dk or Purpose Inc Appeared In:











































February 2 2010

facebook advertising success for a high ticket item

Written by / Posted in facebook / 9 Comments

Like  most people who run successful campaigns, I aint going to give it all away to you. But I am happy to give you a glimpse.

Some details in this article are faked, so you can’t rip off what I am doing. Overall it teaches the lesson though.

We just hit a big home run for one of our clients. They sell a high end product which costs around $12,000 per sale.

Let me walk you through the aggregate guts of what happened over the weekend.

This is for a national campaign.

You can see what happened with one of the campaigns above.

This is one of the pre-formatted reports available in facebook advertising.

It is a summary of what happened over the past 4 days with this campaign.

The first thing that is so remarkable to me is the total. There were over 6 million impressions.

That is a hell of a lot of looks at it.

There were only 1,176 clicks, which yeilds an average of .019% CTR. That means that only 2 times out of every 10,000 times people saw the add, they clicked on it. To me that is like standing on a street corner and showing your flyer to 10,000 people, and only 2 people pick up the flyer and look at it. That would suck.

In this case we paid over a $1.09 per click, that’s the CPC part. If you were trying to run a dating offer, or get someone to sign up for an online game, or buy a slap chop or some such thing, then this would be way too expensive.

If on the other hand, you are skipping the affiliate companies, and a company is selling directly to a specific group, a highly segmented group who are willing to buy the product directly without any middle men, then $1 a click can work out just fine.

The whole trick of course is to target just the people you want to see your add. You need to make sure they are the type of people who can afford your product, and make sure they are the type of people who will buy your products.

Selling High End

Figuring this out is not particularly easy, and it is not particularly cheap to figure out. Someone who knows what they are doing, can still easily spend $10,000 or more on tests before they figure out how to “crack the code” on how to do it. Figuring out how to sell high end items with facebook, is not for the meek, or those with shallow pockets. Once you figure out the basics, it is much easier with each new product.

I spent over an hour this weekend talking to Shoemoney about this subject. I am now in the process of creating a series of products to show the world what I have learned about this subject over the past year. If you are interested in facebook advertising, stay tuned, and I will show you the ropes.

The campaign above? I predict all of those clicks will end up creating probably only one or two sales, but each of those sales will be around $12k. Nice. But still, over 6 million impressions to get that one sale, something to think about.

Thank god we’re not cutting down trees to do this.

January 29 2010

Facebook Presentation now on JohnChow.com

Written by / Posted in facebook / 8 Comments

For me personally the talk I did at Affiliate Summit on Facebook Advertising, was a big deal for me.

From stage I estimated there were about 250 people, plus those standing in the back.

I was told that they were actually turning people away at the door because we were overfilled.

It was an amazing experience.

The anticipation before the event for both speakers and attendees was high because of the big controversy, so I was excited to see what happened.

The acoustics were a bit odd and the speakers had a bit of difficulty hearing the audience’s questions.  Lyndon Reid said the audience could hear just fine. The lesson learned was to get in there an hour early and do a sound check, or I should have invited the questioners up on stage with us. Will do that from now on.

No guns or knives showed up at the session which was also a big plus!

When I looked at the audience I saw John Chow (must read his disclosure) and Tim Ash, the conversion guru, who are both heroes of mine. Tim has the Conversion Conference. promotion code – CCW503. Tim is THE expert on conversion. I expect some real heavy hitters both speaking and attending.

The honest truth is that a lot of people who speak at other conferences are not necessarily the ones with the most experience, or expertise.

At Affiliate Summit I was in the company of some extremely heavy hitters which were,

1. Alex Schultz who I call an executive at facebook but he keeps saying he is not one.

Alex was/is an affiliate marketer, heads up a huge part of facebooks advertising area, is a brilliant individual, and is extremely influential at facebook, and can teach you how to make a paper helicopter as well as a Burning Smurf (you will die with this one, and no-one will be responsible but you!).

2. Mark Colacioppo of Globalizer. Mark is one of the people I most trust in the affiliate industry. He runs a legitimate company, with some good offers one can make a little money off of, and in my dealings with him has been generous and honest. If you want to play with some of his offers you can try to sign up here to be a Globalizer Affiliate. (No promises you will be accepted.)

3. Shoemoney. Do I even need to mention who he is? OK, so go get on the shoemoney system waiting list already would ya? Eventually we all will be signed up so you might a well do it now! Jeremy initially stepped down from the panel due to, well, you probably already know! I begged him and begged him, and he finally agreed to go back on the panel. This was great for me because having him sit next to me both gave me more credibility, and he also drew any projectiles from the audience.

