Authority Rules – I agree

Brian Clark, founder and publisher of copyblogger.com has released an excellent little document about effective online marketing, and it revolves entirely around authority! Hence the name – Authority Rules, download the PDF and take a moment to read through Brian’s thoughts. I agree with him on a number of levels.

I’m not going to attempt to rewrite what Brian has so clearly stated, but I will say this. The world of brick and mortar business is extremely different from that of the online world. A physical store front sets the stage for how the consumer perceives the business. Is it trustworthy? Is it cutting edge? Is it a good deal? In a physical store, these things are affected by lighting, cleanliness, professional staff, stock, etc. But online, the game changes. As a web based business, you have to establish your reputation in different ways. Sure, a nice website design will go a long ways, but that’s not the key to success. In the online world, establishing authority is what builds reputation and trust.

Facebook privacy for Canadians

As a follow up to my last two posts regarding targeting options available through the Facebook ads platform, Jennifer Stoddard, Canada’s privacy commissioner, recently stated that Facebook doesn’t meet Canadian privacy law standards. The complaint raised is focused on the default privacy settings of a Facebook account, the collection and use of data for advertising purposes, and the disclosure of personal information to 3rd party developers.

Personally, it’s the information available to the 3rd party developers that worries me. In most cases, we’re openly providing the data to Facebook. I don’t mind that my birthday is posted, and I don’t mind if an advertiser targets me on my birthday. If I did mind, well then I shouldn’t give Facebook my birthday details, should I? That’s a choice I made when signing up to Facebook. For the early adopters, the Facebook applications that run rampant now never existed. At the end of the day, Facebook shouldn’t ever be a burden to it’s users. If it’s too hard to delete an account, that’s a problem. If privacy settings are too complicated or buried, that’s a problem. In my opinion, a Facebook account should be locked down by default. But if that had been the case since the beginning, would Facebook be as successful as it is today?

As far as the privacy commissioner’srequest – Facebook was given 1 month to comply with recommendations. That deadline was on August 17th, and itworldcanada.com reports that discussions between Facebook and Canada are going well. Right now the Stoddard has Facebook’s reponse in hand, and has 15 days to review and reply. I’d like to get my hands on both of these documents…

Facebook ads – target by connections

Facebook is chalk full of groups and pages – you can join groups to support your love of campfires, your passion for sex on the beach or if you live in BC, your concerns about BC Harmonized Sales Tax. It’s easy to create groups, and for the right business, it can be a powerful marketing tool. One of Facebook’s three new targeting tools is “target by connections”, which allows an admin or owner of a Facebook group/event to create an ad targeting only members of a specific group, or to exclude members of a specific group.

This is an important feature for a number of reasons. Say you’re promoting an event in your town with a Facebook Ad. You set it up as a cost per click campaign, meaning you’re going to be spending 30-50 cents on every person that clicks on the ad. To get the most out of your advertising dollars, you don’t want to be spending that money on someone who has already RSVP’d to the event that clicks on the ad simply because they forgot what time the event starts. No, you want to focus on those who haven’t converted yet, and that’s exactly where this targeting feature comes into play.

Targeting by connections does present some complications by placing more power in the hands of people that are group admins or officers. For example, if I was a competitor of Nike and wanted to get an ad in front of people that had joined a particular Nike group, all you have to do is wiggle your way into an officer position of that group. Volunteer your time by removing inappropriate posts and posting pictures of your vintage Nike shoes and suddenly your trusted by the Nike group. Maybe you sell knock-off Nike products – now you have a targeted audience for your ad, and there’s over 2.5 million Facebook members that have joined a Nike group!

I’m sure it’s already going on for other reasons, but Facebook group administrators will be selling officer & admin positions within their groups simply for the sake of this ad targeting feature. Now the administrator of that silly I love campfires group with 250,000+ members can potentially generate a revenue stream for himself by selling access to his group to outdoor gear stores. The perfect ad headline would read Do You Love Campfires?…

Facebook ads – target by birthday

This past July Facebook released three new targeting features to their Facebook Ads platform. One of these three features is the ability to target someone on their birthday, which presents a handful of opportunities to the right businesses. The variety of targeting abilities does potentially create more “work” when setting up a campaign, but with a large handful of campaigns under my belt now, I can say each individual targeting feature presents nothing but opportunity.

Targeting by birthday is no different. The immediate thought revolves around a certain local business here in Kelowna, Kelly O’Bryan’s. This restaurant offers a free dinner, up to a certain value, for anyone that comes in to eat on their Birthday. The restaurant chain is popular here in Kelowna, but because they operate only 5 locations in British Columbia, outside of the province the brand may be less recognizable. And if you live in or have visitied Kelowna, you’ve likely witnessed the migration of the red license plated vehicles from Alberta every summer. I wonder how many Albertan’s know Kelly O’s offers a free birthday meal?

Everyone feels special on their birthday and everyone surrounds themselves with family and friends on their special day. If a business can tune into that emotion and offer some sort of incentive to that person, the potential customer will likely be more receptive to the birthday ad, and most importantly, will probably come with a small hoard of friends and family that will “Eat, Drink and be Irish”, to quote Kelly O’s tagline.

Live chat advertising

Back in April of this year Intel launched an advertising campaign to support it’s new Nehalem Xeon processor. Advertising for a specific computer processor does present some challenges.

Firstly, you simply have to be in front of the right audience. Your typical consumer isn’t the type to care about a specific processor; the new processor is interesting to computer enthusiasts and IT professionals – and I presume shareholders. To address that hurdle, it’s all about ad placement. Intel placed their ads on CIO Today, CNET, ComputerWorld.com, InfoWorld and Internet.com. The ad was also reportedly on LinkedIn.com, where it was likely targetted to a specific type of LinkedIn member.

Intel's Live Chat Ad

The second hurdle is where Intel started to throw creativity into the mix. An IT professional will be interested in different things than the PC enthusiast will be. Both groups are valuable to Intel, but how do you create an ad that speaks to each group? Quite simple – you create an ad that, literally, speaks! Intel’s banner ads supported live chat. If you have a question, you could simply type that question into a chat box and an Intel representative would answer you, in real time, and hopefully, in a timely manner. This image is what the ad looked like.

So you might think to yourself, “that’s great, but I don’t have the resources to answer hundreds of questions, 24/7″. How can a small business benefit from this approach? It doesn’t have to be a continual effort. Retailers can cash in on holiday hype – maybe it’s a Valentines Day ad with chat representatives selling custom chocolate packages based on the answers to a series of questions? If you can’t answer chat questions 24/7, it is possible to have a standard ad run during the night that clicks through to your website, and in the day it kicks over to the chat ad.

There are always possibilities and ways to make new things work. Remember, the ad technology providers want small business involved, they represent a big piece of pie. There’s a number of businesses and people out there, myself included, that are ready to bring the latest in advertising technology to any business that can benefit from it. Just because a business is new to Internet advertising doesn’t mean it should be content with dated ad techniques (not that those techniques aren’t useful, of course).