My Facebook Ad

The internship that I have this semester is with a women’s clothing company Erebelle. The fun thing about is I work on a social media campaign for Erebelle with Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell…you know the co-authors of Citizen Marketers. It’s really an experience working with them. One of my projects has been to create a Facebook Page for Erebelle (which looks excellent I might add) with pictures, notes, events, and video. Facebook began working towards implementation of these pages so that organizations, clubs, bands, companies, etc. don’t create profiles. Pages allow users to become “fans” of certain things. Once you’re in the fan club you can receive updates and exclusive info from that page. It’s really about the same thing as a profile. You can use most of the same applications and even create your own. I didn’t create an application, but I did experiment with the Facebook Ads option. Jackie, Ben and I were curious to see the workings on an ad and how successful an ad would be. So using my advertising skills, I created a well-structured ad with a headline and a 125-word body. You can’t get too crazy with these ads, there’s a limited amount you can change or ad. Most of the ads look the same on Facebook for this reason. What I found kind of confusing was that you choose to set a spending amount between cost per clicks (CPC) or cost per impression (CPM). At first, Facebook advised me to use a CPC of $.50- $.64 so naturally I chose in the middle: $.57. Then I set the maximum spending amount per day to $10. For four days this ad was running and I never saw it. Apparently nobody else was because I would check at the end of each day and $0, zip, nada had been spent. Facebook then advised me to raise the CPC. So I uped the bid to $1.62. The next day my $10 were spent, and the day after that and the day after that. I was getting 10, 000 impressions everyday and I guess about 10 clicks per day. So I raised my bid again to $2.00 and the maximum daily spending amount to $15.00. I spent all of that the last four days my ad was running. I guess what I really need is some insight from anybody who has played around with Facebook ads and knows what their talking about. What I see know is that my ad wasn’t all that effective. I was getting traffic to the Erebelle page but I don’t know how much that actually did. Any suggestions or secrets to creating a successful Facebook Ad?

Tibet's PR

As we've seen the 2008 Olympic madness start in Beijing, we also see a lot of controversy on Tibet's front. What's interesting is the use of PR, or soon to be use of PR and social media that is used for this issue. I stumbled across the Students for a Free Tibet Facebook Page today and did a little research. Apparently, the situation in Tibet is really working in the social media world to gain awareness and support with what little money they have. What better way than free media like Facebook? This page has about 37,900 members and a YouTube page where organizers post reports and footage from protests. Students for a Free Tibet, which is a member of the international organization, sends out its own talking points, press release templates and protest plans to its 650 chapters, supplemented by the cause page on Facebook.

S.F.T. member told the NY Times, “S.F.T. realizes that the media is a very effective tool getting our message across. One way that we ensure that our message stays on point and is disseminated to audiences it’s targeted to, is by training our S.F.T.-ers to be the best media spokespeople themselves.”

While working toward eye-catching demonstrations that will get coverage, S.F.T. also holds weeklong “action camps” four times a year. Attendees learn to organize protests and deal with the police, and receive training in attention-getting activities like rappelling and guerrilla street theater. Sessions for pro-Tibet groups are held by the S.F.T. to give media training, focusing on anything from artfully answering reporter's questions to delivering a good sound bite.

This has really put pressure on China to do something, and not just with Tibet but on behalf of their PR representation. It's no secret that China needs a better rep and frankly, with the Olympics coming up I'm surprised they haven't been advised to do so earlier. Gene Grabowski, a crisis P.R. specialist at Levick Strategic Communications who worked on the Chinese toy recalls, told the NY Times that he was'nt surprised that the protesters were winning so far.

“The Chinese government is still new to the challenges and the game of playing on a world stage, and playing on the world stage today doesn’t just mean understanding how to control the messages that come out of formal government ministries or the messages that are prepared and disseminated to the global news media,” he said. “There are the blogs, there are Web sites; there’s a whole world of Internet-based communication that the Chinese government still doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate.”

Political blogging

My group podcast decided to go with the whole political blogging theme since the subject was very present and very new. The amount of social media tactics we've seen in this election is truly amazing and deserves to be noted.

While doing this project, I specifically focused on John McCain’s Presidential Campaign. I found that his site has a blog that is probably the most successful of any of its other social media strategies. They regularly blog, although it’s nothing much compared to Barack Obama’s blog. Rather the blog be used as a tool in getting the Republican’s message out about the campaign, it is more of an after thought to report on nomination wins. A couple unique things on the blog is readers can rate the blog posts as well as leave comments to each post. Digg and Delicious are on each of the blog posts. Also, the blog allows for posts to be emailed to friends. Search Marketing Gurus, a blog that includes a group of professional search marketers, points out some unused options of McCain’s blog, including the tags feature. Most recent posts have no tags which makes it difficult to categorize the posts. Another fault in John McCain’s blog is that it doesn’t allow for a reader to subscribe to the entire blog through RSS feeds but only to five separate issues such as Health, Economy, Spending, Campaign, and Iraq but one cannot tell what posts are included in each issue because the posts aren’t visibly categorized.