4. Me dk

5. Markus Frind who started plenty of fish. According to his bio, his dating site gets over 100 million visitors per month. That is over a hundred more visitors than purposeinc gets each month. I had never met Marcus, but heard about him during the controversy and wanted to form an opinion myself. First off here is Marcus’s blog. Sitting next to me on stage, Marcus and I shared a microphone and he appeared extremely polite, and pleasant pleasant. I got to meet a handful of his staff including his right hand, one of the main programmers of his site, and some of the regular workers. Everyone was very nice, and had nice things to say about Marcus. I also heard from a very, very credible source that they thought Marcus was a genius with social media. Well obviously! Look forward to getting to know him better in the future. Marcus also turned out to be an excellent photographer at a moment that was one in a million.

Alex speaking, Mark, Jeremy, dk, and the teacher looking on. Photo Credit - Marcus Frind

Alex speaking, Mark, Jeremy, dk, and the teacher looking on. Photo Credit - Markus Frind

Because the pack I spoke with was so high caliber, I brought with me a presentation to help level the playing field a little.

I honestly had no idea how it would be received.

I managed to get the audience to laugh repeatedly, which I was very proud of. I even got some fairly strong applause after my talk.

I have received a dozen or so requests for the presentation, and John Chow has been gracious enough to post it on his blog. To top off the honor of being on that panel, was the honor of having my presentation posted on Johns blog. I have wanted to meet John literally for years and met him for the first time at Affiliate Summit. Very approachable, fine individual.

Here is the facebook advertising presentation if you would like to see it.

October 10 2009

new facebook ads manager

Written by / Posted in facebook / 4 Comments

Some of the facebook advertisers were selected to beta test the new facebook ads manager. I am sure there will be more changes before it goes live for  everyone, but here is a sneak peak and my initial impressions.

First a rundown on what’s not in there.

The biggest restriction for running facebook ads is still the speed of loading multiple new ads. This was not handled in the new beta. If you are not familiar with facebook ads, there are many, many variables. Even if you decide to test 3 different titles, with three different images, three different ad copy options, to three different age groups, in three different cites, you will have 3 x 3 x 3 x 3 x 3  possible ads which means you will have 243 different combinations. Because the ad platform is all server based, each time you move to the next screen it takes up to a  minute to load, depending on the speed of your internet connection etc. So to run 243 ads will take you at a minimum 500 minutes, or close to 10 hours.

There are software programs that are sold that do this automatically, but the problem is that they are against facebooks terms of service, and they only allow a few variables, and have not allowed for the variables I personally want to test. There are so many demographic different variables to test in facebook advertising, that the options could easily be in the millions when you start adding them up. I am sure this will be handled in later versions of the ads manager, just not yet.

That being said the new ads manager is a huge step in the right direction. In the current ads manager, pre beta, once you have been running ads for a while, you will have pages and pages of campaigns. To navigate to find a certain ad or adgroup would require clicking through multiple pages looking for your ad, which could take a while if your pages are slow to load. Now there is a table of contents that you can slide up and down to find a specific group. You can also sort the adgroups by different variables to more quickly find the one you want. There is also an onthe fly search box to search for ad names that is similar to the search box you use to find facebook friends.

There are also selection boxes next to each campaign in the campaign view, where you can edit entire campaigns, multiple campaigns, or even every campaign, and with a few clicks can change all the daily limits, whether they are active or inactive.

There is also an easy way to change the name of a campaign from this screen which is nice to get them to alphabetize a  certain way, assign them a number to keep track of them, or even just to correct the errors you made when you created them.

The graph at the bottom still is a little counter-intuitive to me, in terms of how to scale it. Mine usually is off the scale and appears blank, and honestly I still have not figured out to use it.

One of the nice features is the ability to click on the top of the column, such as campaign, status, budget etc. and have all the campaigns sorted that way. One notable point of that is the ability to bring all the active campaigns up to the top where you can see them, and push all the deleted and paused campaigns, down out of the way.

Below is an image from one of my accounts.

Because of the massive number of variables there are to choose from when running facebook ads, and the fact that they keep adding on more and more, means that it is going to be a while before you will be able to easily manage all aspects of large numbers of campaigns. If you combine this with the fact that facebook is obsessed with quality, and a great user experience, it would not surprise me if we don’t see the ability to manage even most of the variables in large groups for a year or more from now.

