Trudging through the search engine swamp and clubbing the competition

Looking to reach 22 million people? How about 29 million potential customers? Well, depending on who you trust, Facebook or Compete, you should be able to reach 20-30 million viewers by placing an advertisement on Facebook. According to Quantcast your ad could be seen by 90,000 unique visitors each month, that is to say if you don’t filter for your target audience.

Setting up a social ad on Facebook is very simple. After creating your Facebook account, click on the advertisers link in the footer navigation get started. You get the option to send your clicks through to your corporate site, your Facebook page or to create a new product page within Facebook. There are distinct advantages to keeping your click-throughs on Facebook before sending them to your corporate site including more detailed insight into the demographics of your potential customers (requires at least 10 fans) and the fact that Facebook product pages are now accessible by search engines to further broaden your potential audience. Creating a page takes only a few seconds but you won’t likely get the necessary 10 fans without putting significant time into creating a page that offers your visitors a reason to return and join in the social scene.

Clicking through the ad building interface, you select your target audience. According to Sugarrae, Alexa reports that 44.3% of Facebook users are in th US, UK and Canada. You don’t have the option to select more than one country so you will need to create additional campaigns to cover all three. Filter options available include geo location (in the case of th US this means country, state and city), sex, age range, educational status, political views and relationship status to name a few. As you slice and dice your target Facebook provides you with real-time estimates of how many potential customers you could reach. Selecting Colorado for example, drops the potential audience to 300k and selecting female only drops it down to 138k at the time this article was written.

The ad creating tab is extremely basic. You get a title, body and optional thumbnail. If you weren’t put off by all the bad press project beacon has received lately, you can also add social actions to your ad. Social actions work similar to the activity feed on every Facebook page, providing information about who recently interacted with your products and how.

The final tab in the ad wizard is the budget tab. After selecting CPM or CPC you can define your daily budget and per click or per thousand bids. Facebook offers suggestions to help you get good coverage. Basic tests I performed so far have indicated that CPC is slightly more affordable. Facebook seems to overestimate the cost of the clicks so using their estimates will tend to get you great coverage. I have also found that compared to similar ads running on AdWords for competitive terms, Facebook has a better CTR - likely due to less competition for those key phrases. As with any social networking site, viral content will really do the trick. Some early testers have reported that CTR on Facebook is so poor it isn’t worth the effort. While this may be the case for standard ads with boring content behind them, during my testing, interactive, viral content outperformed standard content by 2000% in terms of clicks even when using the minimum bid of $0.10 for the viral content and recommended bids for standard content.

That’s it! Once you have previewed and approved your ad, it will begin circulating in the ad space within an hour. Daily statistics in Facebook Insight (their analytics package) are updated every 12 hours so you won’t get to play around with Insight right away.  Enjoy!

I have to admit that I have been intrigued with eBook readers for quite some time now. They seem to have the right idea - provide a portable electronic mechanism to read books that isn’t microscopic and doesn’t hurt your eyes. Kindle uses the same E-Ink technology that competitive readers like the Sony Reader use and offers the bonus feature of wireless access via the Sprint network for eBook downloads and access to content that isn’t so old the copyright has expired (see Sony’s list of 100 free books bundled with the Reader).

So kindle is basically second generation eBook technology with a huge content library and everybody’s favorite wireless access so why is it going to bomb? Two reasons: first, there aren’t any. Amazon sold out of Kindle devices already and won’t be able to restock until after Christmas. Second, no advertising. When was the last time any product was successful that wasn’t either built on advertising or funded by advertising. I have been digging around and have yet to come across any details on how Amazon could place ads on the Kindle screen. I know nobody really wants ads, but they are a necessary evil.

Note to Bezos:
Add advertising to Kindle or remove the DRM and open the platform. Actually scratch that second part, just ad advertising to kindle. Even personal Acrobat filess are serving up paid advertising these days.

Maybe I am way off base here and Amazon is really planning on taking a pounding on Kindle with future plans for a software upgrade that will turn Kindle into the most advanced interface to the Amazon shopping experience known to man that will revolutionize the way people use the internet just like palm revolutionized the handheld market earlier this year.

I recently became a Darth Vader fan. Normally I root for the good guys, the white hats, you know - the team destined to win in the end, but I have recently felt the pull of the dark side on Twitter. Yesterday I came across a site that lists the top Twitter users and found that Darth Vader is ranked sixth. How intriguing to see that Scobleizer ranked number 1. Is Robert Scoble the sith lord? After becoming his follower he quickly dropped to number two, even after adding me as follow, so probably not.

The Twitter phenomenon seems to be holding steady. After rapid growth in July this year, the Twitter traffic is holding stead at around half a million monthly visitors. More than likely this just means the base of loyal Twits have already configured their settings and are using phones, messenger, widgets, applications and mashups to send and receive tweets. Twitter users are primarily in the U.S. and Europe according to eBiquity. Spend a little time on twittervision and you will notice a lot of panning back and forth between the two countries.

Although Twitter now nofollows all links, it is still a useful tool for business. Lee Odden touts it as

productive as a promotional tool for pointing to interesting things you’ve found on the web as well as a tool for building credibility and influence

I agree with Lee and have deployed Twitter selectively throughout my company with good success. And even if it ends up fading into technological obscurity you should still use it just to keep tabs on Vader. Speaking of D.V., it makes me nervous when he stays so silent. Something evil must be afoot.