John McCain’s presidential committee started off early last year showing high expectations for social media usage within its campaign, but has since dropped the ball somewhat on promoting the five social media strategies they launched. Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, Veoh, and Yahoo! Answers are online projects the committee uses to actively interact with Americans and in turn, voters can engage with John McCain and learn about issues. National eCampaign Director Christian Ferry says, "People are fed up with politics as usual and Facebook and MySpace are giving them the opportunity to organize and influence the process in ways that could not have been imagined during John McCain's last campaign for President”. Although his committee recognizes the advantages of social media, they have done little to show they truly understand these sites by not playing on their key opportunities. The website doesn’t offer an easy way to locate the campaign’s social media strategies and the initiatives they’ve taken seem to be a result of “jumping on the band wagon”.

Search Engine Optimization for McCain’s campaign is somewhat successful. The official website ranks #1 in Google and Yahoo! for “John McCain” but not in Live nor in Ask. The Splash page was removed early this year and has since done little to improve SEO. As far as social networking sites, there isn’t a direct link to his Facebook page from his website, but one must physically search for John McCain once signed into the network. McCain has a personal social network called McCainSpace similar to Barack Obama’s but a major problem with this network is that it doesn’t reach out to intergrate with other social networks. It is a gated area for the McCain community that doesn’t spread the campaign’s message. Two video channels were created on YouTube and Veoh to host the same videos available at John McCain.com. In addition to these outlets, Yahoo! Answers initiates discussion with Americans about wasteful spending.

It's great to see that our politicians are trying to reach out to us in ways that make it easier and more enjoyable to get involved. Although the fact that all of this content is on the internet can make the elections even more of a popularity contest than in past years.

Podcast

Hey all,
here's my group's podcast project. Podcast Politics 2.0 is a show we created to discuss Social Media practices in the 2008 Presidential Elections. You'll here Patrick Kirby, Gabriela SiFuentes, and me talk about the leading candidates.
Podcast Politics 2.0

How does Advertising hold up?

Forrester Research released a new study that reports social media won't be seeing as many budget cuts as traditional media will. Marketers are more likely to decrease spending here than in areas such as word of mouth, blogging, and social networking. AdWeek reported this last week. Some might be apprehensive to how much advertisers are going to invest in these new practices, especially when the experimental stage isn't over yet. Starting a Facebook page or a blog doesn't cost a company much, unlike the big-media campaigns everyone is doing. The study shows that social media initiatives will withstand budget cuts because companies are beginning to understand them and make smarter choices, instead of jumping into something just because all your competitors are doing it.

Forrester found that Procter & Gamble's online community for adolescent girls, BeingGirl.com, has been 4 times as effective as an almost equally priced marketing program for traditional media. Advertising on Facebook has become even more widespread with the use of "pages", where a company, product, music group, non-profit organization can create content. These pages allow you to buy advertising that's seen by your "fans" or "members".

Cashmere Mafia reveals the new trend

Thanks to a fellow classmate, I've become obsessed with ABC's new show Cashmere Mafia. It's executive producer is Darren Star, sound familiar? He's also the creator of Sex In the City. I really wasn't interested in adding a new show to my list of "must sees", but I can't help but want to watch the trendy and glamorous lives of these 4 women who live in NYC. The stars of the show (Lucy Liu, who is always fun to watch on screen, Frances O'Connor, Bonnie Somerville, and an "ice queen" performance that you just can't help but love by Miranda Otto) unite as a female "boys' club" that dominates the finance, media, publishing and advertising worlds.

Now I'm not writing to give a critic review, but to point out what's really interesting about the show. The fact that it places the power in these women's hands, or shows them repeatably as victors over men is fun to watch, BUT I was particularly drawn to (don't get me wrong, I'm all for a sitcom about strong successful women) its references to modern technology such as blogging, Facebook, and BlackBerrys. I love that in every episode the women are so in tune with this stuff and it plays such a big part of their professions. Of course, I do enjoy that they are marketing execs and publishing editors since this is along the lines of what I plan to do in a few years. Blogging is something that pops up every ten minutes with shout outs to Media Bistro. One character is even a blogger who's made enemies with these women by posting gossip about each of them. Two young entrepreneurs appear on the show to sell their "Facebook clone" for a pretty penny, and Bonnie Somerville's character tells how she receives instant alerts every time her name appears online. It's cool to see how the things we discuss in class are making their way onto primetime television. I'm sure more shows will continue to shed light on trends like YouTube and Myspace.