Once you are inside a campaign you can also change the ad name easily without having to reload screens.

Once you are in the screens to create a new ad, the screens seem identical.

While I am stating my wish list, I would like to see a listing of possible keywords. I got the list of the top facebook profile keywords, but this obviously changes over time. I would also like to see a list of neighborhoods available.

This new facebook ads manager is a huge step forward, appears to work flawlessly, and will cut down the time of managing large numbers of campaigns dramatically. Facebook is doing an amazing job of keeping their software really clean, intuitive, and pretty bug free.

As a final note, take a look at the volume of searches for facebook advertising vs. myspace advertising vs. google advertising. While not a complete story, it does give some insight to the amount of interest in the subject.

If you need help with facebook ads, just give me a holler.

June 10 2009

Facebook Usernames

Written by / Posted in facebook / 5 Comments

On Friday June 12th at 9:01 pm pacific time on your facebook page you can choose a vanity url.

I have had facebook.com/purposeinc myself for a while for my facebook page, but had not announced it till now. If you are a fan of Purpose Inc., go fan me there, http://www.facebook.com/purposeinc

If you are too lazy to actually go there, here is a screen shot.

I just got an e-mail from Barbara Boser asking me if I could help make sure she and Greg got their name. I was like hugh? as I had not heard anything about this yet. I checked and sure enough facebook announced facebook usernames on their blog. Matt Mullenweg has spoiled me with pretty urls on wordpress, so I have always hoped that facebook could get better urls. This is awesome.

The blog says “Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters ….or a period” so we will not be seeing facebook.com/dk

You can only do this for facebook accounts that existed before May 31 of this year.

If you poke around you will see that some companies like Microsoft have already grabbed one, and some like apple/mac have not.

UPDATE – When the time comes, hit this page to do it.

June 2 2009

facebook ad approval questions answered

Written by / Posted in facebook / 13 Comments

One of the perks of being around the facebook, is that I have gotten to know their mystery person in charge of ad approval. This person has to juggle the needs of the advertisers to get their ads on the network while protecting the experience of the users, which is their highest priority. Of course in the background is the fact that if ads are not approved, then income does not come in to facebook. In an emerging platform like facebook, there is still massive growth and understanding taking place in this area on a weekly basis. Considering the fact that facebook ads are still in their early growing years, the job this person does is amazing! Remember for the most part at this time, the ads are being reviewed by a human being.

Just for the record I intentionally never ask for special favors on my ads. I just send them in and watch them get approved or disproved. In fact on one of my accounts I recently got a little e-mail explaining how a few of my ads were bending the envelope a little too far and were not being approved. Oops! They are really great people, and if you do mess up, you simply get an e-mail explaining what part of the T.O.S. you violated.

As users, the more your ads are quality and get approved the easier you make it for them, and believe me they apreciate it!

The ad approval process is not hard science yet on either side, and requires understanding while the process evolves. Facebook is very, very open to user input on what is working and not working, both for advertisers and for users.

Feel free to comment here with any questions or feedback for the ad approval team, or contact me if you are running into any big issues with this.

Bottom line facebook wants a wide variety of quality ads that improve the experience of their users.

Here is a series of questions submitted to me by my readers, and some written myself, answered by the person in charge of the ad approval area at facebook. Their identity kept private. 🙂

1. First can you give my readers the overall philosophy of what Facebook is looking for in ads?
The core of the Facebook brand is our user experience, and this experience is continually reinforced by our product’s distinct look and feel, functionality, and utility. Everything that exists within the site contributes to the overall Facebook user experience, including advertising. Facebook is committed to preserving our user experience by keeping the site clean, uncluttered, and free from intrusive messages. That is why Facebook Ads are a little different from other online advertising units. The look and feel of the ads is more like Facebook content and therefore becomes a part of our users’ experience rather than interrupting it. In addition, data in the ads is based on how a user’s friend interacted and affiliated with your business. Therefore, they behave more like the Facebook content users are used to engaging with on the site.
Facebook Ads allow advertisers to communicate effectively with their desired audience and are therefore more relevant to users.
Facebook Ads enables any marketer to easily and precisely reach the right people at the right time. With over 200 million active users sharing authentic information, advertisers reach their exact audience before they start searching. Advertisers can quickly create ads and target them to very specific audiences. It’s easy for advertisers to track their progress and gain insight into their ads with real time reporting.

