Singapore is full of lesbians according to Facebook
Facebook’s ad tool gives you demographic counts. Here are the number of people 18+ in Singapore– 1.8 million: We’ve left the setting on both genders and all relationship statuses. Now we look at just the females. There are 903,840 of them, which is about half the population. Now let’s look at females who are seeking males– there are only 53,300 of them. Now what one might erroneously conclude is that the difference (903,840 minus 53,300) is women seeking women. Thus, 850,540 of these 903,840 are lesbians. However, not everyone states their sexual preference. So here are the females seeking females. There are 102,980 of them, which is nearly double the number of females seeking males! I ran the stats twice to make sure– and sure enough, these numbers check out. By the way, if you add up the number of women who prefer either males or females, then you have a total of 156,280, which is only a sixth of the female population of about 900,000. Thus, 5/6ths of people aren’t declaring their sexual preference. Why? I believe that gay people don’t want to be ostracised in certain countries, while heterosexual folks are perhaps tired of being bombarded by dating ads. But there could be also a fraction of people who are bisexual, asexual, or have other preferences. Reminds of a friend who was filling out a form– and in the section marked sex, he said, “Yes, please!”
Facebook Fan Page updates showing up in Google Alerts
I set up Google Alerts to monitor a number of keywords– and increasingly I’ve noticed how updates to Facebook pages are now showing up. Part of this is the fact that Google is increasingly using social signals to determine rankings, since what might have gotten hundreds of links a few years ago will today get a ton of “likes”. And the concept of links between pages is now morphing into connections between people. It’s not just PageRank, but FriendRank– or whatever term you prefer to measure influence. A Facebook executive recently shared with me how getting more fans to your page was actually a great SEO strategy. Think about that. You’re generating more inbound links to your page (and yes, it’s accumulating juice) and with frequent/relevant postings, you’re generating more EdgeRank, too. Sometimes that’s enough juice to outrank your regular website if it’s weak enough. They are probably the top 3 for your name, if not already #1. Here’s mine. So I predict Facebook showing up in SERPS not just for people’s names, but increasingly for any type of entity. Have you seen yourself show up more in Google News, Facebook’s own search, and just in general? BlitzMetrics believes that Facebook ads actually help your organic rankings, as you can drive more fans to your pages.
3 Facebook ads on the homepage
Is this just me or are you also seeing 3 ads on the Facebook homepage? This reminds me of the days when Yahoo! and Google would insert more ads on pages to increase revenue. Could imagine what Facebook would look like if they inserted ads all over– leaderboards on the top and bottom, and regular ads on the side? Then they’d collect a 30% fee on payments, plus sell you virtual gifts. Could be a money-making machine, especially if they help advertisers properly capitalize on social targeting options, enhanced by all the new data being made available via the Open Graph and the global like. Are you scared, excited, disgusted, or indifferent? Seems silly to be spending so many dollars sending traffic to Facebook’s own page– yet there’s no denying the traffic and ROI that stems from doing that, versus sending to your own page. But if someday your Facebook business page or applications are taken over with ads, then your investment may be less attractive– whether you’re Zynga or not.
Facebook Community Pages auto-generation out of control
A couple of weeks ago, Facebook released community pages– an attempt to auto-tag the web and build a rival to Wikipedia. Great SEO strategy, as these are in-text links coming from people’s profiles, allowing Facebook to extend their rankings from not just people’s names to businesses, but now to organizations, concepts, favorite foods, common complaints, or nearly entities on the web. Executed right, it’s the most powerful SEO strategy the world has seen– to leverage links, trust, and real content– superior to the Demand Media strategy of farmed content placed under high PR sites. This is real content by real users on existing powerful pages all at zero cost to Facebook. But the downside is that some users might not like the content on their profile pages getting hijacked, parsed into chunks, and linked to other pages without their permission. Users complain that they are linked to schools they didn’t attend, products they don’t endorse, or concepts that they are not interested in, since the bot that is auto-generating these tags isn’t well refined yet. Case in point– do a search on “blitz local” and you’ll see that instead of 2 pages, you’ll now find 24 pages– nearly all of them auto-generated Facebook Community Pages taken from profile tags. Do the same on SEOmoz and you’ll see 21 pages, also with the same types of tags. SEOmoz is treated separately from SeoMoz or seomoz– hence the confusion. Do a search on your company name and let us know how many copies you find, especially if the name is hard to spell. We made a demo page for ClickEquations, one of the top PPC management software firms out there– and the algorithm re-categorized it from being a business to being a community page. I filed a complaint and the Facebook rep said that after careful review, they’ve decided that Craig’s entity is not a business, but should be a community page– in the same vein as community pages such as “I hate people who talk on their cell phones while driving” or other such non-branded items. Overall, I think Facebook Community Pages are a great concept– but as with any company that is a fierce innovator, they have to balance speed versus accuracy.
