Social Media Marketing eBook

Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.

First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:

This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.

Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:

Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.

He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.

The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:

Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.

From AllFacebook:

Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.

And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:

Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.

Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.

Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?

We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.

BusinessWeek first published an article entitled “”Blogs Will Change Your Business” in May, 2005. Yesterday they updated the article with twenty-odd pop-up edits and notes, which reflect the changing social media sphere. I thought it would be handy to gather some of the more interesting facts together–we might use some in a future version of the book:

• “According to Forrester, 11.2% of online adults in the U.S. publish a blog at least once a month. Of the same group, 24.8% read a blog and 13.7% comment on a blog at least once a month.”
• “The numbers are higher for youths. Of online youths, 20.8% publish a blog, 36.6% read a blog, and 26.4% comment on a blog at least once a month.”
• Technorati Chairman Dave Sifry says that the site monitors about 112 million blogs, but only about 12.3 million of those have been updated in the last two months.
• FeedBlog CEO Kevin Burton thinks two to four million blogs is a more accurate number.
• “Sifry estimates that fully 99% of the blog posts reaching search engines are spam.” Does that mean that 99% of the aforementioned 12.3 million blogs are splogs? Probably not, because splogs would generate posts at a much higher rate than humans. Plus, Technorati tries hard to keep splogs out of those that they monitor.
• Tim Bray “says that 4,000 bloggers at Sun, about 10% of the workforce, have had virtually no problems.” Of course, your technologists are going to be savvier than the average blogger.
• Mike Kaltschnee runs Hacking Netflix, and gets treated like a journalist by both Netflix and Blockbuster. His site gets 300,000 to 400,000 unique visitors per month.
• “Research company eMarketer reckons the market for podcasts in the U.S. was 18.5 million people in 2007, and will reach 28 million in 2008. Advertising revenue for podcasts totaled $165 million last year.”
• Federated Media, an ad network for about 150 popular blogs, earned $22 million in 2007.

Monique linked to a couple of interesting studies about marketing and trends in the book industry. They may float your boat, but I wanted to discuss the first paragraph of the report on the Publishing Trends survey on online marketing:

It’s unanimous. Publicists think online is the way to go for promoting their authors’ books, but before you cancel your next pub party, read on: Publishing Trends polled publicists at publishers, independent publicity firms, and agencies, and sent a companion survey to members of the book-related media to find out what publicists claim they’re doing, and what the media report they’re actually doing. Nearly all (70.9%) publicists said they devote up to 50% of their resources to online marketing. The remaining said they do even more.

There’s so much wrong with his paragraph. Remember that these are people who work with words. You know, for a living. :

• “Unanimous” means “fully” in agreement, not “slightly more than two-thirds”. Because, speaking accurately, that’s what 70.9% is.
• By the same token, 70.9% does not mean “nearly all”. It means 7 out of 10. If I eat “nearly all” of a chocolate cake, it means my sisters only get a sliver, not more than a quarter of the thing.
• Also, if 7 out of 10 publicists devote “up to 50% of their resources”, it’s not a foregone conclusion that “publicists think online is the way to go”. Let’s illustrate these numbers. Say that “up to 50%” averages out to, generously, a 30% online spend by those 7 out of 10 publicists. Now imagine that 100 of the surveyed publicists each had $10,000 to spend. According to these results, they would spend just $210,000 or 21% of the total budget online. Clearly publicists are still pretty centered in the offline world.

I have no stake in these results either way. In fact, given my day job, I’d probably support this kind of online boosterism. But this is a bit silly, don’t you think?

I’m not saying this survey is without merit or interest–just that their approach to describing the results is faulty. I don’t know what Publishing Trends’ motivation is here. Maybe they have a stake in promoting online publicity in the book industry? Or maybe they were just looking for a way to frame the survey results. That’s important if you want to make it palatable to the media.

If so, they picked the wrong frame.

Yesterday a story ran in the New York Times about popular retailer Target actively ignoring bloggers as part of their PR strategy.