2. In general, what don’t you want to see in ads?
Misleading ads are very frustrating for the user. For example, the text and the image of the ad should accurately represent the product being advertised. When this is not the case, not only does the user feel deceived and loses trust in the ad, but in the long run, the ad’s performance is affected too. If a user has a bad experience with an ad, they are much less likely to click on that ad or a similar ad again. This hurts both the user and the advertiser.
Deceptive and hurtful language are also detrimental to users’ experience and advertisers’ performance. For example, asking users ‘Are you fat?’, ‘Are you lonely?’, ‘Have bad acne?’.  Users often see ads like these as personal attacks and certainly don’t respond well to them.
Ad image has a rather significant impact on performance. Inappropriate or irrelevant images should not be used.  Advertisers don’t want to pay for clicks that don’t convert and users don’t like to be confused when clicking through an ad. When thinking about creating a high quality ad, be as transparent and relevant as possible.

3. What effect does the landing page have on approval?
Landing pages are reviewed through the approval process along with the ad creative itself. Even if the ad complies with all of our policies but the landing page doesn’t, we will reject the ad. For example, if an acceptable dating ad is submitted but the destination page has graphic images, we would not approve the ad. For more details on landing page requirements, please view section 2 of our Ad Guidelines (http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php).

4. Can you explain the time it takes for ad approval. If someone is trying to tweak different specifics of the ads, it can take up to 12 hours to get them approved.

Do you guys work on approvals 24 hours per day?
Our online sales operations team reviews ads as soon as possible and in the order that they are received. This can take up to 12 hours but is usually much quicker during normal PST business hours. Turn around times on the weekend are slightly longer than during the week.
If your advertisers use the ‘Create a Similar Ad’ option to make minor adjustments to their ad text (title or body), the ad is generally reviewed much more quickly.
5. What is allowed in capitalization?
Ads may capitalize entire words for emphasis, or capitalize the first letters of words in the ad text, but may not capitalize entire sentences or the entire text.
INCORRECT:
WINTER SPECIAL 50% OFF
WINTER is the BEST TIME to REJUVENATE SKIN and PERMANENTLY REDUCE HAIR!
ACCEPTABLE:
Winter Special 50% OFF
Winter is the BEST TIME to rejuvenate skin and PERMANENTLY REDUCE hair!

6. I noticed that if I submit 20 ads in a campaign it looks like it takes longer to approve, than if I just submit one new ad.
Ads are reviewed as soon as possible and in the order they are received.  There’s no relationship between larger ad groups getting reviewed slower or faster.

7. What can you tell us about your team?
The Online Sales Operations team works with all advertisers who advertise through the Facebook Ads interface (http://www.facebook.com/ads/create). The goal of this team is to help support, grow and retain these advertisers. The team is focused on compliance, supporting advertisers’ questions or problems via email, soliciting product and system feedback, and improving campaign performance through optimizations.

8. What direction are you guys heading in terms of ad approval in terms of automating it, and/or making more consistent?
We are working hard to improve our advertising products and system to help our advertisers reach users in an effective and meaningful way. We are continuingly revising our ad review process to be more scalable and consistent.
Since we launched the Facebook Ads platform in the Fall of 2007, we have used advertiser and user feedback to inform product improvements and policy changes. As a company, we are always striving to provide a great experience for our users and partners. As advertisers, you have significant impact on this experience. Our advertising policies help safeguard the experience on Facebook for our users while providing you with opportunities to engage with users and promote your business. As we work on automating more of the ad review process, we will look to our users to provide their feedback on the relevance and quality of ads to the advertisers themselves. Ad quality and user feedback have always been important considerations for Facebook Ads, and help determine what ads are actually seen by users.  In general, ads that receive negative user feedback are less likely to be shown to users, and may not even run at all.

9. I read that if your site doesn’t get a good CTR the first 2 hours, then Facebook does not show it very much after that. Is that true? How does your algorithm work to decide which ad to show?
Ads will be shown based on the advertiser’s daily budget, bid and targeting criteria they’ve selected. If an ad doesn’t perform well when it is first running on our site, it is likely that our system will determine that this ad is less likely to perform well in the future, and will display the ad less often as a result.
For any given ad unit, we select the best ad to run based on its bid and historical performance. Therefore, if you are not receiving as many clicks or impressions as you would like, we suggest increasing your maximum CPC or CPM bid. We also suggest making sure your ad is as relevant as possible by targeting your ad to the most appropriate audience. Your ad is more likely to perform better and continue running successfully if it is being displayed to the users who are likely to be the most interested in your ad and click on your ad. You may want to experiment with multiple versions of your ad text and targeting to see which one generates the best results.

