Microsoft Scam Ad is pretty savvy

Microsoft doesn’t have to try to be to-cool-for-school in their ads just to outdo Apple. Their latest commercial to tout how safe Internet Explorer 8 is and how well it protects you online is actually pretty good. It shows real potential customers being duped into opening bank accounts by giving all their information a way with no questions asked.

Boom Roasted or practice what you preach

It’s funny, just today I met with an antique/art collection and sales group. I advised them to become the pros online–part of which came with blogging. I told them to talk about what you do, discuss what they know and even record their pieces with some of the history behind it. And yet I can barely keep up with my own blog.

Looks like I need to practice what I preach. What is good for others is as good, if not more important for me. Boom roasted.

Yahoo Bot Puts Server Down

Thanks b3091029.crawl.yahoo.net. You ruined a potentially wonderful Sunday. After hours of digging around we found out what was demolishing our server–which mean client sites that we host were down too. It seemed that the Yahoo crawler bot was not closing the server connections, which ate up all additional resources on the server.

So as much as I want Yahoo to crawl our sites–not at the cost of completely taking those sites down. What good is having your site indexed if no one can get on it?

5 Ways to Make Facebook Ads Work For You

Social media articles often talk about how to build your audience organically, and that is the best way to build your audience for the most part. But it shouldn’t be your only strategy. If you’re a new company or launching a new product? You can do a great job of building fans with Facebook ads.

We were brought onto help a senatorial race and after a month of struggling to gain fans on Facebook we doubled their fans in a week by running ads. We picked up 1500 fans for a total cost of around $1000. Facebook ads are a great addition to your marketing strategy. And, unlike Google AdWords, Facebook Ads are not nearly as complex but don’t let the simplicity fool you. Facebook Ads on average for our campaigns have delivered a higher click-through rate than Google AdWords.

Here are 5 tips that will help you make Facebook Ads work for you and your campaigns.

5. It’s about testing. Always run multiple ads targeting the same Likes & Interests. Keep your Likes & Interests the same while testing different ad copy, headline or image.

The one thing that needs to remain the same as your control for a general test is your Likes & Interests keywords. You can test many controls, but the simplest is Likes & Interests. Facebook targets audiences off two variables: users and Likes & Interests. If you change these in two different ads then you don’t have an apples-to-apples test.

4. Likes & Interests matter. Likes & Interests are essentially keywords you are targeting for your campaign based on what shows up for a user. You don’t want to use random Likes & Interests keywords. To make Likes & Interests work for you it’s important to target based on what is associated with that individual in some way—associations they belong to, things they like, where they work, what they are fans of or what they’ve written on their walls.

It’s is important not to just add a hundred Likes & Interests keywords because it’s cool to see the numbers of possible audience continue to rise. It would seem that big numbers of audience is a good idea, but it’s actually counterintuitive. You want to choose highly targeted Likes & Interests keywords that are associated tightly with your ad copy. Don’t choose a keyword just because of its audience reach. You want to make sure that it matches everything you know about the ad copy. Just because someone rides a motorcycle doesn’t mean they are interested in a Harley. One guy might buy sports bikes, another might buy BMW motorcycles, and another might be into Harley’s. You can’t blast all of them with a message about Harley gear.

3. Demographics can sink you—if ignored. Age, gender, location are all extremely important. You wouldn’t target tire chains for cars to someone living in Florida. Yes, it is true that they might go somewhere to drive in the snow, but they wouldn’t be your primary audience.

Another example would be if you were selling something specific to women, you wouldn’t want to have men receiving the ads. If, for example, you were selling bikinis men wouldn’t be your primary audience nor would women of a certain age. Know your primary audience’s gender and age. Location for something national wouldn’t matter as much, however if you were selling bikinis and believe Florida would be the best for your campaign then have one ad set up just for Florida. How could you test that? Create duplicate ads for all 50 states and then eliminate each state that under performs.

It sounds like a lot of work, but you can easily duplicate an ad and just change the state. This would be better than just trying to target the entire country. But keep in mind that it is important to make sure all your keywords and ad copy are the same when testing just how much a certain state clicks through an ad. If you want to test different keywords, ages or ad copy then let your main ads be your control and then create variations. But you should make those 50 state ads the same and create variations off those.

