 39.01%, while TDECU has 23.89%
Banks hold the top seven spots for highest Share of Voice (% of interactions across the industry).
Citi has 22.41% SOV, BOA has 16.8% SOV although it should be noted that BOA suffers from more negative sentiment than most other banks. Wells Fargo is at 15.92% after that there is a steep decline; American Express has 8.33% SOV.
Which is better: Fan count or engagement?
Catch 22. We want to raise both!
Use sponsored stories to:
Page Like Story: Build fan base
Page Post Ad: Push good content to friends of fans.
Content:
Most of these banks heavily rely on pictures and questions that encourage users to respond. Both banks and credit unions try to show that they support their local communities by giving away scholarships or sponsoring some charitable events or functions.
The biggest difference between banks and credit unions is the more socially successful credit unions generally offer far more incentives like giveaways and other promotional strategies that are then publicized on the wall for the whole community to see. Trips to Hawaii, $1,000 giveaways every day, etc, can be very powerful tools to foster community online.
Customer Relationship Management:
Complaints, even in financial institutions that are thriving in social media, are commonplace throughout the industry.
The faster a customer service representative responds to complaints, the better.
YOUR credit union has an average response time of 21.36 minutes
Usually complaints are responded to in the first hour. Otherwise others tend to jump in and express their dissatisfaction as well.
Action:
Credit unions need more fans and banks need more interactions. The credit unions need to use ads in tandem with their giveaways to attract more fans and more account holders. Banks should take a cue from credit unions and offer better incentives for participation.
Congratulations to Veronica Stecker and Gordmans “Choose Your Outfit” app’s acceptance into the Facebook Studio Awards! In addition to managing Gordmans’ television, print, and digital marketing, Veronica maintains a blog on all things social at VeronicaStecker.com. Working with BlitzLocal, the “Choose Your Outfit” app launched on July 18th, 2011 and ran through August 19th, 2011. The interactive app allowed Facebook fans to dress a male or female avatar with Gordmans’ clothing and accessories. In order to use the “Choose Your Outfit” app, users had to fan Gordmans’ Facebook page. After a fan had chosen their outfit on the app, they received a 15% off coupon for use at any of Gordmans’ locations. Gordmans ran sponsored story Like ads and Friend of Fan ads to drive users to the “Choose Your Outfit” app. The campaign drove 10,376,388 impressions and 8,771 connections. These are great statistics, but the most telling of all was that Gordmans saw their average transaction size more than double from $32.00 to $68.00. Keep up the fantastic work Veronica! There are surely great things coming from Gordmans after the amazing “Choose Your Outfit” app and campaign.
About the Author: Travis King is Manager of Facebook Marketing at BlitzLocal.
this is a guest post by Sundeep Kapur, his website is www.emailyogi.com, he’s also a Digital Evangelist for NCR.
Year over year the amount of content available on Facebook has increased dramatically. More brands are beginning to leverage this channel and while the number of consumers on Facebook continues to grow, it is going to get harder for brands to attentively engage consumers. Here are some key points highlighted in this report.
Successful brands need to focus on increasing interaction effectiveness with their consumer base. You do this by increasing the frequency of exposure, paying close attention to what is being discussed, and focused advertising.
Interactions with consumers will occur as you post and more than 70% of the interaction occurs within the first hour. So keep up your efforts on posting more often and monitoring right after you post versus posting and “going to bed.” Also, a post with a “question” tends to drive increased interaction.
Don’t forget that advertising does work. Your engagement rate can go up by 21% to 43% by knowing what to say, when to say, and of course how you say things on Facebook.
Brands have a significant opportunity to leverage social. The key to success is to understand how much of the social data is public, how to collect the data without alienating the consumer, and how best to quickly use the data that is collected.
The BlitzLocal team attended the Facebook Mobile Hack event in NYC on January 18th and took some notes on the newest updates to the mobile platform.
Read here to see what the Facebook engineers had to say, and hear what has worked for several case studies.
Intro: Facebook Platform for Mobile
How has the web changed since the early days?
Photos!
Facebook tagging (social)
Games
Not focused on rendering the best graphics, but social aspect
200 million people playing games on Facebook Platform
The rise of mobile
Across all levels of mobile devices
350M users of Facebook mobile
Twice as engaged as desktop version
Social + Mobile
Friends, Newsfeed, search, notifications, requests, bookmarks
Photography, websites, music, communication, games, books
Web Apps (HTML5) Development: Matt Kelly & Vikas Gupta
How to facilitate sharing with friends
Problematic when sharing over different types of devices
Apps don’t exist across platforms
Hard to share content between them even if apps exist
How can Facebook fix this?
The social channels
Requests: user to user direct messaging
Make sure they are super fast! Almost real-time
News Feed: one to many sharing with friends
Posting, view on wall, view on news feed
Open Graph: Lightweight, seamless sharing
Wherever your app lives or works, Facebook distributes properly so there are no holes.
