Facebook Ads and monetizing engagement

After the Facebook IPO filing, I got to thinking a lot more about what significant things Facebook would do beyond what we currently see on the website. Instead of thinking, as I normally would, about what functionality they would add, I figured I'd focus on how to better monetize what they have.

In my mind, what Facebook has is engagement. Whether it's "social" or not, they've got people scrolling, clicking, and moving their eyeballs all over their website. I didn't really see how they've actually made huge money except through deals with companies like Zynga. But what I had forgotten is that I had been blocking ads on Facebook for the longest time using AdBlocker.

So I turned off Adblocker and started seeing ads in the usual spots along the right-hand side. The odd thing is that the ads didn't really seem all that relevant for me in the here and now. I kept seeing ads for  products and services that professional photographers would use. This isn't surprising since I had a photography business for years and still run a photography site. But for the last 6-9 months, I've hardly said anything about photography.

So it didn't quite make sense. If Facebook was poised to make so much money off ads, how could they be presenting me with ads that haven't been all that relevant to me for the last year?

Then I started seeing ads for things related to internet technology and jobs. No surprise since I've been in the technology world in Silicon Valley for 12 years. Then I started seeing ad polls relate to the Lakers. Not surprising since I'm very active in a Laker Fans group on Facebook. This was getting better, especially as compared to the ads to buy Photoshop actions.

But then I kept seeing the same ads. Over and over.

What was going on?

The quick question I got after choosing to hide an ad

I finally decided to hide the ads using Facebook's function (to hide a specific ad or all ads from that advertiser). Then I started seeing where Facebook was taking things. Upon asking to hide the ad, I'd get a quick question about why I wanted to hide it. Then I was asked to help find more relevant content by telling Facebook what I liked.

Facebook as a site was basically engaging me with a few simple questions. And I didn't really have a problem answering them. The questions didn't confront me as pop-overs or cover up other content that I actually cared about. So I answered them and moved on.

The response after answering the above question

Very quickly I started seeing ads more relevant to my current interests. Like within an hour. Damn, they were already leveraging the simple questions I answered to provide me more relevant ads. That actually encouraged me to take a look at the ads (and hide them if I didn't like them along with giving them more knowledge about what's relevant to me). There are still a mix of photography & technology, but it's way more relevant and changing more often than it was just 2 weeks ago. Compare this with the weird ads I got years ago like a head-shaving razor (yeah, to shave my head), hunting camouflage, and pregnancy stretch-mark cream. Right now, I see an add for a business-technology conference, the Lakers, and Customer conversion through social engagement. Sounds on-point to me!

Of course, along this way, Facebook is learning more and more about me and is looking to make money off me. But the simple way in which they are getting me to look, click, and engage intrigues me. Amazon does a very good job with finding relevant content to show me on their home page (based on my previous buying and product research habits). Facebook is not nearly as good at providing me spot-on content, but I can already see it getting better. Given the amount of data they have on my habits & likes and my friends' habits, I expect the ad content to get more and more relevant.

So I'm leaving AdBlocker off and plan to look at the ads I'm presented every time I login. I probably won't click on them, but it's something I'm keeping a very close eye on this evolution. It's amazing to think it's still in its early stages, but given the speed at which I've seen improvement in relevancy, I can only see that Facebook will be making a lot more money (and very soon) off of the level of engagement its users have with each other and with the site itself.

BTW, as I finish off this post, I checked Facebook one more time and here's the ad I got. Relevant? Well, I love cooking and I'm Indian...so it MUST mean I need a tandoor in my life and kitchen! Right!? Let's just say it's not a perfectly relevant ad, but I see where it's coming from :)

I'd love to hear your experiences with ads on social sites...leave your comments here!

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Personas on Twitter - Part 3

Closing out on the topic of personas on twitter, I wanted to talk about what never feels right to me or like it doesn't work. (You can read my previous two posts on what DOES work in Part 1 and Part 2 here)

Now, I personally get annoyed by some individuals on twitter, but this post isn't about individuals, it's about what can backfire in terms of getting a following and maintaining engagement.

To keep it simple, as a business, the last thing you want is for your twitter personas to feel like it's made up in the back cubicle in your marketing department. Sure, the account can be used as a marketing tool, but it's so easy to come off as doing nothing more than bragging about your company and nothing more.