Determining the value of Facebook for your business– mistakes you’re probably making
A Rice University study last week claims that Facebook is an effective marketing tool because of these stats, comparing Facebook fans versus their general customer base: Made 36 percent more visits to DG’s stores each month. Spent 45 percent more of their eating-out dollars at DG. Spent 33 percent more at DG’s stores. Had 14 percent higher emotional attachment to the DG brand. Had 41 percent greater psychological loyalty toward DG. At first, this sounds great– these Facebook users are more loyal and spend more money with this restaurant chain. But as you learn in first-semester college statistics– the correlation is not causation. The folks who fanned your page are likely already your strongest supporters– it wasn’t because they fanned your page that they all of a sudden started spending more money at your restaurants. Consider the fact that the percentage of people who visit the emergency room and die is higher than the percentage of random people who don’t go to hospitals, yet still die. Clearly, there is a correlation between going to the hospital and dying, but that doesn’t mean if you’re sick or injured that you should avoid the hospital. People who go to the hospital are already sick, so it’s not fair to compare them against the normal healthy population. In the same way, of course, the first fans of your Facebook page are not representative of your general customer base. It’s your friends, coworkers, and folks closest to you. OF COURSE, these fans are strong supporters, especially since this particular study had a tiny sample size. Does that mean you shouldn’t do Facebook or that fans are of low value? Quite the opposite. It means that after your initial wave of fans (which are your most loyal supporters), then you begin to attract the mainstream fans of your product or service. These are the people who may have heard of you but aren’t raving fans yet. And it’s the viral loop of friends telling friends who then tell other friends– all the while spreading via the wall and word of mouth– that you get MASSIVE ROI. Facebook is great for demand creation– to help spread the word about your brand through folks who already love you. Demand collection is showing ads to people who are about to buy. That’s where social media and search work well together. The AIDA funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) shows that social media owns the first 3 phases and that search owns the last. You have to generate awareness of your brand and also be there when they are ready to finally buy via Google. Thus, your Facebook ads are not “better” than paid search, nor is your Facebook Fan Page a better opportunity than your regular website. You might as well argue that the steering wheel in a car is more important than the gas pedal. You need both– it’s not an either-or situation where they work together. Stay tuned tomorrow for when we quantify the value of your Facebook presence, starting first with determining “The Gap”– the difference between your offline brand strength and your online presence.
Facebook Fans– concept being changed to “like”
Internal documents propose that users can become a fan by just clicking “like”, as opposed to “become a fan”. Their documents, read them here and note that saying “like” is a lightweight method of expressing interest. BlitzMetrics’s take is that this will cause several things to happen: Users (I was about to call them “fans”) will be confused as to whether they are liking something or actually joining a Fan page. If Facebook is going to change the language to like, then they should also call a Fan Page a “Like” Page, which would devolve Fan pages into the old Facebook Groups– for when people want to hit thumbs up on a clever slogan. In effect, a fan page becomes more like a bumper sticker popularity contest than a real business presence or one of deeper engagement. In a “Twitter-esque” move, Facebook is trading a volume of interaction with a depth of interaction. This is the “lightweight” engagement they mention. We believe that this will increase traffic over the long run and reflect the aim of a social network to be a casual conversation. Increased interaction is great from a search engine and investor valuation standpoint– it allows Facebook to show greater numbers since the bar is lower to become a fan. This is somewhat similar to Twitter announcing they have just crossed 10 billion tweets– who cares how many of these are real (by humans versus robots) or how many were even seen by a human. The point is to show large numbers. Remember the search engine wars on how many pages each had indexed? Facebook will be able to sell engagement more broadly: Albeit, the engagement is in the form of someone clicking on a button, as opposed to interacting at a deeper level. Advertisers may not realize this change, which will allow an interim bump in earnings. From an optics standpoint– wouldn’t you want to increase your fan count, even if you have to change your language to say that “X number of people liked my page” instead of “X number of people are fans of my page”? Hat tip to Nick O’Neill and curious to see what other Facebook advertisers think of this. If a fan might have been worth 50 cents to you before, what’s it worth now?