Bookmarks
m.facebook.com
Gives users a specific spot to get back to your app
Mechanism for engagement
Native facebook for iPhone
Payments
Use credits to monetize apps
Build social from the ground up
Search, login auth, directed to app
Social apps work everywhere
iPhone, laptop, android, ipad, android tablet
HTML5 works across all platforms
Native App + Open Graph: Aryeh Selekman & Christine Abernathy:
iOS and Android + Facebook platform
Open Source Native SDKs
Developer app settings
Fields to configure iOS and Android apps
Linking and app distribution works appropriately if these fields are filled out correctly
Single Sign On (SSO) login without typing
Login with facebook button
Understanding Native Distribution
If an iOS or app exists, all requests/News Feed Stories/Timeline stories will link directly to native app (or apple store if not installed)
On android, requests/News Feed Stories/Timeline stories wil only direct to your mobile web app
5 Best Practices
1. Build a mobile web app
HTML5: distribution on m.facebook.com on all webkit enabled touch browsers
native wrappers
take advantage of SSO capabilities
2. Implement SSO
3. Implement requests for app discoverability
Rate now, invite friends, send requests
4. Leverage existing friend graph
Promote activity and interaction
Re-engagement
Push notification through native channels to let you know your friends joined
5. Get your app on timeline
Open Graph and Mobile Apps
One API – distribution to ticker, Timeline, newsfeed
Allows you to define what people do in your application
Reading, listening, watching, etc.
4 Steps to get started using open graph
1. Define your actions and objects
2. Design your Timeline aggregations
Pictures, maps, represent actions and data that people send through
3. Markup and expose your objects
Everything represented by underlying URL
Where do objects live
4. Publish actions
Native Distribution for Mobile Apps
Case Study: PhoneGap
Pattern
Embed a chromeless browser in a native app
Create a bridge between the browser and the native code providing access to native APIs
Write a web app
Package the web app with the native code and deploy to devices
Write once debug everywhere
Take note
HTML, JS, CSS included in an app package
HTML loaded on file:// URI scheme, no cross domain request restrictions
Engineering wise, approach is simple to extend to new platforms
Support Platforms
iOS, Android, BB, webOS, Symbian, Windows Phone (mango), Samsung Bada
Mobile first!
HTML5: write native code easily, scale like an app so width is design width – no pinch zoom etc
CSS3: webkit transformations
The future
Tooling
WebGL
Facebook, Linkedin, Walmart use case
Continue polyfilling HTML5
Case Study: Washington Post Social Reader
Coding for the futures
Everything you write effects possible futures
Architect for the foreseeable futures
Short term futures
Building mobile second
Use mobile to rethink boundaries
Roll mobile learning back into the webapp
Case Study: Thuzi
Hospitality app
Social by design
Send invites, RSVPs
Share great offers with my friends
Provide reviews of the experience
Capture the moment for a special occasion (Timeline)
Local by design
Dining is a local experience
Find a local restaurant
Invite friends, redeem offers, find out what’s happening
Native by design
Want to ensure you have access to the newest native APIs
Want to have the fastest app possible
Want to guarantee formatting correctness
More choices for monetization – iAds, etc
Many existing open source libraries and blog posts and tutorials
Are not dependent upon plugins or other 3rd party series for push notifications

Express Adwords Consulting | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:52 +0000

BlitzLocal’s Express PPC Booster will show you quick fixes that will give you a minimum of 10-15% improvement in conversion performance. Our PPC experts are masters at spotting what’s preventing you from getting blockbuster results in your campaigns.
BLITZLOCAL EXPRESS PPC BOOSTER*
The most important 60 minutes you’ll ever spend on your ad campaign!
During your 60 minute interactive online consultation, we will look at your campaigns and show you exactly what needs work. This is the most valuable hour you’ll spend on your PPC campaign, bar none. Here’s what’s included:
Review appropriate account structures: how to improve campaign, ad group, and keyword organization.
Identify the top Quality Score issues hurting your keywords and account, causing ad disapprovals and higher CPC.
Discuss your keyword strategy for keyword expansion and pruning: we’ll show you where to focus for highest ROI.
Assess theming between keywords, ads, and landing pages.
Answers to any of your questions regarding PPC optimization.
Provide a list of actionable recommendations for you to implement immediately!
BONUS! We’ll deliver a transcript of the call and webinar, so you can access it later with your team.
Limit one Express PPC Booster consultation per customer; additional campaign reviews available at special prices when ordered during your Express Booster consultation. Ask for details. Limited time offer. Value $2,500.
For a limited time your cost for the Express PPC Review is only $799. You can start enjoying the benefits of more conversions within a few days. Use the code EXPRESSME to receive your personal $1,701 discount. Please do not share this code with others; only a select group is being provided with this once in a lifetime exclusive offer. If you would like us to extend this offer to a colleague or friend, please email our CEO, Dennis Yu, with your request. We will make every effort to accommodate requests, dependent on availability.
Need more? Consider our PPC JumpStart service!
Questions? Call 888-811-2448 or email review@blitzlocal.com.

Learning Center | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:52 +0000

To succeed in social media you must engage your fans and build relationships that go deeper than a transaction. Facebook gives you a chance to humanize your brand and makes it easy to educate and entertain your customers. If done correctly, your fans will become your advocates spreading not only awareness, but endorsement as well. This is called Engagement marketing and it is one of the most powerful ways to build interest and brand loyalty in your products. Think about it, how much more likely are you to see a movie a friend recommended rather than one that is just advertised on TV? So how do you fuel engagement marketing? The best way to learn is from others who have already done it, in this case, that would be Niche Modern, a company that specializes in modern lighting fixtures and lamps.
Niche Modern recognized the chance to connect with fans and replicate their in person customer service skills by engaging fans on their wall and building a vibrant community of loyal supporters. Of course it’s easy to engage with fans when they’re stroking your ego but what about customers who are disgruntled? Niche Modern responds by empathizing with them and then doing whatever they can to resolve the issue and then leaving the post on the wall. This shows the community that they care about their customers experience and will do everything in their power to rectify any grievances.