Being upbeat about your products is great, but if that's the only layer you provide to your presence on twitter then it's not something which will get much engagement. It might get some eyeballs, but they'll stray quickly to more interesting or more useful personas.

I was going to put examples here, but let me instead explain a simple way I have of thinking about this: If you only tweet what you have already said/posted/documented elsewhere (eg, your website, your marketing pamphlet, YouTube, etc), then you're not building anything useful to you or to potential followers; you're simply creating noise. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with tweeting those things as part of your stream, but you've GOT to do something more.

Now this may seem quite obvious, but many times, I just feel like companies don't get it. They just want to be on twitter, but don't think anything more of it once the account is setup. Or they may overthink it: They send out tweets only after multiple rounds of review by people in marketing or legal or They setup robots to tweet out headlines. Or they just constrain what their twitter account could be used for.

I'm not going to call out any specific twitter accounts here since, to be honest, I just unfollow such accounts. However, I hope this helps explain what I feel doesn't work in an environment as dynamic as twitter.

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Personas on Twitter, Part 2

Following up on my last post about brand/company personas on Twitter, I want to focus on bloggers...

I'm actually going to focus on Sports bloggers who go above and beyond writing posts on websites and keep an active dialogue on Twitter. They typically include a variety of NBA game re-caps, league summaries/opinions, and real-time game tweets.

I'm just going to list a couple of accounts that I think do a good job and explain why I think they maintain a great presence and persona on twitter (and not just be tweeting a lot)

@HPbasketball
@LakersNation

Now, LakersNation is obviously an account for fans of the LA Lakers. with 48k tweets to their names, they obviously keep things busy on twitter, but they do it in a variety of ways. Not only do they tweet what every Laker fan might be talking about during a game, but they keep things going in between games. Not just with thoughts about recent and upcoming games, but also about Laker history and trivia. I think it's a great way to keep fans engaged before, during, and after games. And since I'm a huge Lakers fan, it's no surprise that I follow them!

HPBasketball, it could be argued, hates the Lakers (not really), but he keeps followers engaged in a lot of ways. Again, there are blog posts and in-game tweets, but there's a lot going on between games. Some of it is analysis of the whole league, some is specific topics or nits that he needs his followers to understand. A lot of it may rub people the wrong way, but somehow, through 140 characters at a time, he manages to explain himself. There's a lot of times where I don't agree at all with his opinions, but the fact that he gets his thoughts out there and manages to explain things 140 characters at a time keeps me a follower.

So what's to learn about personas from these two accounts? It's fun to live tweet games, but the followers will only stay if you manage to keep their interest throughout the week. It takes more than linking to your game recaps or team/league summaries. And being a passionate fan of the subject shows off in how you engage your followers.

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Personas on Twitter

Lately I've been thinking a lot more about what works and what doesn't work in the social media space, specifically on Facebook on Twitter. The reason I started thinking about this is because I had noticed some "random" photos on Facebook being liked and/or shared thousands of times. These viral photos may be one-offs, but more often than not, specific websites/account would get large numbers of likes over and over. Anyways, it piqued my curiosity and lead me to look at my twitter timeline as well.

Now, I'm no social media expert and this post certainly isn't aimed at being instructive about how to increase twitter presence. I'm just going to focus on a few examples and tie them back to personas and try to understand why I think they're successful. I was originally going to do this all in one post, but I realized, it would end up being really long, so I'm going to split this into a few posts.

I'm going to break it down into a few types of personas. Note that I don't call these brands even though some of them are. A twitter profile can be a brand, but I don't consider it to be interesting or worthy of following unless it goes beyond just being a brand. That means I don't follow celebrities or product brands unless they do something other than advertise their products. That also means that the twitter accounts I really look out for establish their personas in strong, unique ways.

So let's start off with the persona that got me thinking about this whole thing:

@littledebbie - Very random that I start with this, but the person(s) behind this profile are definitely having fun with it and show they understand that a brand can provide factual info and help their customers, but also create a connection with the twitter-verse. I won't go into all of the details, but based on some simple tweeting with @Questlove in December and joking about their brand, a lot of people in the twitterverse noticed the tongue-in-cheek humor behind the Little Debbie account. I definitely noticed the fact that they go beyond just responding to "help me" tweets (in this case about nutritional contents). Before this, I hadn't thought of Little Debbie since grade school when my mom would pack a snack cake in my lunch bag. Now? I think they're maintaining a pretty cool persona on twitter. That is reason enough to say they've done a good job establishing themselves as something unique on the social internet.