10. Where do you guys get the list of available keywords? Where do you get the list of available interests when creating an ad?”
The site is indexed for keywords in profiles and we compile those words as options for our advertisers to target.  When you choose to target an ad to certain keywords, it will be shown to users who have included any of those keywords in the “Personal Info” section of their profile. This includes sections like Interests, Activities, Favorite Music, Favorite Movies, etc. Ads may also be targeted to a user’s groups or the Pages he or she is a member or fan of that are related to the keywords you select.

End of Interview.

If you have any questions not covered, feel free to leave them in the comments, and if I can get them asnwered I will.

March 4 2009

the inside scoop from facebook advertising – the day I spent inside

Written by / Posted in facebook / 59 Comments


tim kenall, don faul, and dk at coffee shop near facebook

175 million active users, billions of friendships. That’s billions with a B.
The stats are straight up off the hook.  The full complexity of those relationships is unfathomable.

What started as a closed Ivy League system now has 175 million active users.  The fastest-growing demographic is those over 30, and the average user has 120 friends. There are 850 million photos uploaded every month. Then there are the applications that anyone can build to run on their system, fan pages, event pages, and on and on.

When you hit Google, you are looking for something specific.  When you hit facebook, you are just looking. Eyes are wide open, interested, and ready for something different. You don’t go to facebook looking to buy, you come looking to see what your friends are up to and to let them know about you.

You have no agenda, other than the fact you are up for something you haven’t seen before.

Hmmm… 175 million people, and you are catching them at that moment each week when they are looking to find out what’s new.

This creates some interesting opportunities for using facebook advertising.

I have always put the good of the world, and of my fellow man, as a high priority. This has cost me a lot of money over my lifetime, but it is the right thing to do.

I am happy to say that after meeting with executives and staff at facebook the guys and gals I talked to want the same thing. They put the user experience as way more important than cashing in a buck at your expense. I had a good talk with Andy Liu (buddytv.com, failblog.org) about this the Friday night of the Elite Retreat, driving to the airport to exchange my rental car. The fast buck has been the Internet marketers’ friend, but the long-term play is going to be with integrity and quality.

The Tuesday of the Elite Retreat, I had the pleasure of meeting with, learning from and advising some of the executives at facebook. The meetings took place at the Prolific Oven coffee shop in Palo Alto, (no ties, thank god!)_in the facebook headquarters scattered around Palo Alto, and walking in the rain on the mean streets of Palo Alto while sipping tea. It was way cool. I felt pretty important.

I got to meet with Tim Kendall, Jeff Iden, Don Faul, and Alex Schultz, plus some others that I was asked to keep off the blog.

I can’t disclose everything discussed, but we went over facebook’s quest to reach more unique advertisers and to offer more and more quality products to its users.

It was confirmed that the thumbs-up and thumbs-down by the ads actually result in real measurable changes for the advertisers. It was also confirmed that the interests you can target when advertising are taken not just from the profile the user sets up initially, but more and more from things posted on their wall.

They also confirmed that each and every ad is still reviewed by a human being, but long –term, their philosophy is to let the users guide the facebook computer as to which ads are appropriate or not. This eventually will hopefully result in Nancy Temple getting served ads from her church and related products, while Billy Boister gets hit with ads from the new club opening and the car show.

The really exciting thing is where this is headed. Google knows pretty much one thing about you as a user: what you are searching for right now.

Facebook knows a lot more than that. Facebook is very protective about the info of a particular user, even though their data is more or less public if you are able to view that users profile. On the other hand, facebook has the potential in the future to look at what a user is up to, as well as what their friends are up to and how these relate.

Imagine your friends and yourself are planning a trip to the river, to wakeboard. It’s all over yours and their walls on facebook. It also so happens that the Purple Doves are playing a free concert at the river, sponsored by Judy’s book, as part of their Green Energy program.

Facebook knows all these details. You and your friends have typed it onto each other’s walls for the world to see. Would it be inappropriate to show you an ad of the new hybrid SUV that can haul a trailer full of Jet Skis? That the SUV company promises that 10 percent of their profits will go to buy electric- generating windmills!

It can get even deeper than this, if you imagine things your friends are doing, that you don’t even know about. Taking into account social trends of what can be predicted you will be into in a week or two?