Google Analytics in Korean– and a scary thought
Whoa, I just logged into my Google Analytics and see it in Korean. I hadn’t changed my browser’s language settings, logged in as another user, or had dinner at my favorite Korean restaurant. I have seen this kind of unexpected personalization from Facebook before, where sometimes they change your language settings based on where you’re coming from. It reminded me of a conversation I had with the CEO of PeekYou yesterday. We were talking about how Facebook will often nudge you to reconnect with friends you haven’t spoken to in a while. Given the amount of data that Google and Facebook have about you, could you imagine walking out of the grocery store — then seeing Facebook send you a text message saying “Hey, you should have bought Miller Lite at Albertson’s, you idiot– it’s $5 cheaper per case there!” With applications (games, really) that combine mobile, social, and local– people are broadcasting what they’re doing, where they are, and what businesses they frequent, so it’s actually possible to do that now. Do you have a rewards card via your favorite supermarket, airline, or hotel? Now imagine you earn extra points by signing into that program’s Facebook application. Would you do it? P.S.– while most of the words are in Korean, you can still mouse over the links to see the words in English. Thank goodness that urls are in our alphabet. And then notice that “Conversion University” is not spelled out in Korean– maybe there’s not a translation for that!
Facebook and Omniture ink analytics and ad serving deal– problems lie ahead
Read the MediaPost article, hot off the presses. Omniture (now owned by Adobe) will have the ability to buy ads via SearchCenter, their PPC management tool, by the end of 2010. That’s over 3 years behind Content Factory– an eternity in web advertising, so it will be interesting to see what product is in place by then. I will want to know if Omniture has plans yet to integrate Facebook into SearchCenter such that it’s treated like another search engine or whether it operates orthogonally (since social media plays in the AID of the AIDA funnel). It will be interesting to see how large agencies and brands adapt, given their penchant for wanting simple interfaces to manage campaigns, as opposed to performance marketing on Facebook. The world of buying Facebook ads is significantly different than traditional keyword advertising– much closer to the content network, but still its own animal. There is also the issue of attribution since social media adds additional touchpoints earlier in the funnel. On Facebook, people find out about brands and develop trust from seeing what their friends like and endorse. To be able to now see those social touchpoints later convert on Google search will pose an interesting challenge to advertisers that have to now allocate a budget between social and search. This doesn’t even yet address the issue of brand bidding, which also messes up the perfect dream of automated bidding– to be able to hide behind the black box math that is actually just last-click attribution. Even when Facebook does introduce its own conversion pixel later this year, it doesn’t address the issue of how to allocate credit when a user has multiple clicks in their clickstream prior to a conversion. Neither the last click nor the first click nor the average click is the correct answer. I believe in a multi-channel environment, the advertisers who rely upon having smart in-house strategists will win over those who decide to shell out cash to buy the most expensive software. Online marketing, and marketing in general, is increasingly becoming multi-channel, which will scare some into hiding behind software while motivating others into arbitraging out the profits amidst the confusion. We’ve been at this for 3 years with brands large and small, having seen and experienced the problems that the big players have yet to even encounter. What do you think will happen?
Einstein Brothers Free Bagel– print this coupon!