How do you post engaging content? There is no magic bullet to produce engaging or viral content, if there was, everyone would be doing it. That said here are some tips: pictures and videos generally work better than just words, ask questions that encourage your fans to respond, post exclusive offers and understand your fans with Facebook Insights. With your posts be succinct, 100-250 characters is a good rule of thumb. Post at least twice a week, creating a content calendar will help.If you’re just posting to your wall less than 16% of your fans are going to see the post but with page post ads that number can shoot to 70-80% of your fans and can be done on a shoestring budget.
Use ads to find fans. Entice them by showing them value and targeting the people that are most likely to be interested instead of just blasting your message across Facebook to everybody. A combination of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories as well as Page Post ads, to keep your current fans engaged, will be the most beneficial strategy for attracting fans and keeping them coming back. The ads may find the people but it’s the social component that will clinch the like.
You don’t need to be some conglomerate or multinational corporation to excel at engagement marketing; anybody can do it. A vivacious Facebook community offers a variety of tangible benefits: people are 51% more likely to buy a product after liking them on Facebook, fans report visiting and purchasing an average of 2x more than non-fans, more in-store traffic can be generated with exclusive Facebook coupons, you will have a new feedback channel to poll customers, you will have increased participation in promotions. Ultimately engagement marketing boils down to four steps: build a Facebook page, connect to fans with ads, engage fans with quality content, and influence the friends of your fans. Although the ROI may be difficult to quantify, if done correctly the end result will pay off in spades for a long time to come.
You can use this tool inside Facebook’s Graph API to find multiple pages for any business or brand! First, go to the Graph API inside the Facebook Developers page. Scroll down until you get to the ‘Searching’ section. You will see that Facebook supports search for many different objects. We’ll use pages to search for all Fuddruckers’ Facebook pages.
After clicking on the ‘Pages’ link, we are taken here. The search is defaulted to search for platform, and we can change where it says platform to Fuddruckers in the url so now it starts with:
https://graph.facebook.com/searchq=Fuddruckers&type=page&access_token=
To pull more than 25 search results, add:
&limit=200
The search will now pull 200 results with the name of each page, its category, and id number
We are interested in the id number because we add it to the end of www.facebook.com/ to bring us to their page
Select all, and copy to a new workbook in Excel, and run a simple ‘Sort’ on the data so we can isolate the user id for each Facebook page.
After the sort, you will end up with a list where all of the id numbers are together. Isolate these and paste them to a new workbook.
We will now use the find and replace feature to:
find: “id”:
replace with: www.facebook.com/
click replace all
Use the find and replace tool to clean up the rest of the apostrophes and spaces, replacing them with no characters. Your list of the top 200 Fuddruckers pages is now be ready to go!
The BlitzLocal team attended the Facebook Mobile Hack event in NYC on January 18th and took some notes on the newest updates to the mobile platform.
Read here to see what the Facebook engineers had to say, and hear what has worked for several case studies.
Intro: Facebook Platform for Mobile
How has the web changed since the early days?
Photos!
Facebook tagging (social)
Games
Not focused on rendering the best graphics, but social aspect
200 million people playing games on Facebook Platform
The rise of mobile
Across all levels of mobile devices
350M users of Facebook mobile
Twice as engaged as desktop version
Social + Mobile
Friends, Newsfeed, search, notifications, requests, bookmarks
Photography, websites, music, communication, games, books
Web Apps (HTML5) Development: Matt Kelly & Vikas Gupta
How to facilitate sharing with friends
Problematic when sharing over different types of devices
Apps don’t exist across platforms
Hard to share content between them even if apps exist
How can Facebook fix this?
The social channels
Requests: user to user direct messaging
Make sure they are super fast! Almost real-time
News Feed: one to many sharing with friends
Posting, view on wall, view on news feed
Open Graph: Lightweight, seamless sharing
Wherever your app lives or works, Facebook distributes properly so there are no holes.
Bookmarks
m.facebook.com
Gives users a specific spot to get back to your app
Mechanism for engagement
Native facebook for iPhone
Payments
Use credits to monetize apps
Build social from the ground up
Search, login auth, directed to app
Social apps work everywhere
iPhone, laptop, android, ipad, android tablet
HTML5 works across all platforms
Native App + Open Graph: Aryeh Selekman & Christine Abernathy:
iOS and Android + Facebook platform
Open Source Native SDKs
Developer app settings
Fields to configure iOS and Android apps
Linking and app distribution works appropriately if these fields are filled out correctly
Single Sign On (SSO) login without typing
Login with facebook button
Understanding Native Distribution
If an iOS or app exists, all requests/News Feed Stories/Timeline stories will link directly to native app (or apple store if not installed)
On android, requests/News Feed Stories/Timeline stories wil only direct to your mobile web app
5 Best Practices
1. Build a mobile web app
HTML5: distribution on m.facebook.com on all webkit enabled touch browsers
native wrappers
take advantage of SSO capabilities
2. Implement SSO
3. Implement requests for app discoverability
Rate now, invite friends, send requests
4. Leverage existing friend graph
Promote activity and interaction
Re-engagement
Push notification through native channels to let you know your friends joined
5. Get your app on timeline
Open Graph and Mobile Apps
One API – distribution to ticker, Timeline, newsfeed
Allows you to define what people do in your application
Reading, listening, watching, etc.
