Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

My Social Network Moment of Irony

I've recently been working with someone at Facebook who sent me a connection invite - on LinkedIn.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but for me it sums up how the Web is much more about symbiosis and a rising tide rather than cannibalism.

Searching Facebook by the Numbers

Sometimes the most fun I have with columns is when I spend hours just searching for stuff. Here, I searched for user interests on Facebook and had some fun, especially when I decided to drill down to the political leanings of Hannah Montana fans, and then see how Montana-based fans of Hannah Montana compared with Indiana-based fans of Indiana Jones. And as you might expect, while dozens of the searches are represented here, dozens more didn't make the final cut. The column's below and continues in the extended entry; it was originally published at MediaPost.

Searching Facebook by the Numbers

On Facebook, the marketers can now search for the searchers. Facebook’s Aditya Agarwal claimed in July that 600 million searches are performed on the site monthly. Compared to comScore numbers discussed in a previous column, that makes Facebook a more popular search engine than MySpace, Mapquest, AOL, and Ask.com. Facebook claims it’s “the most used people search engine.” That’s great for consumers, but marketers can search for people in a different way.

Marketers can search Facebook’s audience for ad targeting with its Flyers Pro ads, a self-service cost-per-click (CPC) ad format; advertisers can take part for as little as $1 per day. As John Battelle summarizes the potential on his blog, it’s like Google’s “AdSense driven not by search queries, but by personal profile. It could be a major, major new platform, if we, as a culture, take to it. It’s not a given, but it’s a very compelling vision.”

When scoping out a Flyers Pro campaign, you can see how many people on Facebook meet the targeting criteria you enter. You can even search Facebook for the users who post certain interests on their profiles. Using the Flyer metrics, you can discern that fans of Hannah Montana are disproportionately less likely to be liberal compared to the overall Facebook population, while “Colbert Report” fans include far more declared conservatives than “Daily Show” fans. You’ll see that tallegiance to the Red Sox is more than double than those who admit to rooting for the Yankees — but the Red Sox are no match for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Here’s a snapshot of the Facebook audience that you can target through Flyers Pro.

 

Twitter Podcast Volley: Take That, Jeremiah!

Last week was so nuts, I never got around to posting the podcast debate about Twitter that I had with Jeremiah Owyang, who did such a generous writeup on his blog. It's a great way to start your week - read Jeremiah's blog now.

The Twitter debate was run by Paul Dunay, one of the best moderators I've encountered for any such exchange, be it teleconferencing or live (he's also now on the blogroll on the right). It's on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix.

Here's the post that started the debate: http://www.marketersstudio.com/2007/10/to-twitter-or-n.html

Must keep this short. Thanks Jeremiah, Paul, and Ann and the gang at MarketingProfs for making this happen. I learned a ton in the process.

Quintura's Embeddable Search Cloud

Ever wish you could embed your own search tag cloud on your site? Your dreams have now been answered, courtesy of Quintura.

UPDATE: I had this posted on the blog, but as a reader noted, it was painfully slow. You can still try it out via the link, but I killed the embed.

Birthday Greetings by Channel, Updated

Now that the birthday's done, I had to update the pie chart from yesterday on birthday greeting referrals. As if the blog comments here weren't enough, colleague Chris Humber, featured in this week's column on universal search, scrawled out a handwritten note.

Some more notes on this chart:

• Friendster beat MySpace for referrals because Friendster, passe as it is, still sends birthday alerts via email.
• Skype came through at the buzzer, as I found a couple messages there when I left my computer on last night and checked this morning.
• With greeting cards, I'm still optimistic that my grandmothers will come through. Just give them a little leeway, alright? You might remember an introduction to one of them, Grandmom Berkowitz, in the Google vs. Grandmom column from a couple years ago.
• I'm surprised how few marketers take advantage of birthdays since so many have it on file. The best one to reach out to me was Michael C. Fina, which emailed a 15% discount during my birthday month. While we were planning to already, this reaffirmed that Cara and I would buy our wedding bands there. (An aside: their customer service is abysmal, no matter who I've dealt with there at their NYC retail store, but merchandise quality has saved their brand for us.) Other marketers to reach out for my big day: Xing.com, the social network that I never use, and LiftTicketsCheap, a friend's ski lift ticket site that left a birthday card + ad in my MySpace profile comments (Nate, your ad just went viral).
  Update: It turned out Helio and Travelocity's Roaming Gnome also left me birthday greetings with prominent images on my MySpace comments. No need to update the chart for the ads.
  
• Thanks to everyone for their birthday wishes. I'm looking forward to a great year.