I went through the trouble of clicking on the ad and installing the app so that you don’t have to (a lot of work, I know). Just print out this coupon and redeem it by January 31st to get a free bagel and shmear. Better yet, print out 10 of these and share them with your friends. No catch and no purchase necessary. Who says there’s no free lunch– I mean, a bagel. If you like this, tell them Content Factory sent you!
Why loyalty programs are failing and how to fix yours
An article in MediaPost today highlights why few companies are delivering upon their loyalty programs. In a nutshell, consumers want personalized rewards, whether it be through their grocery store cards, airline frequent flyer program, or other points-based systems. But marketing departments are not able to personalize because they are unable to collect the data needed to personalize offers and internal organizational hurdles prevent companies from unifying their data across multiple silos. I was fortunate to spend a few years at American Airlines to perform analysis on the AAdvantage program– to learn firsthand how the granddaddy of loyalty programs operated. Some challenges and how we overcame them: Incomplete customer data The website, reservations deck, and gate agents all had separate customer databases. If you were a smart customer, you could complain at all three locations and earn triple the points. So if a bag supposedly fell on your head from opening the overhead bin, you could get miles for the inconvenience, and the agents at the airport, on the phone, and from the website wouldn’t know that you were already compensated. The solution– create a unified customer database. This is quite expensive, and has political issues to solve, but is well worth the effort. When you can create a single view of the customer’s activity, you can measure their overall profitability and create programs to incent the right kind of behavior. Mass blasting (spamming) customers Email marketing is so easy and inexpensive that SVPs of Marketing are tempted to spam customers. After all, if sales increased by changing the newsletter frequency from monthly to twice a month, why not weekly? We’ve seen this approach taken at a number of large brands. Not only is this a customer turn-off, but goes against the whole point of offering personalized offers that are most appealing to where a customer is in your lifecycle and their stated preferences. Part of status is being remembered for your particular likes (mints on your pillow and extra towels if you’re a hotel customer), not to get the same message delivered to everybody. The data crypt What used to be called a data warehouse, then later called a datamart, then called business intelligence, then enterprise analytics is really just the same thing with a new name each time. Even if you can embark on a $20 million project to consolidate customer data into one spot, the bigger issue is actually getting it out. Most marketing managers believe they have to speak a special prayer to the high priests of IT to be granted access to the database. The inability to easily access the data– no matter what expensive analytics tool you might have bought– prevents the marketing manager from being able to do the analysis necessary to create a tailored menu of rules. Without a menu of actions and corresponding points, and then being able to adjust payouts based on what’s working, a loyalty program bleeds. And the more data you have in your scoring model, the more complex it is to calculate status, as you’re dealing with an increasing number of empty fields for variables and bad data. So perhaps you were able to get a data append from a third party– let’s say Acxiom– and now you have gender, income, and the type of car they drive. How is that affecting the ways to earn and burn points in your loyalty program? IT doing Marketing and Marketing doing IT Managing a loyalty program is really an exercise in user psychology, but it requires some technical execution. You’re really looking at video game design and trying to influence their behavior. An average IT administrator is not going to understand this, nor is a traditional brand marketer that has done media buys for 20 years. If you have a loyalty program in-house, ask yourself who is running it. The answer is finding folks who are well-versed in data analysis (crunching SQL statements in the database) and also understand user psychology. Writing SQL is for engineers, you say? Look at Amazon, where they require marketing managers to know how to query a database. It’s not that hard. How are you going to structure and adjust rules for earning and burning points by customer segments if you’re not able to go in there and hands-on be able to run reports? Summary– the weakest link Well there you have it– all it takes is one break in the chain and your loyalty program has a problem. If you aren’t able to collect user data– transactions and preferences, you can’t create personalized offers. If your marketing people can’t properly access the data, that expensive database just sits there. If you have the wrong people trying to solve the problem, it’s a guy with a hammer who thinks everything looks like a nail. I’d say that brands would be well-served to hire folks from Nintendo, Blizzard, and other companies in the gaming industry to help revamp their loyalty programs. This is nothing more than a video game.