4 Steps to get started using open graph
1. Define your actions and objects
2. Design your Timeline aggregations
Pictures, maps, represent actions and data that people send through
3. Markup and expose your objects
Everything represented by underlying URL
Where do objects live
4. Publish actions
Native Distribution for Mobile Apps
Case Study: PhoneGap
Pattern
Embed a chromeless browser in a native app
Create a bridge between the browser and the native code providing access to native APIs
Write a web app
Package the web app with the native code and deploy to devices
Write once debug everywhere
Take note
HTML, JS, CSS included in an app package
HTML loaded on file:// URI scheme, no cross domain request restrictions
Engineering wise, approach is simple to extend to new platforms
Support Platforms
iOS, Android, BB, webOS, Symbian, Windows Phone (mango), Samsung Bada
Mobile first!
HTML5: write native code easily, scale like an app so width is design width – no pinch zoom etc
CSS3: webkit transformations
The future
Tooling
WebGL
Facebook, Linkedin, Walmart use case
Continue polyfilling HTML5
Case Study: Washington Post Social Reader
Coding for the futures
Everything you write effects possible futures
Architect for the foreseeable futures
Short term futures
Building mobile second
Use mobile to rethink boundaries
Roll mobile learning back into the webapp
Case Study: Thuzi
Hospitality app
Social by design
Send invites, RSVPs
Share great offers with my friends
Provide reviews of the experience
Capture the moment for a special occasion (Timeline)
Local by design
Dining is a local experience
Find a local restaurant
Invite friends, redeem offers, find out what’s happening
Native by design
Want to ensure you have access to the newest native APIs
Want to have the fastest app possible
Want to guarantee formatting correctness
More choices for monetization – iAds, etc
Many existing open source libraries and blog posts and tutorials
Are not dependent upon plugins or other 3rd party series for push notifications
Didn’t get a chance to check out the Trada Webinar on making Facebook ads work for you? No worries! Here at BlitzLocal, we watched and learned, and took some notes for you. They started with an educational slideshow about the different types of Facebook ads, and finished by answering questions from the chat window. Here are our notes, and some additional article links for extra information.
The Bottom Line: Facebook Ads are the most versatile, targeted way to advertise online, and they have incredible reach.
Challenges with Facebook Advertising
Banner Blindness
You have to hire a graphic artist to make all the ad creatives
Facebook Glossary:
Connections: The number of individuals who liked your Facebook page, RSVP’d to your event, or installed your app within 24 hours of seeing your ad or sponsored story. Basically, a connection is a conversion.
Unique Reach: The number of individual people who saw your sponsored stories or ads.
Social Reach: The number of people who saw your sponsored stories or ads because their friends liked your page, RSVP’d to your event, or used your app.
Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your campaign’s sponsored story or ad. This is helpful for measuring ad fatigue.
Basic Ad Formats
Basic Ads
“Like” ad: Links to tab on Facebook page
Event ad: Links to event
Application ad: Links to application
Standard ad: Links to specific URL
Sponsored Stories
Page “Like” Story: Mary-Jane likes your page, Page “like” Story lets Mary-Jane’s friends know about the like
Page Post Story: You published a post to your page’s fans. Page Post Story allows this post to show up in fans’ news feeds
Pages Post “Like” Story; Alex liked one of your page posts in the last 7 days. Page Post “like” Story lets Alex’s friends know about the post like
App Used and Game Played Story: Lauren played/used your game or app. App Used/Game Played Story tells her friends about this action
App Share Story: Hayes shared a story from your app in the last 7 Days. App Share Story lets Hayes’ friends know about the share
Check-in Story: Lisa checked in or claimed a deal using Facebook Places. Check-in Story lets Lisa’s friends know about it.
Domain Story: Mike liked/shared content from your website or pasted a link from your site to his wall. Domain Story lets Mike’s friends know about this action.
The complexity and potential of targeting on Facebook
There are so many ways of targeting that it can be confusing
Age, likes, interests, birthday, apps, education, timeline content, friends, event RSVPs, fans
When choosing targets, focus on two things:
Narrowing your audience
Demo and Geo Targeting
Geography: Country, State, Province, City or Zip targeting
Demographics: Gender, Age, Birthday, Relationship Status, Language
Workplace and Education Targeting
Workplace, Education, Preferred Language
Likes and Interests Targeting
Favorite TV Shows, Movies, Books, Music, Hobbies, Religion, Political Views
Thinking outside the box – Let’s say you want to sell golf clubs
Nick (who plays golf) is an obvious target
Barbara doesn’t like golf – but she likes the Palm Beach Country Club
Chaz doesn’t have the word golf anywhere on his profile, but he plays golf for a living: he’s a sales guy!
Try the obvious targets, but Facebook’s best advertisers use non-linear thinking to target ads.
Campaign Organization Tips
An “Account” in Facebook is similar to a “Campaign” in Paid Search
A “Campaign” in Facebook is similar to “Ad Group” in Paid Search
Warning: Don’t create campaigns with many different targets and ads. Keep your campaigns small.
Do not put all segmented target groups in one campaign – as your ads are competing within the campaign.
Prevent ad fatigue, or banner blindness by changing ads frequently
As soon as CTR trends down, submit new content!
Q&A:
What is a good CTR?
What images work best?
