Social Utopia
The features that are important to you, might not be useful for the next person, and the important thing is a balance between usefulness and a bloated program. Proponents of Twitter like its ease-of-use, 140 characters at a time. This social platform thrives on a staccato-like simplicity, but some feel the technology a bit too minimalistic. Facebook users enjoy posting their own interactive content, or just perusing the content that others create. It’s the expansive content sharing that helped Facebook rise to fame. Facebook has been able to keep things personal by surrounding you with people and things you like, while their business is growing like a hungry teenager. When your personal friend posts a picture of their new car, it is kind of cool to see it while not worrying about getting their floor-mats dirty.
Think about your friends. Aren’t you closer to some than you are to others? In your ideal social media platform, perhaps you can place friends at different distances and create new circles of friends who are all talking about the same thing and your grandmother doesn’t have to hear about you painting the town on Saturday night. This is doable in Facebook, but a user must create a special Facebook page, and then hope that people will visit you there.
Whatever the next big thing is, I hope you create it and I want to be involved, helping others make sense of it all and facilitating valuable connections, blurring the line between business and friendship.
Facebook Advertising
It’s become one of those often used anecdotes — if Facebook were a country it would be the third largest in the world!
There’s no denying the power of social networking and Facebook in particular. Beyond the benefits of the network are those achieved through advertising that’s available through their network. Facebook advertising, like any advertising, has it’s upside and downside. In the case of Facebook it appears for some businesses there’s considerably more upside opportunities associated with this tool.
Specifically, the ability to target an audience can be remarkably accurate.
For example, if you want to target females between the ages of 25 and 40, who live in Beaverton, Oregon, went to Beaverton High School whose birthday is in May and are single — you can do that. If you want to target a specific birth date in May…you can do that too.
Facebook allows you several target options including: gender, location, age, education, birth date, workplace, relationship status, education and keywords.
Powerful targeting in the right hands.
The key to making this work is running equally targeted advertising messages. Because this is pay-to-play advertising where you’re charged either by the click or impressions, it’s critical you make your offer specific enough that it only attracts qualified, genuine prospects. You can control runaway spending by setting daily budgets and you always have the latitude to shut your campaign down if you need a breather or time to re-evaluate what you’re doing.
You can offer a free $5 birthday gift card to people within a five mile geographic area to a retail location, for instance, for those all those May prospects. With your businesses logo at the top of the page, a short description of who you are and what you do and the offer — it should pull well if it’s sent to the right demographic audience.
By the way, research shows again and again that dollars/amounts pull better than percentages (i.e. 20% off).
Finally, and maybe most importantly, test your message. Just like a direct mail piece, online ads require rigorous testing to evaluate which message is most effective.
Thankfully, Facebook provides useful metrics to assist in the evaluation of your campaign. Like most online ad campaigns ample information is available to understand how your campaign is performing. You can mine data that will let you know what age group, gender, location, etc. is most productive. Certainly, you can evaluate click-through rates if your goal is to get them to a web page or the quality and content of the impressions you’re achieving in an awareness campaign. The bottom line is Facebook, like so many others has made it easy to evaluate the efficacy of your efforts with data-rich campaign information.
Facebook provides a number of online tools to study in creating and launching your campaign. They’ve made it paint-by-the-numbers easy where anyone can get in and get a campaign going quickly and easily. The trick is to launch an effective campaign. That takes some skill, ongoing effort and constant evaluation to clearly understand where the punctuation is best placed in targeting your market and developing the most effective message in stimulating some anticipated action.
The Social Snowball
We hadn’t talked in 20 years but we picked up where we left off thanks to Facebook.
Baby-boomers like me grew up with technology — heck, we invented a lot of it. We started with punch cards that we stuck into massive main frame computers that buzzed and whirred like something out of an old Buck Rodgers movie using programs named Fortran, Cobal and Pascal. We gravitated to MS DOS as the technology changed learning lengthy codes that tested our recall and then we ran to the simplicity of Windows that required neither cards or much personal memory. So why-not Facebook?
“What have you been up to these last 20 years?” Well that answer was best left to a crisp micro-brew and a couple hours of catching up. I’ve now enjoyed a short case and several contacts from long lost friends thanks to the power of social networking.
Today, I posted a shot of a wonderful fish I’d caught on the Deschutes River. It was a fabulous fish and a great shot so I thought it worthy to share. Within minutes “oohs” and “aahs” flooded in from Alaska, New Jersey and California from people I wouldn’t have connected with otherwise. My network isn’t just the 70 or so people I’ve cultivated…it’s all those people and the people they’ve attracted — in several cases hundreds and in some even thousands. All of whom are privy to my message.
I can easily see the value of these networks.
We landed an important new account today. I don’t have the official go-ahead to share the news yet — but we will soon and when we do thousands will know about it in seconds. Hundreds will probably notice it and a couple months later the traditional media will print it and it will be old news — but still news just the same — just not as timely as these social networks we’re building.
If I was a retailer I’d be after this stuff like a fat man to a pie-eating contest. I’d grow my network fast and furious. I’d want thousands, tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands to see my tweets, twitters and blogs. This is powerful stuff that happens immediately.
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Social networking creates buzz. It’s exciting, immediate, engaging, fun and effective.
Social networking has become mainstream marketing. A celebrity sends out a tweet that he’ll be yodeling on some street corner and the next thing you know is 5,000 people are gathered on a street corner tying up traffic listening to the celebrity yodeler. Better yet, media floods to the fracas trying to be as just-in-time as the tweet which stimulates another 2,000 people to join the now mobbed celebrity yodeler.
This stuff is incredible!
I’m finding people and they’re finding me. I’m connecting and re-connecting more easily and seamlessly than I could imagine. Daily my network is growing and by this time next year it should be into the hundreds as more and more of us climb aboard this wonderful runaway train of technology.
Us boomers don’t fear it…we embrace. At times slowly. We’ve been sold a bill of goods before and understand time is precious so we squander it just like we do our precious identities. We get it though — it’s easy to understand, easy to do, easy to accept and easy to use. That’s why we’re building our LinkedIn and Plaxo accounts as well. Some of these may fall by the wayside…no worries the investment was minimal and it’s to be expected.
We finish the first beer and order a second. We’ve re-hashed a failed marriage, several perfect kids we’ve sired, dreams we had, ambitions we followed and now it’s time to talk about our fishing exploits. Nothing like sharing tales of big salmon and the prospect of future trips over a cold one…or two…or…