The saga began when a blogger from ShapingYouth.org contacted Target about a questionably-designed ad showing a woman splayed across a large Target ‘bull’s eye’ pattern. Target’s PR team responded by saying, “Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets.”

The PR person really should have shown the blogger the same courtesy any Target “guest” would have received if they had contacted the company about an ad they found offensive. Instead Target put up a barricade, got considerable blogger backlash, and is now featured in the New York Times for their new media faux pas.

The lesson is twofold. First, treat bloggers the same way you’d treat customers or journalists. Second, it’s common for news from the blogosphere to bubble up into the mainstream press, good or bad.

Thanks to ATIS547 for the photo.

Lots of marketing types are talking about Clive Thompson’s provocative article in Fast Company, postulating that the Influentials theory of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (and many others) is, well, bollocks. I don’t have anything smart to contribute at the moment, but I wanted to point to two clever marketers.

Seth Godin discriminates between ‘important’ and ‘passionate’:

Unleashing the Ideavirus didn’t spread because ‘important’ people endorsed and promoted it. It spread because passionate people did.

One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm’s point all along.

Meanwhile, publishing industry guru Monique Trottier references a pitch I made to her, and the results:

In internet land, my blog post is a very small blip in the Brother Printer landscape. Although SoMisguided is the first result for the search “brother printer wireless”. But down on Earth, everyone who comes into our office comments on our fancy printer and I mention it’s a Brother Printer and that I like it very much. It does an excellent print job. I also comment that I wish it did more…

So was it a waste of money for Brother Printers to hire Darren and to get a bunch of bloggers test driving their printers? I don’t think so. Again, it comes down to trusted sources and timely feedback on something people were interested in.

It is worth mentioning that Duncan Watts, the smart dude between the anti-influencers theory, isn’t stirring the pot without reason. As Thompson writes:

He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people–and ignoring Influentials altogether.

Ironically, the influencers are talking about his approach.

So this isn’t quite social media marketing, but I just saw (and loved) the movie Juno and thought this was a clever outreach strategy.

In the film, the protagonist Juno talks to her friend on a phone shaped like a hamburger. It’s a charming illustration of her quirky character, and there’s even a joke about it in the script.

The producers of Juno apparently sent a hamburger phone to journalists to entice them to review the film:

It looks like you can get your own on eBay. Photo courtesy of KPBS.

Garth Risk Hallberg recently published his first novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family. Subsequently, he received his first Amazon review, from Grady Harp, a top ten Amazon reviewer. He started exploring the upper echelons of Amazon reviewers, and discovered some interesting stuff:

My own research suggests that GH is no more or less credible than Amazon’s other “celebrity reviewers.” Harriet Klausner, No. 1 since the inception of the ranking system in 2000, has averaged 45 book reviews per week over the last five years—a pace that seems hard to credit, even from a professed speed-reader. Reviewer No. 3, Donald Mitchell, ceaselessly promotes “the 400 Year Project,” which his profile identifies only as “a pro bono, noncommercial project to help the world make improvements at 20 times the normal rate.” John “Gunny” Matlock, ranked No. 6 this spring, took a holiday from Amazon, according to Vick Mickunas of the Dayton Daily News, after allegations that 27 different writers had helped generate his reviews.

Elsewhere in the piece, Garth seems a little surprised that his publicist solicited Harp’s review, and that the Amazon reviewers may be actively gaming their own (and their friends’) rankings. Garth may be feigning his surprise for the sake of the article. Such behaviour shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody who’s participated in any sort of social network with abstract popularity valuations. People will struggle to accrue the most karma points, cred or (as is the case on Amazon) ‘helpful votes’. These currencies also help marketers like us identify and target the influencers in a community.

This reminded me of a point we make in the book about identifying niche communities to engage:

Most important to the marketer, there are many websites that only cover a particular industry or category. It may be more valuable to identify the niche social news website in your industry and focus your efforts there. If you run a winery, then 1,000 oeniphiles from Cork’d or OpenBottles are probably more valuable than 15,000 users from Digg.

