Notes about Facebook advertising

Unless you’ve been stuck in some sort of time-warp (or you’re my Dad) over the last few years, you’ve been on Facebook and seen all the ads being served up on your home page, fan pages, and everywhere else. The Facebook ad server is a pretty robust beast for Marketing types to be able to pin-point who and how many of the more than 400 million Facebook users they want to target. There are a couple of options, and differences to note when looking to create a Facebook ad campaign.

Facebook’s self service ad manager allows anyone in the community to create an ad promoting whatever they want. It can be a quick, inexpensive way to reach out to your target audience in the places they frequent such as fan pages, groups, like pages, etc…. With literally hundreds of options for demographic targeting, you can whack away with a broadsword, or poke at specific groups with a toothpick – your choice. You can also select CPC or CPM, as well as run the ads only at specific times for a specified duration or budget amount. Plus, it’s all wrapped up in a simple, easy to understand interface that makes the barrier to entry about the height of a standard speed bump. The big omission here is that these ads do not run on the users home page. You know, the page where you spend 70% or more of your time, the very same page where you go when you log in to Facebook every day. To get on the home page, you have to pay – and I mean really pay.

To run with the big boys, and get your ad on the home page you work directly with Facebook sales to start up a, for lack of a better word, custom ad campaign. Your investment will buy you a lot. If you figure that there are more than 400 million users on Facebook, and they spend 70% of their time on the home page, that’s a lot of time to see your ad, by a lot of people. There are greater capabilities with these campaigns, you still have all of the targeting from the self-serve ads, plus you get greater tracking. Facebook can track post impression visits for 30 days, which means if you see the ad on your homepage, and visit the fan page 28 days later but not by clicking on the ad, it’s tracked for marketing purposes. From an ad buy position this is cool.

Another cool option here is the friends of connections advertising. With friend of connections targeting you can serve up your ads to friends of people who already Like your page, application, group or event.

Things to consider with the custom ad buy option are that it’s expensive, by their own contact form their looking at folks wanting to spend 10k or more to start. $10 grand can be a hard pill to swallow for a small business trying to ramp up their social marketing campaign. Users also don’t typically even see the ads until the second or third time they’ve logged in for the day, which simply means you have to create a better, more compelling ad than the next guy. And no, Facebook won’t let you opt to server up your ad to users on the second or third time they’ve logged in, sorry.

Facebook has compelling case studies on their ad page, which, naturally, is very enticing. Just like every iPhone app developer wants to have the next #1 selling app, every ad buyer wants to generate thousands of dollars in sales for only a few hundred invested. Don’t fret though, you can do it, it just takes a little time and some savvy ad placement. The best thing about the self serve is that it’s cheap, so for a few hundreds bucks you can play with it a bit, and get things tuned in and hopefully see some results.

Before you jump in do your homework, get to know your target audience, and don’t shotgun your ad if your product or service doesn’t apply to everyone in the world. What do I mean by that? Well, if you’re selling girlie underthings, you generally aren’t going to include 18 year old dudes in your scope. The consensus that ads are irrelevant and annoying is pretty prevalent, and you don’t want wast your marketing dollars falling into that group. A little research goes a long way, so take the time upfront to get good analytical data about your audience, then come up with a good formula for Facebook advertising.

Why developers suck more than Flash

Flash has always been an easy target. It doesn’t matter if you are still quoting Jacob Nielsen’s 10 year old shellacking on Alertbox, or if you just can’t get past the still (unfortunately) present skip intro button, Flash is the favorite whipping boy of the intarwebs. The reality of it is that Flash is a very viable solution for many projects whether they are web related or computer-based, and you really should stop blaming it for your short comings as a developer.

There I said it.

Everything on the web has a failure point. You can’t play Flash or Silverlight without the plugin. You can’t view any super slick jQuery goodness without JavaScript enabled, and even the totally old skool animated gif file fails to show off its dithered beauty if you have images turned off. So what. Get over it. Do your job, and plan for your site to degrade gracefully, and in the case of Flash, that means providing alternate content for those who have Flash blocked, don’t have the plugin, or for some Paleolithic reason have JavaScript disabled. It doesn’t matter what you are doing, there are great tools out there for creating a solid experience for the people who visit your site.

Banners. Everyone has seen Flash banners, and I think most would argue that alternate content isn’t needed since you don’t want to see them anyway, but listen for a sec okay? We’re talking about developers doing things the right way, not whether or not the people having bucket loads of banners chucked at them want to see them. If you’re using .NET, you can use the adRotator control with one tag, and a simple XML file to rotate between images of the banners. This is a simple solution, and it shows the banners according to how they are weighted in the XML file every time the page is loaded/refreshed. Naturally there are others too, A List Apart has this article for a PHP image rotator.