Recently I have been slowly working my way through Lee Odden’s recommended reading list. I just finished John Battelle’s The Search and can see why Mr. Battelle has been so successful. He is a captivating writer and a pretty good audio book narrator not to mention a brilliant marketer and entrepreneur. Released in 2006, The Search provides a concise history of search and the rise of the internet billionaires behind Google and various other search related companies. It is amazing to think how far the web and internet search has come in the last decade and even more amazing to realize that most leading edge search companies agree that search is in it’s infancy and is likely no more than 5% of the true potential.

One of the more interesting innovations in search in the last few years as noted by Battelle is IBM’s WebFountain. WebFountain is a wobbly step towards the search holy grail that is clarity into the database of intentions. Unfortunately, according to IBM, although WebFountain is incredibly powerful and far more complex than the slurp and burp Google index of today, it lacks scalability. The WebFountain index generates 10 megabytes of data for every 1 megabyte it reads in. There are, it seems, many internet billionaires yet to be crowned in the kingdom of search.

Of course the database of intentions is tightly coupled to the fabled semantic web. The father of the internet, Tim Berners Lee recently did an interview at HP and spoke on his thoughts about the future of web science and the semantic web. One of the large problems Sir Lee addressed in the interview was how the wiki model is breaking down. He discusses how the open world editable concept behind wikis is slowly being deflated as they are forced to filter and limit control due to misuse and abuse and how the world needs to work together to eliminate this issue by making collective decisions that contribute to a successful meritocrasy. He also addressed the issue surrounding access and control of private systems such as MySpace. He believes that companies and sites that attempt to wall off their data and prevent open use and access will risk being abandoned in favor of open social networks that will allow people to access, share and control their own data. In the post interview Q&A Berners Lee touched on the white hot topic of centrally managed and openly accessible social networking data. As the web evolves it will be more about people interacting with people he explains. We need to move away from the document level focus and instead shine our light in the direction of people’s actions and the relationships between real things.

The solution to all these problems, Sir Lee posits, lies in the adoption of RDF, a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. RDF in conjunction with various other semantic web technologies like
GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages) and a query language SPARQL. The likelihood of successful adoption of these technologies seems high given the group supporting the adoption and the fact that GRDDL is basically extended XML and SPARQL is syntactically similar to SQL.

It is an exciting time to be an SEO. In reality it is an exciting time to be an internet user. As we look back on 2007 in future years we will likely scoff at the rudimentary tools used by the cro-magnon man searcher of yesteryear.

If only DVR’s could schedule upcoming events more than two months in advance I would have scheduled the recording of the latest Tin Man mini series the day it came across my RSS reader for the first time. The marketing group over at SciFi did an excellent job promoting the series, so well you could say they have it down to a science *grin* At least they got me hyped up for a new series that I knew relatively little about.

Part one of the series reintroduces our well known Wizard of Oz characters in creative fashion. Alan Cumming plays an absolutely brilliant recreation of the scarecrow as Glitch, the inventor that knew so much that part of his brain was removed by the wicked witch - now known as Azkadellia the sorceress. The lion (Raw) though quiet has the ability to heal injuries and see the future and the former long arm of the law, Wyatt “Tin Man” Cain is itching for all out revenge after his family was tortured and killed right before his eyes, over and over again.

These great actors make you forget you are watching SciFi and not a blockbuster Hollywood hit, then DG (aka Dorothy) brings you crashing back to earth with her vacant stare and clueless bumbling. Please tell me she is not “the One”, even with the blank Keenu Reeves facial expression she doesn’t manage to pull off the Neo persona and she surely isn’t giddy enough to remind me of the original character. The director goes to great lengths in the early stages to freeze frame her with pigtails and checkered dress as she starts her day at work at the local diner, but after that momentary image burn the likeness fades quickly and the horrible acting drags down the rest of the cast.

Even with DG’s less than perfect stage presence I was not dissuaded, nor were the other 6.3 million viewers on Sunday night, from thoroughly enjoying the experience. Apparently Tin Man brought in record viewership with a show that wasn’t as geek specific as Galactica or Dune. The special effects were hit and miss, but overall the Tin Man had a really nice, polished feel to it. I am not sure it was as deep or quality as the aforementioned Dune or Galactica, but it was enjoyable all the same. Apparently Digg users didn’t necessarily share my affection. With over 1000 related Digg submissions I didn’t see any go hot. Alexa and Compete didn’t show much of a traffic spike for scifi.com over that last month so I guess there weren’t 6.3 million additional viewers tuning in to watch the full episodes online. Maybe Revision3 is ahead of its time, or maybe Adobe’s recent Flash upgrade with support for H.264 HD encryption will be the tipping point for online media.

The loyalists on the SciFi forum graded it an overwhelming “A” and agreed they would love to see the prefix “mini” removed from the title in favor of a full blown television series. Obviously television advertising and off-net viewing still reign at SciFi. If only my wife hadn’t “accidentally” deleted my scheduled DVR event AND recordings I could have watched it commercial free, in HD, on my big screen television. Alas I was subjected to somewhat grainy 8-12 minute segments with obnoxious introductory commercials that were far louder than the show. Still, kudos to SciFi for putting up the full content in record time each night and for not splattering commercials through 3 full length sections.