Amazon reviewers hardly constitute a niche, but I’m sure there are top reviewers for very specific book categories. So if you’ve got a book on terriers, for example, don’t necessarily pitch the top reviewers. Pitch the top reviewers of pet books instead.

UPDATE: Matthew’s discussion of the furor over recent Digg algorithm changes highlights how hotly contested such topics can be.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve done a lot of marketing projects for DeSmogBlog. We feature a few in the book. One which we didn’t write up was The 100 Year Letter Project. From the introductory blurb:

We asked friends of DeSmogBlog to write a letter to their great, great grandchildren about their vision and hopes for their world in 100 years, in the context of global warming. Will we all be underwater? In outer space?

To kick off the project, we contacted some prominent bloggers, climate scientists and writers. We got about a half-dozen letters from these ‘experts’, and those letters became the backbone of the project. That drew some attention, and we since have received a bunch more letters.

Beginning with experts does a few things for you:

• It gives a nascent project instant credibility.
• It may drive traffic if those experts are active elsewhere online and link to the project.
• It can attract mainstream media attention.

The reason I’m writing about The 100 Year Letter Project now is because it was referenced in two different spots–a blog and an article–by The New York Times. That’s terrific, but frankly not necessarily reflective of the project’s relatively low visibility.

In my experience, the media loves big, easy-to-articulate ideas. My odd pop art web projects like Get A First Life and Dear Rockers have received a surprising amount of media attention for this reason. They tell a good story, and make for good sound bytes. The same is true, I think, of the 100 Year Letter Project. Of course, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the letters.

I’m a bit late on this, but I wanted to post a quick pointer to Chris Winfield’s 10 simple steps to social media success in 2008:

#4 - Meet a Digger a Day. Spend 15 minutes per day (during the week) contacting a new person from Digg via instant message and forging a bond. You can usually locate this information right on their profile page and add them to your IM program. This simple task will do more for your chances of success at Digg than anything else you can ever do.

As we write in the book, social media success is more about time than money. Chris describes how much time each activity will take, though his estimates are a little dubious. If you’re only taking three minutes to answer each question on Yahoo Answers, how valuable are your answers really going to be?

In any case, there are a number of good tips in the article–check it out.

In the book, we only dedicate a couple of pages to micro-blogging, and specifically Twitter. That’s because it’s a new service, only hip among geeks, and, well, we had a lot to cover. Here’s a bit of what we said:

As of November 2007, Twitter and its competitors are just beginning to see mainstream adoption. Frankly, it’s too early to say how commonplace these services will become in marketing efforts. Unless you’re marketing to geeks—or your customers ask for it—we’d recommend caution in expending too many resources on micro-blogging.

We discuss a couple of media-related case studies as well. I may have to change our tune in three to six months, but much like Second Life, I don’t think there’s enough value in spending time on Twitter for the average, non-technology marketer. It’s just a little early in the adoption curve to spend serious time on micro-blogging. If you’ve got the resources, great, but I think you’re going to probably enjoy better return on your invested time elsewhere.

Regardless, Vanessa Fox (who we quote in the book on another topic) has written up a lengthy, insightful post (and associated podcast) covering all the basics. I’ve already bookmarked this as a reference when we expand the micro-blogging section in version 2.0. Here’s part of Vanessa’s answer to a question about how brands can use Twitter:

If nothing else, you can use it to track conversations about you. Natala, for instance, mentioned that she often Twitters about Alaska Airlines, as she flies a lot (I have no idea what that’s like; heh). Alaska could track mentions of them to see what people are saying - if they’re having good or bad experiences and how discussions about those experiences are impacting brand perception.

On a personal note, I have very mixed feelings about Twitter. I’ve found that it’s kind of an Ego Distillery. Blog posts, obviously, tend to be pretty self-centered. But because Twitter is restricted to 140-characters per post, it really seems to bring out the self-importance in everyone.

Twitter asks the question “what are you doing?” I find that the answer is too often “something really important”.

That’s why I only post quotations from songs and poems in my own Twitter account. It ensures that I don’t add to my already burgeoning self-centered online presence, and my Twitter followers probably enjoy a break from the banalities of their friends and colleagues lives.