Logos traditionally don’t work well
Images of people are effective
Format design keeping small size in account
What is a preferred or optimal frequency?
Keep it small!
6,7,8 is bad
Any issues with click fraud?
There is a department at Facebook dedicated to click fraud with a sophisticated monitoring team.
More difficult to produce in Facebook than in search where you can just search to make a specific ad appear.
How will timeline affect ads/business pages?
Fans much more likely to take some type of action than non-fans.
Targeting workplaces is a great tool for B2B marketing.
What sort of company uses page post story? How breaking should the news be? What types of posts work best?
Entertainment, news businesses using these most effectively
Have emotional connection so people will click
Is there advertising on Facebook mobile?
In testing, not released to general public yet.
Notes taken by BlitzLocal Analyst Matt Prater
Graphics obtained from: http://www.slideshare.net/TradaPaidSearch/facebook-ads-you-can-make-them-work and www.facebook.com.
Sentiment analysis, though not a recent term, is nevertheless generating a lot of new buzz within the online business world, due in part to the proliferation of social networks that are generating huge streams of user chatter about companies, products, and services. Social media pundits have drilled businesses with the message that their customers are talking about them, whether they like it or not, and whether they are participating in the conversation or not. As these businesses begin to accept this fact, they realize that they need to do several things if they want to take part in those conversations:
Locate the conversations
Gauge the overall sentiment of those conversations
Participate in the conversations
Work towards increasing positive sentiment
Tools to help businesses locate the conversations that are taking place around their brands, products, and services have proliferated over the years, so achieving #1 is generally a piece of cake.
Participating in the conversations simply requires good old-fashioned customer service, as does increasing positive sentiment, although a fair amount of training may be required to teach employees how to navigate different social networks, and help them understand just how public their interactions really are. Despite the extra training, numbers 3 and 4 are still hands-on, human-touch activities that that businesses already understand how to handle, and they generally don’t handle being automated very well. Customers would rather have no interaction with a company, than to have nothing more than automated robots attempting to solve their problems.
So if number 1 is easy to solve with automated tools, and numbers 3 and 4 are handled primarily with human-touch activities, what about the second need – gauging the overall sentiment? This is an area that into that fuzzy, not-quite-sure-how-to-handle area. People and businesses are trying to automate this process because applying a sentiment grade to huge datasets is beyond the capacity of manual human power. At the same time, trusting a machine to correctly analyze sentiment is fraught with problems.
Let’s first consider the ways that a machine might analyze sentiment.
Methodology 1: analyze human-scored data, in which humans first analyze and rate sentiment of each piece of data, and the machine then analyzes those ratings to produce reports and aggregated summaries.
Methodology 2: the machine applies a human-scored dictionary of phrases to incoming data, then analyze the data to produce reports and aggregated summaries.
Both methodologies require manual human action first, and neither is a perfect solution. Either humans must score data, as in methodology 1, which is not scalable, or humans must score dictionary phrases, as in methodology 2, which is much less accurate because the phrases cannot take things like mixed messages or sarcasm into consideration. “I love my ugly shoes”, has both positive and negative dictionary words (love and ugly). How should a machine evaluate that? Or “Wow, that’s the most awesome mullet I’ve ever seen!” might sound positive to a machine, based on words such as “wow” and “awesome”, but that algorithm will miss the fact that the user was being sarcastic.
For now, the best solution seems to be the human/machine/human process. Humans must first create phrase dictionaries (or use ones created by others), possibly run actual data through a group of humans who score the data as the basis for which machine learning can rely on, then let the machine classify new, incoming data using the human-scoring process as a way to improve the machine algorithm. The entire process should be repeated as often as deemed necessary. Eventually, the classifier should improve, but humans will always be needed to oversee the results.
Clearly, this process is not merely a matter of humans vs. machines. Both are required to properly handle sentiment analysis.
“It’s hard enough to determine sentiment via email– think of when you may have misinterpreted tone in your own personal communications. Now try to determine sentiment when you have only 140 characters or when a third of these interactions come through a mobile device. Irony, sarcasm, and humor are hard to convey via a 4 inch touch screen. Thus, automated sentiment analysis is problematic, at best, but can at least give you a general sense of how your customers feel. Then manual checking of sentiment can sit on top of your automated monitoring.”
– Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal
So how should companies gauge sentiment if automated tools aren’t sophisticated enough to pick up on sarcasm, for instance, but humans aren’t scalable to meet the growing flow of data?
There may not be a “correct answer” to this question, but I believe a smart strategy is to choose the best tool to meet your particular needs, and then use intelligent, business and marketing savvy humans to “analyze the analysis”. This human-based analysis of the analysis will ensure that the data reports are not only correct, but are also actionable. After all, knowing that 93 customers are unhappy is a meaningless metric. Understanding which customers are unhappy, and why they are unhappy, leads to being able to take the necessary action to accomplish goals 3 and 4 – participating in conversations and improving sentiment.
Let’s take a look at a few ways that sentiment analysis an be turned into direct action:
Customer service: find specific complaints and negative sentiment, so those users feelings and issues can be addressed, before they cause widespread brand damage.
Promos and offers: determine how a new promotion is doing, enabling quick decisions on what to promote further, and what to discard. Sometimes, a promotion backfires, and should be pulled (and perhaps explained) before negative sentiment explodes.
Understand conversion problems: make note of potential blocks within the conversion funnel that is creating negative sentiment, thereby causing potential sales to fall off the cliff.