2. Know your audience, or at least attempt to understand them. If you want to be successful then you need to understand what your audience might like or at least have a sense of the world your potential customers live in. If you are trying to sell footballs then don’t target broad keywords like outdoors or sports. It sounds like they might coexist, and they may, but it’s too broad.

They best return would be to target keywords that are extremely obvious like football, NFL, college football, specific college football teams, ESPN Sunday Morning, specific players, etc .The narrower your keyword is to the specific potential customer the better your click-through rates are going to be.

1. It’s all about click-through rates. Want to save money while driving your acquisition costs down? Then get great click-through rates. We’ve already discussed ways of doing this, but you can’t settle on simply doing well. You want to constantly try new things and break off new ad variations that tie your keyword tightly with your ad.

One thing we have learned from running many campaigns is that as good as your Likes & Interests keywords might be, your ad copy and image has to capture the users attention. It’s really obvious saying that but it’s possibly the most important and most difficult thing to make work on Facebook. Part of this has to do with understanding the potential customer and then appealing to their tastes—because often you have no idea if something will interest someone.

We’ve had ads get a million page views over a few days but receive only a few clicks. It seemed like everything was scoped out well with the keywords, audience and ad copy, but it didn’t catch on. It was amazing that simply changing the world “Funny” to “Hilarious” increased our page views tenfold. But those are the sorts of things you have to be ready to test.

We like to see a Facebook click-through rate to be .07% or higher. If it is lower, we try a few variations and then pause the campaign. We have often achieved click-through rates of close to 1.0% on Facebook campaigns. But campaigns like that are often targeted to an audience of 10,000 individuals or less. Our best campaigns are often in the few thousands. That doesn’t mean an entire campaign only goes after a few thousand people, the campaign may go after 400,000, but we segment keywords to an audience so as to run 40 different campaigns all highly targeted. It’s less money spent to acquire these individuals because we aren’t blasting the masses.

Yes, Facebook ads work–if used wisely

I’ve been working on a senatorial campaign for the last few weeks and we have utilized Facebook ads very precisely. We’ve tested many messages and keywords. Geography is key in this strategy and we have utilized so many great features that Facebook offers. For the first week we spent $400 to add fans to the campaign’s official page. When I arrived we had 700 fans and after one week we doubled that number with the $400.

Then we tried a mixed approach of spending $200 on fans and $400 on sending people to the website to watch a video. We added another 200 fans in that week and went from getting dozens of page views a day to increasing 100 page views a day to average around 900 a day. Sure, those aren’t huge numbers but for what the amount spent it’s certainly a fantastic return.

My next blog post will discuss some strategies for Facebook ads and getting ROI.

Walgreens the rip-off artists

Just the other day I almost brought a prescription to Walgreens. The drug was a generic that was priced at $207. Only problem is that before leaving my doctor’s office he called a local pharmacy and was told it was $20.

So, instead of feeling like I’d die by waiting an extra few hours I went home and did some research online. It didn’t take long to find out that Costco was selling the same generic for $20. But it didn’t seem to add up.

Now, I had to go back to Walgreens. I asked the pharmacist again if the drug was cheaper. He said no, and that this was a very expensive generic. Yes, generic. Not the non-generic. I asked this question multiple ways and got the same answer. I took my prescription back, went to Costco and saved $190.

I’m sad to report that I tried the same thing with another drug that was a different price, but got the same result. The generic of this drug was $100 at Costco, but three times that at Walgreens. The big scam is on.

Apple wins from simplicity in a world of electronic overkill

Right now I’m trying to buy a digital camera. Seems simple enough. Except that I’m an amateur and that I want HD video as well. After a few hours of research I stumbled onto an amazing YouTube video [see below] and website that does awesome camera reviews [cameralabs.com).

In the end I’m picking a Canon Powershot SX1 IS. But it shouldn’t have taken me hours. This proves one significant point about electronics: electronic companies have gone insane. Canon has 25 point-and-shoot cameras that range from $100 – $600. Each with some incremental increase in quality. There aren’t 25 different Apple iPads or iPods or iPhones. And when you are buying an iPad its very cut and dry. The quality of the product is the same, but the storage and whether its on a phone connection or not. It’s not about nickle and diming you with features you have no idea if you will use but can’t resist upgrading to the next version and then the next and so on. All this means R&D goes into trying to figure out these incremental improvements rather than dropping down that 25 product line to 3. Canon could literally have 3 digital cameras: one for the Elph, D-Series and high end. Why do they need to confuse you with one camera that you need to pay $200 more to go from 720p to 1020i for true HD. Why not just make the great camera and let other companies dozens of okay products?