More brands have done a pretty good job:

@eyeficard - They run a pretty standard support profile, but they have employees with other jobs also man this profile and get to the bottom of customer issues. From what I've seen, it's allowed them to provide consitent responsiveness in a world where waiting 10 minutes feels like forever! For a small company like this, I think it shows that you can establish a helpful presence for your customers no matter how big or small you are. Besides all this, I walk my dogs past their office all the time and they look like cool folks :)

@comcastcares - Back before twitter was a household term, this account became known as a place to go for help with Comcast issues. The reason it got noticed is because it seemed to be more responsive than the Comcast phone lines. That's actually a bad thing to say about the normal Comcast support process, but a really good thing when it comes to leverage the internet. It may not seem like it now, but Comcast was at the leading edge of this. The account content itself is kind of boring, but I think they've established themselves well as a consistent place to go for real help.

So my takeaway for these company/business/brand accounts is that just getting on twitter doesn't do much for you. However, there's a variety of ways to make a name for your company. It can be as simple poking fun at your brand or as another way for your customers to ask for help. The point for me is that some companies do a pretty good job at maintaining consistency in the persona they've chosen for their brands and that consistency is key.

Okay, that's it for now. I'm going to get to more interesting personas in the next post so keep an eye out!

[UPDATE: Check out the next post on this topic here: Personas on Twitter, Part 2]

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Continuous, Iterative Improvement (or The Hacker Way)

Over the past day, a LOT of attention has been focused on Facebook's IPO filing and it's actually pretty interesting to see the numbers behind FB's business. One of the areas that caught my attention though is the cultural focus on continuous, iterative improvements. In Mark Zuckerberg's words, it's "The Hacker Way"

This post on Startup Lessons Learned has a nice summary and way to think about this.

Whether or not you call this a way that hackers think about their work, for me, it comes down to a commitment to iterating and improving at every step. Facebook's a great example of that especially since they are clearly pushing the envelope of Social but bring their users along for the ride and improving based on their inputs. I've lost track of how many big changes we've seen to the timeline and other features, but in the end, what I see when I login there today is FAR better than what I saw in 2008.

So by total coincidence, before the IPO announcement yesterday I had talked to some folks at work about accomplishing big things over time using fast steps. On one occasion it was in regards to an organizational announcement which was solidifying the work that a small team was doing around trying out new "innovations" even if it required a lot of manual work to start with. The idea was that it's better to test it out and see what you can make of it, but not get too bogged down by the need to make it everlasting. If it works, great, we can figure out a way to make it last. If it doesn't work, not a huge deal since we tried it out and quickly determined there may be better ways of spending effort. Effectively, this is The Hacker Way even if it wasn't in the context of hacking code.

To be honest, this org announcement sort of surprised me, since this ethic isn't all that common where I work. In fact, it goes counter to the way that most things get done around here.

And that was the second time this idea came up in conversation. In doing some planning, I felt that the group was trying to do too much and it may make sense for them to decide, example by example, whether something should be in scope or not. My take was that it didn't make sense to put something on a release roadmap if you had very little confidence in getting it done and especially if it would require such a long timeframe to plan & execute it. I wasn't suggesting to think smaller or to drop the idea, but to think more tactical and not get stuck in the idea that everything that could possibly be aligned to their goals should definitely be in scope. If it's such a great idea, we can probably find someone else to take it on while we focus on the goals at hand.

The response I got was interesting since it was a bit of the Hacker Way of thinking since they were suggesting that if they can get it done, they should give it a try. I still don't agree since "it" was just one of 20 other things they wanted to get done at the same time. Lending even more reasons for me to believe that "it" wouldn't get done and it would be better to find another team to give it a shot.

About an hour after this, Twitter blew up with news about FB's filing and I got to thinking about these two conversations. My takeaway is that the iterative, continuous improvement way of working is definitely a winner, but you have to keep that in the context of not trying to get too many disparate things done at the same time. Trying to get too much done will likely cause you to lose focus and incorrectly think that all the mad-crazy work you're doing is actually getting you to your goal.