As I mentioned early on, there are many tools to help locate and monitor the conversations taking place about your business. These tools range from the simple Google Alerts tool to the more robust and complex Radian6, with most small businesses choosing a tools that fall somewhere in the middle, such as socialmention or Trackur.
Some tools that are either entirely focused upon sentiment analysis, or include sentiment analysis as one feature of a broader social monitoring tool, include:
Which tool is chosen will depend heavily upon company needs and budget. Regardless of the tool used, however, the question businesses need to ask is, “Do we have the manpower needed to properly assess the results, and then take action to enhance or improve sentiment?”
A smart marketing team, in conjunction with a customer service team, should do “an analysis of the analysis” to determine the next steps to take. Understanding the causes of sentiment and making smart marketing and customer service decisions based upon that understanding requires people who are trained and highly skilled in these areas. These people may be in-house, or may be a part of an outsourced social media marketing agency such as BlitzLocal provides, but what is clear is that while machines may be necessary to process large datasets to calculate sentiment, humans are a crucial factor in not only refining the analysis, but in taking necessary actions based upon that analysis.

marketing | BlitzLocal

Dennis Yu — Wed, 03 May 2023 15:09:51 +0000

This handy tool uses Facebook’s authentication to download information about your personal Facebook usage. This is NOT the same as analytics for Facebook pages. But it does use the same permission requests you’d need to play Farmville or a related game.
For those non-geeks out there, the Wolfram Alpha search engine does computation. Put in math problems or ask the GDP of France in a Google-esque search box.
Go check it out and watch it lay bare who your friends are, when you’re online most often, and what things you talk about most.
Type in “Facebook report”.
Click “Analyze My Facebook Data”. Click “Allow” when the app requests permission.
Enter your information when prompted.
Click “Analyze My Facebook Data Now”.
Allow some time to gather data.
At the top, it shows your basic information on a slightly deeper level.
Your posts are broken down by time period, amount, and type.
Then they are broken down into immense detail.
Statistics about your friends’ interactions with your posts are shown, as well as what your top posts are.
Detailed check-in and app activity are also displayed.
You even get a time breakdown based on what you use to access Facebook.
Information on photos and tagging are all displayed.
Your friends are displayed by their gender, relationship status, age, location, and more.
You also see a visual interpretation of your network, color-coated based on occupation, school, local area, etc.
A colleague recently told me of his plans to dominate his particular niche. The competitors in his space have deep pockets, massive ad budgets, and are well-connected in the space. These competitors have a clearly inferior product, though it can be argued that nobody exactly smells like roses in this niche. So “Paul”, we’ll call him, felt that having a better product that was priced competitively, could win in the market. I’m not revealing who “Paul” is, since it’s the concept that’s important, not the particular individual. Here is why that strategy alone doesn’t work. May it serve as a lesson to any other budding entrepreneur who wants to go after Fortune 500 clients.
The graveyard of failed startups is littered with the bodies of companies that have gone after the Microsofts, Cokes, and Proctor and Gambles of the world. Why not? The reasoning is that just one Coke as a client can be worth 1,000 little clients, and is perhaps even enough to sustain your venture all by itself. Unfortunately, when you have one big customer that accounts for most of your earnings, they can also jerk you around; more on the “Wal-Mart” problem later.
Some people call this the problem of the elephants, deer, and rabbits. It’s sexy to go elephant hunting, but the trouble is that it takes a team to kill the elephant. That team may have to wait for months on-end before getting anything; often starving in the process. It takes sophisticated tools and plenty of unpaid labor to get an initial meeting, much less deal with all the various levels of decision makers needed to get your first dollar.
Rabbits are small, plentiful, and easy to catch. These are the small businesses that have $10 a month for your software, but can be such a pain to service that you get a case of “rabbit starvation”. Yes, it’s true; if you live in the woods and subside only on rabbit meat you will starve, since wild rabbit meat is so lean that it takes more energy to process than it’s worth.
So in true Goldilocks fashion, the rabbits are too small and the elephants are too big. And thus, startup advisors say, you should chase deer—medium sized, not too hard to catch, and enough meat to make it worthwhile. Trying to serve the middle, however, is like trying to be everything to everyone. With no focus in the marketplace, you are unable to differentiate and unable to dominate a niche.
Back to “Paul” again; he has had minor success selling to elephants. He is personally well networked, and one of the best salespeople I’ve ever met. But he is just one guy and there is only so many of him that can perform magic. It’s not scalable. Further, the $10,000 proof-of-concept deals don’t seem to materialize into $100,000 deals, despite what the Excel spreadsheets to the board might represent.
He may have spent (gambled) $50,000 in energy to get the $10,000 deal. And the big brands that he’s dealing with know this full-well, and are happy to take advantage of the discounts their name can leverage. It’s like the prom queen that can be mean to the adolescent boys; teasing each of them into an endless stream of favors. And it is here that startups die.
In engineering projects, we know that you have to multiply the estimates by a factor of 3. If they say it will take 5 weeks, then you can assume 15 weeks is a more realistic estimate. Same is true of sales. That deal that is 60% likely to close is actually 20% likely to close. And instead of 2 weeks, it will be 2 months. You might be ready to go, but the main client contact may be slow to respond to email, the accounting people have some arduous PO process, or some new person wants to evaluate your software—starting the clock over.