Apple is great because they focus. Not on picking our pockets for coins but picking our pockets. Apple makes products we love to own. I resent Canon for making purchasing their product so confusing. On the flip side I can’t express my love enough for Apple.

The Borders Shortlist to insignificance

Every few weeks Borders has an email that it sends with decent deals. Usually 20-25% off any book. That is great. But they don’t really understand me at all. Every book I purchase is either a technology or business book. And yet, unlike Netflix, Borders doesn’t know me at all. Today they put these as five items I’ll love:
1. “Apologize, Apologize!” – Here is a description: “Collie Flanagan’s life is part Grey Gardens and part The Royal Tenenbaums in this beautifully written if unwieldy dramedy debut.” Well, this couldn’t sound less like something I’d be interested in. Sorry. Strike one.
2. Sean Hannity’s “Conservative Victory” – He is insane. Strike two.
3. Giada at Home – A cookbook. Hmmm. I can’t cook at all. Strike three.
4. “Solar” – Strike four.
5. Sherlock Holmes – yes, it was a good movie. They could have thrown a dart at a crowd and found a fan of the movie.

Borders has all kinds of buying information about me. They collect it every time I go into their store and make a purchase. How? I’m a member of whatever membership they have. Every time I’m there they ask for my email in order to give a discount. How hard is it to craft an email and special deal to me directly? Apparently its really hard for Borders. Which is odd, because its super easy for Amazon. Anyone wonder anymore why Amazon gets 95% of my business and has eroded the business of both Borders and Barnes & Noble?

Newspapers could save the world, instead they just report about it

Newspapers are failing because they are reactive, not proactive. Newspapers take time to craft a story after the fact. But don’t seem to try very hard to get out ahead of anything. So should we be surprised that they don’t dominate news anymore?

Maybe I haven’t noticed, but when do newspapers write about how they would do something to fix problems in the world, rather than just having an opinion on how someone else screwed something up? Sure, there are some great opinion writers out there except the newspaper puts an asterisk to note that the opinion is the sole ownership of the opinion writer.

There needs to be a change. All these smart people have opinions–they just aren’t always allowed to use them at work. So, how would a bunch of very smart intellectuals who work at a newspaper get rid of smog? Or end a war? Or stop drunk driving? Or make education better? I’d like to see a newspaper brave enough to write a weekly feature on how they’d fix problems and not just asking questions or waiting for someone else to offer their opinion. Imaging if these features were called “How We’d Save the World.” And that newspaper would offer researched advice and opinions about fixing problems without waiting for government to solve them.

Keys to success:
1. An opinion is vital. You can’t play both sides of the fence and be objective when saving the world.
2. Write with emotion.
3. Write with the belief that you can make change happen.
4. Create a committee that comes together every few weeks to work on these ideas–perhaps this includes readers, government officials, business people, etc. If this happens can I join?
4. Once an on opinion is made then push to help turn these ideas into reality. Fight for the citizens.

Is it wrong for newspapers’ to push agendas if they believe they are for the betterment of the lives of citizens? \Newspapers would argue that they shouldn’t have a corporate opinion. I think that’s sad. And I think those days are numbered.

Newspapers need to strive for greatness–otherwise they will be nothing but a footnote on Wikipedia, right under Encyclopedia Britannica

Jiffy Lube knows the nickle and dime

The most annoying things for a person to have to do is buy a car and meet with their accountant. well I think you could add going to Jiffy Lube as next in line.

Jiffy Lube love to try and nickle and dime you. They have multiple screens to show you all the things they say you are neglecting on your car. Yes, I know. It’s the manufacturer’s recommendations, but let me worry about being a neglectful owner and not bug me with it every time I’m there. I know why they do it. But wouldn’t it be great to just order your oil change and schedule a time online? It’s real annoying to go through the list of what my car company recommends and then add rock chips, air filter, wipers and coolant to the mix. Most of the things they sell I can buy far cheaper. Hell, I could buy enough coolant to last me a year for what they charge me for a top off.

I’m at the point where I’m done with the Jiffy Lube’s nickle and diming. A
new shop just opened up. Looks like it’s time to give them a try.