Unearthing Your Hidden SEO Gurus

This is the most recent column penned for MediaPost's Search Insider; it continues in the extended entry.

HOW MANY of these actions have you conducted in a professional capacity for your company or a client?

* Posted a video to YouTube with a few tags and a remotely descriptive title.

* Rated your company's video on YouTube (or related video sites from Google, Yahoo, or MSN).

* Submitted a press release to some online newswire (or a traditional newswire that also posts releases online).

* Tagged photos on Flickr (owned by Yahoo).

* Posted an event to Upcoming.org (owned by Yahoo).

* Added a local listing to Google Base.

Okay, maybe you haven't done any of this, but if you serve in a marketing role, you probably will before long, and all of these actions can provide greater exposure for your Web presence in the major engines.

Birthday Greetings by Channel, October 2007

This year more than ever, my birthday (today) has emerged as a great networking opportunity, largely thanks to people reaching out via Facebook, email, and to a noticeable degree this year, Plaxo. Here's a rough stab at charting it out:

A few notes here:

• The phone is entirely from family and a couple close friends.
• Other social media properties like MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Upcoming, Flickr, and Delicious haven't registered.
• The blog hasn't contributed yet, but it may well now, not that I'm fishing.

Watch Celebrity Videos at Clinique, Support Big Brothers Big Sisters

Maybe it's because everyone's getting into holiday giving mode, but I'm getting more emails about philanthropic causes to support, and as long as they resonate with me at least in some way, I'm more than happy to share them here.

Below is an email I received from Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City, a cause I was marginally involved with (no need to overstate things here), and one I'm happy to support. This also happens to be a great use of online video, one I'd expect to see more of. If you have a minute, click to view one of these short films, even if you just have it running in the background (I'm not sure if you need to watch the full movie for the donation to count, but I'm playing it safe).

Clinique Happy and Glamour Magazine are making watching films and downloading music charitable!
 
You can help support Big Brothers Big Sisters by watching 3 new celebrity-filled short films directed by Rita Wilson, Kirsten Dunst and Kate Hudson from the Glamour Reel Moments Series, sponsored by Clinique. All the films are about 10-20 minutes in length and feature happiness as part of their storyline.
 
Each time the films are viewed online free of charge at www.clinique.com/reelmoments Glamour Magazine will make a $1 donation to Big Brothers Big Sisters – up to $10,000! And, each time Rita Wilson's new song, Lessons Learned - an original ballad she sings from her film - is downloaded free of charge on the clinique website, they will donate another $1 to Big Brothers Big Sisters -- up to $10,000!
 
This exciting new online cause marketing campaign will only be live for about a month. Please check out all the movies and the song at www.clinique.com/reelmoments and forward this e-mail to your family and friends so they can enjoy while helping Clinique and Glamour Magazine support Big Brothers Big Sisters too.

 

Listen to the Tweets

Once again, this blog fueled a column, though less directly than in other instances. Below's this week's entry, originally published in MediaPost and continuing in the extended entry.

Listen to the Tweets

 Here's a question to consider when trying to get marketers to try something new: how should the task rank in their priority list? Should it be one of the Top 10 items on their daily to-do list? Should they try it once and then shelve it for awhile? Do they really need to try it at all?

Bias is always a problem here, so there's no perfect answer. It also depends on the audience -- the marketer's title, seniority, and job description. Yet thinking about marketers in a broad sense, here's a priority question that comes to mind:  How much should they care about Twitter -- namely when considering it as a search engine?

Twitter's main use is for communicating; it's a hybrid of instant messaging and blogging (and it can bring out the worst of both worlds, with people publicly broadcasting notes that would have been unnecessary to even IM). Ann Handley of MarketingProfs provides a number of ways marketers are using Twitter to communicate, but marketers are lucky to reach a following of even a thousand people on Twitter; only a few tech brands tend to get that many, and there's no way to determine active readership. I'm skeptical of marketers using Twitter (and related services like Jaiku, recently acquired by Google) for communicating right now; that's a topic for a different column, though if you're interested, you'll find a rousing debate on my blog where a number of Twitter diehards tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about. 

Atlanta Social Media Mixer - Tuesday, November 13

I'm making a long-overdue visit to Atlanta next month, and thanks to a great idea from Toby Bloomberg (who I once heard introduced as the Oprah of bloggers - and that's a compliment to Oprah), it's turned into a good excuse for a blogger/marketer/social media maven mixer.

You can register on Facebook (which won out over Upcoming or, dare I say it, Evite). If you're in the area, it'd be great to meet you there.