Meanwhile, you’re burning cash. It’s not like you can put payroll or your rent on hold. What you’ve expended so far is a sunken cost, so you just keep going like the gambler who bets double or nothing. Even if you get the deal, you might not be paid until you complete the work, plus net 60. So if the project takes 90 days to complete and you’re paid 60 days after completion, you have to float 150 days of cash. If the pre-sales process took 90 days, you’re now looking at 240 days; not an uncommon cycle to close a big deal.
In those 240 days, anything can happen. Facebook or Google comes out with a product or feature set that eliminates the need for your product. The company you’re dealing with has a re-organization, so your internal champion isn’t the decision maker anymore. Maybe you lost a key engineer—hey; lots of places are notorious for folks who are disloyal, jumping to whatever the sexy thing of the moment is. Your board or investor begins to pressure you, forcing you to spend more time on convincing them that you’re “so close” to hitting it big, while actually taking your focus away from execution.
Napoleon had his Waterloo because he overextended his supply chain. In other words; the clock ran out on him. If you’re going after the big boys, it’s easy to underestimate what it takes to win. Mind you, self-service software is a different matter—we’re talking about selling deals to household brands that are used to dealing with big agencies who will roll out the red carpet with not a penny of cost on their side for months.
So here are some key insights to help you avoid a prolonged death—to have a decent shot at success versus running out of gas.
Law #1: Enterprise software is not bought, it is sold. Companies don’t just walk up to you and say they want to order the #2 meal, supersized. Expressing interest after reading about you on TechCrunch is a long way from getting your first penny. Enterprise software is sold via a network of experienced sales reps that have inside connections at the client company. That rep may have been an agency player with a big black book or someone who was internal until recently. If you don’t have teams of folks who can navigate these landmines, you’ll be constantly scratching your head as to why you got so close, but some inferior vendor won the day. You’re column fodder, buddy—the client was happy to waste your time to get you to fly in and pitch, just so they can say they talked to 3 other people before selecting the vendor they had in mind all along. Moral of the story– don’t enter a battle that you haven’t already determined you’ve won via inside connections. In other words: never go into an RFP situation blind.
Law #2: Ask for a token payment. Sure, you might be dealing with someone from General Motors. But does that person have power to sign a check? We no longer do custom work for free or do a ton of free consulting. If they want a proof of concept, we charge a nominal fee. Even if it’s only asking for $1,000, the prospect’s reaction to this will be quite telling if they are serious. Case in point—one of the largest newspapers in the world wanted our help with Facebook marketing. They wanted every PowerPoint presentation we have ever done, some one-on-one meetings on-site, and some technical help to troubleshoot. We were flattered. But when we popped the question, they balked. I knew this person’s boss, who told me that this person was preparing a strategy to present as their own. This person was just swapping our name for his name and taking credit with no intention of engaging with us. It happens all the time. Watch for it now and you’ll see it often. A payment of a few thousand dollars is a gesture of good faith between both parties. And if you are looking at doing a partnership with a larger, more established company, be wary of “partners” that want you to take all the risk.
Law #3: Decide if you are positioning yourself as cheaper or better. You can’t be both. Even if you are, the marketplace won’t believe you. Plus, you’d be leaving money on the table if you can justify yourself as being of higher quality. Would you trust a heart surgeon that is offering surgeries this week at 50% off?
Law #4: Triple your prices. You’ll lose some customers, as you should. But the ones you lose are likely the ones that are causing you the most headaches which, in turn, prevent you from focusing on the guys that are happy to pay you more. Spend time on the customers who love you. Don’t abide by the squeaky wheel management philosophy. If you have 30 clients paying you $5k a month each on average, wouldn’t it be so much easier to have just 10 clients paying you $15k a month?
Law #5: Ignore the armchair quarterbacks. Often the most well-meaning of family and friends will insist on giving you advice. While you trust their friendship, it doesn’t mean they can weigh-in on complex business decisions. How much of your precious time are you selling to folks who aren’t going to buy your software or can’t help you refine your offering? You’re talking to the wrong people, though many enjoy the entertainment of verbal jousting at your expense.
Law #6: Sell through a partner. If you can’t afford a sales force, leverage the client base on someone who already has a Fortune 500 client base. That’s what BlitzLocal does with Webtrends, who opens doors for us that we would never get on our own. In fact, we get to work with existing clients who have Webtrends as their analytics provider, which makes deals so much easier. It’s a win-win for everyone.
So that’s what it takes to go after the big boys. If you’re not extremely lucky, you need the cash, connections, and focus to weather lengthy sales cycles. So think twice if you want to get Nike as a client. They won’t even let you publicly mention them as a client if you do, so the referral value may be less than you anticipate. But when you can find those particular clients who are partners that care about your success, too—then you’ve found a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
If you found this helpful, let me know in the comments below. If you want to argue, feel free to voice your opinion, too. I can’t promise I’ll respond, but I will certainly try to respond to folks who ask for help. You can also reach me at facebook.com/dennisyu.
About the Author:
Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook. BlitzLocal serves both national brands and local service businesses.
250 Million users and growing… Facebook has more users than Indonesia (the fourth most populous nation on the earth), has people. So how can a B2B marketer pull in prized customers from this vast ocean of prospects? More importantly, how can an advertiser reach B2B customers while they’re posting photos, chatting, and playing Mafia Wars? Wouldn’t ‘reaching’ them be considered an interruption? Facebook’s Advertising Department is so confident they can reach B2B types they invited me and a group of fellow advertisers to its headquarters a few months ago. Though I remained skeptical I began the journey to Facebook’s Headquarters in Palo Alto one drizzly August morning with an open mind.
