Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Craigslist Real Estate Scam Alert - Another Version

Recently I posted about a Craiglist real estate scam. Several people have written in with other aliases that the fraudsters used. Most recently, someone sent the entire email chain of correspondence between him and a scam artist, and I'm including it in the extended entry so that search engines will index it and other potential victims will find it during their research. (The name and contact information of the person who sent this have been omitted.)

If you've encountered this scam yourself, please take a moment to include relevant information about the scam in the comments field. You are free to use a pseudonym and hide your identity.

Whatever you do, if you've been approached by the scammers, cease communication with them and of course don't send them a dime. Read the original post for more background.

Social Ad Debate - 70+Comments and Counting

There are over 70 comments on the post "Facebook Social Ads Need an Opt Out." Be sure to read through the dialogue as it's the most commented-on topic in the history of this blog, and of course add your voice to the discussion. Thanks to everyone who's taken part so far.

We Didn't Start the We Didn't Start the Fire Gimmick

NewTeeVee posts all the year-end roundups that are coincidentally scored to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." I can believe no one intentionally copied the other, but they all suffer for it. Of the three that came out, JibJab feels the most derivative, as it's trite on two counts - both with the song choice, and with this year's clip feeling like all their others. I'm done forwarding them around. You read it here: JibJab jumped the shark.

Link: Seriously? Billy Joel Inspires Another Parody � NewTeeVee.

If you need a new song for next year, go with one of these:
* American Pie
* Bohemian Rhapsody
* Hey Ya

Any others you'd like to see as the overdone soundtrack for 08?

Search Like Its 1985

Via Organic's ThreeMinds blog, a German car rental company found a way to make their text ads stand out by turning them into ASCII art - the old-school method of creating pictures based on standard text characters.

This is brilliant for its creativity. Three thoughts:
1) Google won't allow this for the long haul. This should be relatively easy to flag. It's one of those campaigns you can only get away with so often. Though I wouldn't be surprised if a florist tried the classic rose ---'--,--@ or something of the sort soon.
2) The case study on BannerBlog mentions a 47% increase in the click-through rate. Great, but what did it do for conversions?
3) This is an interesting precursor for when Google expectedly experiments with images in the search ads. It's a tricky situation to manage, but expect the engines to test this out soon.

One aside: ThreeMinds is one of my favorite blogs to find interesting examples that I don't see everywhere else. Great work.

Facebook Social Ads Need an Opt-Out

Lately I've been seeing far more ads on Facebook supported by implicit endorsements from friends. I've also had other friends share screenshots of ads and applications that I endorse. While Facebook did an admirable job mitigating the Beacon controversy, the debate about its Social Ads is far from over, and Facebook clearly isn't yet giving enough control to its users.

Consider this ad that appeared in the left-hand ad space on friend Jeremiah Owyang's profile page, which he then sent to me:

Yes, about a month ago I did sign up as a fan of Blockbuster's Facebook page. Yet I never told Blockbuster that it could use me to endorse its ads. I'm not a user of Blockbuster Total Access. In fact, as I write this, I'm home sick, I don't have any good Netflix movies here, and there's nothing but garbage on pay-per-view On-Demand or HBO On-Demand, so I even looked up Blockbuster to see if there's one near my apartment, and the closest is ten blocks away (others that were closer have shut down since I last checked). If anything, I'm a little pissy with Blockbuster right now, so I'm surely not going to provide a testimonial for their ad campaign.

So what's the next logical step? I tried to opt out of the advertising. Of course, I can't. The only setting I can change says, "Allow Blockbuster to send Updates to the Updates tab of my Facebook Inbox" - in other words, I can opt in or out of Blockbuster messaging through Facebook. How come I can't opt into or out of its ad campaign? Here's the screen shot of the settings on Blockbuster:

This doesn't just revolve around pages. Jan Van den Bergh also sent me a screenshot of how I provided this kind of endorsement for an application being advertised, and not even one of the apps I'm particularly fond of. I wonder what else I'm endorsing. Facebook, this isn't over.

UPDATE:

Below is another example of such an ad, and in this one the member is inadvertently promoting Jackass, which may or may not be his cup of tea. Added irony: The ad appeared when I was writing someone from MoveOn.org about this issue. So much irony it's oozing out of every orifice: The member whose identity I've hidden works for Facebook. You can't make this stuff up.

Forrester's POST Method in Review

Forrester Research VP & Principal Analyst Josh Bernoff shared a review copy of "Objectives: The Key to Creating a Social Strategy" that introduces its POST method, discussed on its Groundswell blog. The report, written by Bernoff in conjunction with Charlene Li, Cynthia Pflaum, and Scott Wright, is a great read for marketers developing their social media strategies (which is just about everyone these days) or the agencies helping them along.