I recognize that it becomes a lot more difficult when you are talking about full sites developed in Flash, but that really doesn’t matter. Not doing the job right because it’s too much work isn’t a good excuse. Now, I fully recognize that freelancers charge for this time, and clients can be cheap, but I bet they’re going to be pissed when they find out how many people can’t view their kickin’ new flash site. If you only take into the consideration the more than 60 million iPhones, iPods and iPads out there, that’s a huge chunk of people who will get Jack and his buddy Squat when they come to your site.

SwfObject makes it simple to include alternate content, so there’s another reason why you shouldn’t bail on the details. I know, it’s JavaScript, but the thing here is that it degrades to your alternate content so you’re safe using it. I’m not really going to get into how to develop your secondary content, that’s your bag. There’s another benefit too, your information will get indexed more thoroughly if it is in the page when the spiders hit it. Sure Google can index Flash, hell Yahoo can and Bing probably can too, but if you have information in the page, it’s going to grab that first, and it will give it preference. Developing alternate content for your Flash work will also help your search engine ranking, which is important right? I mean you built the site so people would find it and see what’s there, right?

It really just comes down to doing the job right, and not blaming the tools used (or the tools who created the site) used to create the site. Flash isn’t perfect, but it really isn’t the root of all evil either. HTML 5 isn’t ringing the death toll for Flash either, so quit squawking about that too.

Using the iPad for business

Since the iPad was announced, and subsequently launched, there has been a lot of talk about the viability of the platform, the fact that it doesn’t support Flash, and that it will likely take a huge chunk of business away from the mobile gaming companies. While all true, like any mobile device, businesses should be taking a long hard look at what it can do for them.

With built-in WiFi, 3g and Bluetooth, the iPad is well equipped to handle tasks that the average technogeek (like myself) wouldn’t usually ask of it. The Medical Industry could be the first industry to have big gains, especially since they have been proponents of tablets and laptops for a long time already. There are already a solid variety of apps available to Doctors and Nurses for the iPhone, and the larger format of the iPad would only lend itself to a more comprehensive selection. The easy targets here are patient information retrieval and recording, although you could have prescription databases that include pictures of the pills, along with all of the other information on screen at the same time. Lengthy patient surveys could be streamlined into the database rather than having to be recorded from paper forms, x-rays, ultrasounds and test results could be viewed real-time allowing doctors to more clearly explain test results.

Surveys and questionnaires are good places to go nuts too. With apps like those from exZact Data Collection, an iPhone (and soon an iPad) is turned into mobile data collection device, with custom form building tools. There is also always a simple online form too, and by using HTML 5, you can get the device to recognize field types to bring up specific keyboards for number, name, or email fields to speed data entry. This would be great for large events like the X Games. Sponsors could show up to events sporting iPads to collect data for email lists and contest entries, which could ultimately allow remote selection of contest winners, and they could be notified on the spot.

That’s just the start of it. Sure you could do this with a laptop, netbook, and other tablets like the HP Slate, it’s just not the same, and here’s why. The iPad isn’t a computer, unlike the Slate which will run Windows 7. It isn’t susceptible to the same problems that a computer is. It boots faster than my netbook by at least twice, and I’ve never had mine freeze, crash, or anything else that I have experienced with all of my other computers. This is also a negative though. The iPad OS is a closed application system and you either have to develop using Apple’s SDK, or run a web form of some kind. It’s not perfect, but it’s a solid device with a boat-load of potential.

These are just a couple of ideas and industries that could use the device, there are a lot more, and it will be very interesting as this device, and the tablet market matures, to see how businesses take advantage of a new tool.

Apple could learn a thing or two from Microsoft

Blogging from the iPad – w00t!

So I got my hands on iPad today, it’s not mine really, but I get to play with it for a couple of days while I get it setup for a work project. My first reaction is that it’s pretty freakin’ cool, just like a proper Apple fanboy. I’m amazed at how nice the majority of the apps that I have look on it even when they are zoomed in to twice normal size. Both of my apps, FIB-U-LATOR and Karate Chapp scale remarkably well, and hold together visually at two times their designed size.

I also downloaded iBooks and started poking around to see how many of the books I have recently bought are in the store…. Yeah, that would be none. I know it just came out, would be a big use for me if it turns out to be something I can really get into reading on. I would rather have ebooks than have a huge library of books I may not read more than once.

Writing this post is a challenge too since the WordPress interface is really not working. The visual editor doesn’t work at all, I can’t scroll any of the in page elements like my categories or the editor. But then again, I’m sure there’s an app for that.

It seems that simple web browsing is faster on the iPad too that it is on my iPhone or iPod. It could be that it just seems that way because it’s a new toy and I’m still geeking out over it, or the newer device actually performs faster since it has newer chip. Probably a little of both.

Anyway, it’s really fun to play with, and I can totally see getting one when version two comes out, especially instead of a Kindle, which is a single use item.