Researching Facebook’s site was the most fun I’ve had at work in a long time. I wasn’t nearly as familiar with Facebook as some of my friends. The site is so addicting I’m not sure I want to know it too much better than I do now… Some of my Facebook savvy friends had hundreds of friends and were sending me Mafia Wars weapons, IQ Quizzes, and cause invitations before I even ‘friended’ my wife and daughter. The quizzes are entertaining, the games are worse than crack, and the ability to re-connect with long lost friends sucked me in. The site combines the best features of classmates.com, linkedin.com, Picasa, (photo sharing) chat, charities, fan clubs, causes, and games. Additionally Facebook brings all the best features of these sites to a new viral level. But the one thought that kept nagging at me was: folks on Facebook are not there to research products so how can we reach them while they’re socializing on this site? The marketing challenges seem insurmountable:
Finding my B2B audience among the 250 Million
Getting their attention while they’re ‘playing’
Not interrupting or peeving them in the process
Facebook’s Headquarters in Palo Alto have all the trappings of a typical Silicon Valley start up: high ceilings with exposed ventilation ducts, a gourmet kitchen open all hours, and a virtual United Nations of employees all spread out in desk areas without walls. None of them appears older than 28, and some are moving about on skateboards and razors on smooth concrete floors. Our conference room was a candy colored assortment sofas that swallow your bottom surrounding a 60-inch LCD TV serving as our demo screen. Despite the trendy trappings, Facebook had much more substance than met the eye.
One of the mid twenty somethings presented to us that Facebook an incredible lineup of user demographics and can target them on no less than 19 different parameters including:
Country
State
Age
Gender
Interests
Activities
Music
TV Shows
Education
High School
College
Major
Workplace
Relationship status
Books
Moms/Parenting
Small Business
Pet Enthusiasts
Sports
Demographics didn’t quite convince me but I was getting warmer. Facebook connects more than just people to people; it connects:
People to companies
People to organizations
People to products
People to classmates
People to social groups
People to causes
People to hobbies and interests
People to brands
While all this reconnecting/socializing/chatting/sharing/gaming is going on, the viral aspect of Facebook is also thrown into the mix. Word of mouth is powerful.
For example, when someone goes out to eat, buys a car or any product or service for that matter, do they trust the reviews they see on Yahoo!, Cars.com, or Amazon? No disrespect to these fine websites, but I don’t trust their reviews any more than I trust restaurant reviews from TV “Phantom Diners.” Disappointing sushi shops are more the rule than the exception when I believe American restaurant critics who purport to know something about sushi. The fact is, I trust my friends, especially my very meticulous Japanese friend’s sushi restaurant recommendations. So when I’m connected to friends on Facebook and one of them recommends a good sushi shop, they’ll usually tell a friend. That friend tells friends and soon the word on the best sushi shop spreads around like a virus.
Now let’s take that virus and multiply it. Let’s say the sushi shop we’re raving about runs an ad on Facebook with a $10 off coupon. My friends are more inclined to click on the ad because of my recommendation. CTR and Conversions increase because the social context increases the probability of intent to purchase, (by a multiple). Ok, I’m getting warmer, but it’s still a B2C example. What about B2B?
Through Facebook’s Pages, businesses can create a page to connect with customers and create a community. Company X can, through Event Ads, let its community know that it’s attending the next Comdex or E3. The company can run an ad on its corporate page with a lottery for a prize to be announced at its booth. Company X could have speaker announcements on its Facebook Page. Why would a company want to do this? Company Fan Sites or Corporate site Pages are Voices – 1/3 of your fans will see what you put up on your site. 30% of your fans will read what you’ve launched on their individual home page. If they comment on that announcement on their wall, it’s seen by all their friends following their comments. How’s that for reach?
Engagement Advertisements
On the right side of the home page, (Engagement Ads) “become a fan,” Ads can be video, static, Users can comment on ads or video on the user’s profile page.
Celebrities and Industry Experts
Company X can capitalize on its unique content and celebrities. If Company X has industry experts who’ve published technical articles and how-to application notes, it can feature these experts as Celebrities on Facebook. If your company has a celebrity or expert who can create fresh content for you, that content can be launched as an update on the corporate Facebook page or the expert can have his or her own Facebook page.
Favorite Pages Application
The Favorite Pages Application can be used as a corporate sponsor. The Afflac Duck fan site posts photos of the Duck visiting famous places all over the world such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the pyramids of Giza. All the photos posted on the site of course are taken from the Duck’s perspective, i.e., from 1 foot off the ground.
If Facebook is the social networking site where everyone is, why not take advantage of the fact by becoming part of it? The B2B aspect became clear: start a corporate Facebook page, populate it with useful unique content that users can’t get anywhere else, and make sure the content drives traffic to and from the corporate web site. Facebook Profiles enable brands to connect with fans. Videos, Comments and interactions get organically put back on users sites. Companies can ask users for feedback. They can make an offer once a day and make a pitch in the voice of a character
Papa John’s Pizza gained millions of impressions and 130k fans in 24 hours
They thanked the fans with exclusive offers – and the redemption rate was higher than email offers
Built brand loyalty
I’m convinced. Now can I convince my colleagues at work?
Meanwhile, I’ll just have some fun.