As a user, I would much prefer the ads I am shown each day to actually resonate with what I might like, such as a new Whole Foods location or a better surf report website, rather than trying to sell me Viagra or a new copier which I have no interest in.

If they showed me the new watch that Brian Norgard or Shoe just bought, it will have a have a huge effect  on me next time I see Shoe and see his watch. Facebook can know what watch Shoe buys, even before I do.

Facebook currently still has a small number advertisers compared to a network like google, with many of those advertisers selling the same products, to hundreds of millions of users. In other words, there is only a fraction of products being sold that could be.  It boggles the mind to think of what could be sold on facebook and how it could be done.

Will facebook’s ad revenues end up being bigger than Google’s? Everyone I have asked has said No, but I wouldn’t bet on that so early in the race.

I am deep into the facebook wave now and just starting my bottom turn. I predict that those who catch the wave now will have a good long ride, with the wave building in height for quite a while to come.

In the coming weeks, I will be doing testing of different strategies that will help both advertisers and facebook to increase bottom-line profit while benefiting consumers, and then reporting back to facebook with recommendations.

I’ll keep you posted.

February 14 2009

Getting Ready for Facebook, We all should be.

Written by / Posted in facebook / 2 Comments

On Tuesday I am going to Facebook.

There is quite a bit loaded into that statement.

I am going for actually a long list of reasons.

1. To make sure everything is smooth as silk for the Elite Reatreat “field trip” there on Thursday, with Magic Bus transportation provided by the ever cool Jim at We Build Pages.

2. To have some great food, and great meetings, with some truly first class people.

3. To become super educated on Facebook, so I can help them interface more smoothly with the internet marketing world.

4. To answer some questions they have for me on who the influencial internet business/marketing bloggers are, and whatever else they want to know from me.

5. To learn stuff to help with my own projects.

6. To stand in front of a tidal wave just before it hits.

I had a long talk with Michael Jenkins about this one morning last week. Michael is the Founder and CEO of Market Leverage Affiliate Network. Facebook reaches hundreds of millions of people each week. They also have more info about who each user is on a continental basis than any other site. They actually care more about the user experience than they do about making money. There was a lot more to this conversation that I am not at liberty to release, but boy oh boy is there a lot of opportunity here.

In no way would I imply that google has maxed out on their ability provide value to advertisers, but at the moment Facebook provides ridiculous value to advertisers if you can figure out how to utilize it properly. Jeremy, (Shoemoney) turned me onto this and we have been working on some early experiments on how to utilize facebook advertising for maximum value.

Recently I have been looking at what other medium has ever been able to be able to target demographically their users on such a wide scale. Answer? Nothing.

Google is cool that if you use adwords you can have a great understanding of their intent at that exact moment, but with Facebook you can find out if they like to dance, are 24 years old, live in Phoenix, and are in a relationship. Man if I had a romantic restaurant in Phoenix I would be spending everything I have on marketing to that group today for Valentines at my place.

The closest thing I have ever been to that had this type of detail is buying mailing lists and mailing to people, or e-mail lists. It is a huge difference because with those lists you are making assumptions about what the person is into, but with Facebook the person themselves has either said they are into that, or at least talked about it on their page.

The real future of facebook hasn’t even been unleashed yet. It will be when they fully develop their system for not only directing ads based on what the person is into, but also what their friends are into, and tying it in to whether their friends are allready users of a particular product or service or not.

Can you imagine if you were selling Zoomi Electric Bicycles and you could target a Facebook user who had 9 of his 45 friends allready riding Zoomi Electric Bicycles. Just imagine the ad saying something like,

John, C’mon allready!

All your friends are riding Zoomi Electrics to school,

why aren’t you!

And then it shows photos of his friends who allready ride them.

So maybe this is pushing it a bit too far, and impinging a bit on their personal privacy, but it really demonstrates the power that is available through their data.

Like I said in the beginning, one of the main reasons I am really excited to get to work closely with Facebook is that they actually put the users experience far ahead of their interest in making money. Long term this is going to put them I believe in a position that will be more powerful than even the mighty Google.

Shoemoney pointed my head to look in the right direction, and after my own studies and speaking with Michael, I can hear the rumbling. There are a few hundreds of millions of eyeballs, maybe billions? starting to look in this direction at our ads and we know more about each one of them than we ever have before.

I am putting myself right in front of that tidal wave right now, and looking forward to it breaking on me.

Stay posted next week, and you will hear more about what I learned at Facebook.

In case you haven’t heard of them, here is their site 😉