The PDF Bernoff shared with me and other bloggers who inquired (and may have beaten me to posting about it) focuses on a case study with L.L. Bean, and in all of seven pages, there's meaty analysis into Bean's customers and objectives. The report's greatest asset is also its Achilles Heel. What I fear from reading this is that marketers will be so overwhelmed by this report that they'll feel the only way they can succeed with social media is by subscribing to Forrester and having them conduct a "social technographics profile" of their customers. Forrester of course would love that to be the case.

While I have no doubt marketers can benefit from Forrester's services, there's nothing wrong with marketers' intuition either. For instance, it's hardly surprising that the 'granola' audience of L.L. Bean is more active with social media than average. Does it really matter if they're "Creators," "Critics," or "Collectors"? And let's say the audience is, overall, a little less into participation than average. Does that mean the marketer shouldn't cater to the segment of its audience that does want to be more involved? There are various paradigms that illustrate that say, for instance, 1% of consumers will create content, another 5-10% will engage with content in some way (rate it or post a comment, for instance), and the rest will freeload and benefit from the contributions of everyone else.

With this review, I almost forgot to say what POST is all about. Here's how Bernoff defines it on the blog:

• People: Assess your customers' social activities
• Objectives: Decide what you want to accomplish
• Strategy: Plan for how relationships with customers will change
• Technology: Decide which social technologies to use

You can also pre-order the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Li and Bernoff, due out in April.

Two Kinds of Holiday E-Cards I Can't Stand

Amidst all this holiday cheer, allow a moment of grinchiness.

With all the holiday e-cards going around, two are starting to get to me.

1) The sales pitch.

This is NOT what an e-card's for. It's a way to acknowledge clients, prospects, partners, and others, not to sell to them. Every other email you send out during the year can have a sales pitch in it. Leave it out of the holiday card though. The one type of business that can get away with the sales pitch is a non-profit; this is precisely when they can rake in last- minute donations that qualify for the current year's tax deductions while capitalizing on the giving spirit people get into. If you're for-profit, your card must be non-pitch.

2) The click-through card.

Below is an example of an actual card sent my way. This was the entire text of the card (they didn't even bother adding in my name. And then as if I had nothing better to do, they  make me click to see some greeting I really don't need in the first place, some generic exhortation of holiday cheer. Blah. Why would I waste my time?

Google Checkout - Holiday Donations

Even if Google Checkout hasn't yet become the PayPal killer it was first billed as, it still deserves a shot from consumers, as I've found it generally speeds up the checkout process.

Now it's being put to even better use for non-profits; Google waives transaction fees for these donations so 100% of the payment goes to the participating charities including March of Dimes, Save the Children, Unicef, and others.

Link: Google Checkout - Holiday Donations.

Can Search Predict Elections?

Yesterday, the Yahoo Search blog asked, "Can Search Usage Predict Election Outcomes?"

The answer is no. I covered this in a Search Insider column in November 2006, "The Unpredictable Election":

If you were able to, in any rough sense, predict the results of the U.S. elections last week for either chamber of our bicameral legislature (and, yes, I've been waiting years to use "bicameral" in a column), then you can feel pretty good about yourself. It means you have a leg up on the search engines.

I should slow down, as that's not entirely accurate. The search engines themselves weren't predicting anything about the elections (though it would be fun to see them try). What some of my colleagues and I tried examining, however, was whether consumer search behavior was a better predictor of election results than polls. It wasn't.

I will agree with Yahoo's take on the value of search usage:

That may be a bit of a stretch, but there's no doubt that online search behavior can be an insightful window in the minds of consumers and voters.

For that reason, among others, have fun with the Yahoo Political Dashboard, where Yahoo Buzz, based on search behavior, is one of the factors considered for candidate success.

Search Insider Summit Recap

The fourth MediaPost Search Insider Summit is now in the books, and while I look forward to feedback from people not as close to the event, it lived up to its promise of great education and conversation with industry influencers in a relaxed setting.

• MediaPost’s Raw blog, with prolific coverage by Tameka Kee and Aaron Goldman: http://blogs.mediapost.com/raw/
•  Lee Odden’s blog: http://www.toprankblog.com/category/seo-sem-conferences/search-insider-summit/
•  MarketingPilgrim coverage from Jordan McCollum: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/author/jordanmccollum
•  Flickr photos from Lee, Cam Balzer, Chris Heuer, myself, and others: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/searchinsidersummit/

If you want to attend or speak at future events, contact me, or better yet, join the Facebook group, as that's a great way to interact with other attendees and share your thoughts with the community.