Marketing Archives - Page 7 of 37

What Facebook knows about you and me and what I can do about it

Cambridge Analytica harvested personal information from a huge swath of the electorate to develop techniques that were later used in the Trump campaign.

Source: How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions – The New York Times

I often have consultations with clients involving data sources. Marketing has always been closely tied to the acquisition and analysis of data related to potential target audiences or desired demographics. A large part of what I do every day is staring at spreadsheets and trying to derive direction or wisdom out of data that Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Snap or Google has gathered from their (often overlapping) groups of products users for our clients’ campaigns.

I loathe using the term “campaign” to refer to anything marketing related… it’s not a battle and we’re not at war. Even worse is the dehumanization that often occurs in marketing conversations we all have about the data generated by real people on the web. Both are related in that our gathering and use of this data combined with our resulting conclusions and “targeting” (again with the militaristic violent language) makes actual people into abstract data points.

It’s little talked about in our industry, but data ethics are something we really need to take more seriously in all aspects of our marketing efforts, whether you’re working with a Fortune 500 company or a small country church.

I know that I personally feel a twitch of regret mixed with reservation when I click on a radio buttons to specify that I’d like to target women above the age of 40 who have relationship issues but live in this affluent ZIP code and enjoy looking at pictures of wine and spirits on Instagram. It’s terrifying. But, it’s relatively cheap and incredibly effective. Our church and nonprofit clients on shoestring budgets can’t get enough of the reach and response from this kind of data marketing (“like shooting fish in a barrel” is a common saying for a reason).

I did a good deal of work on ethics in Divinity School. I’m taking a course in the coming weeks on Data Science Ethics. Now, I need to do a better job of thinking through these types of marketing efforts and explaining the ethical implications of using this data given that most people have NO IDEA how much is known about them (yes, because of Facebook and social media but also because of the relative ease of connecting someone’s phone number or address or email with their browsing history, activity on location tracking services, voter records etc). I need to do a better job of helping clients think through the humanization and dehumanization involved with marketing and advertising and their own goals (especially for churches and nonprofits). I need to do a better job of providing real alternatives to the types of data usage that resulted in situations like our current political climate. I need to provide shoestring budget options for marketing that emphasizes humanity and relatedness rather than victory.

Otherwise, I’m just hanging out in Omelas.

Is there space for “ethical marketing” in a crowded environment of agencies driving the cost of “targeting” and “campaigning” and “development” to the lowest common denominator in terms of price and friction? I’m not sure. But I’m just crazy enough to start giving it a try.

Nonprofits, the smartphone, Facebook, and Google

Interesting thoughts here from the NY Times CEO on how they are shifting focus in relationship to Facebook and Google due to the smartphone revolution … much of this applies to how nonprofits and churches can do better marketing as well:

It’s about how you think about the product and what you’re trying to do and what is the value you’re giving to users. The areas of weakness in the publishing industry have been not having an audience strategy or sufficient brain space to think about how you serve your audience. It’s very easy to get tracked into assumptions about who your audience is. In legacy media, journalistic parameters were set by the geographical limitations. [The smartphone] changes everything. You need to reinvent journalism from the ground up with this device in mind, and then try and figure out what you’re going to do on a laptop and the physical newspaper.

via ‘Facebook is not transparent:’ NY Times CEO Mark Thompson says the platform’s role needs to be clearer – Digiday

The power of looking ahead

Never get so caught up in the past and present that you fail to see what’s ahead. Vision is a powerfully lucrative skill if you’re crazy enough to think you can change the world.

From 1992…

How rich is this lode? At one end of the spectrum is John Sculley, the chief executive of Apple Computer Inc., who says these personal communicators could be “the mother of all markets.”

At the other end is Andrew Grove, the chairman of the Intel Corporation, the huge chip maker based in Santa Clara, Calif. He says the idea of a wireless personal communicator in every pocket is “a pipe dream driven by greed.”

via The Executive Computer – ‘Mother of All Markets’ or a ‘Pipe Dream Driven by Greed’? – NYTimes.com

The Age of OutrAGE

The media is built for clicks now, and we were trying to see firsthand how it all works. I feel like I now understand on a much deeper level why Trump got elected. Negativity is what travels. So we learned more about how the internet functions, and how it’s an insane feedback loop. It’s like, we just played a show in London that was one of the best shows we’ve ever played there. It was honestly so fucking exciting. And at the show we sold a T-shirt where we put an ironic Everything Now logo on top of Kylie Jenner’s face. It was visually punk as hell. We knew doing that would get a lot of press pickup but every single news outlet in the world covered it. Somehow there’s a story in that, but there’s not really a story in Band Is Really Amazing at Music and Plays a Live Show and People Cry Because It’s So Beautiful. So it was really interesting to us to see what got picked up about Arcade Fire. That idea plays into what we were doing as well: We were providing the ammunition for people who wanted to write negative things about the band: Here you go! Here’s something to be outraged about!

via Arcade Fire’s Win Butler on ‘Everything Now’ Album Rollout

Your logo and Instagram content

Good advice to consider here, particularly for nonprofits and churches on slimmer marketing budgets looking to make the most impact possible on social media…

What about content that doesn’t show a clear logo? What about companies with unbranded or non-logoed products? We’ve seen that a huge percentage of the content shared and posted on Pinterest is logo-free. It’s important to go beyond the logo to get the whole story of an image—how brand content is shared over time, who has shared that content and who has influence in getting it shared

via Brands Must Look Beyond the Logo to See the Big Picture – Adweek

FoxSports.com lost 88% of its pageviews after switching to all video

And true to expectation, that has shown up in the first substantially reported numbers about the traffic to FoxSports.com. SI’s Richard Deitsch reports that traffic dropped an astounding 88% since the “pivot to video.” Their traffic has gone from over 143 million in a monthly period to just under 17 million.

via FoxSports.com has reportedly lost 88% of its audience after pivoting to video

Wow.

Video is great for engagement (and ad dollars). However, it’s part of an overall approach that still includes text. People are more sensitive than ever to page load speeds and the actual “size” of a web page in terms of mobile data.

Use video, but don’t put all your eggs in that basket.

Using Video to Promote a Nonprofit

You should be using short form and live video (Periscope, Facebook Live, Snapchat) to promote your nonprofit’s efforts. It’s simple, easy, free, and can always be embedded back into your social media pages or website.

Plus, it drives engagement much better than text or pictures in 2017.

Interesting stats here…

“A whopping 80% of users recall a video ad they viewed in the past 30 days”

via 17 Stats and Facts Every Marketer Should Know About Video Marketing

ShelfJoy: Clever use of messaging and affiliate marketing

We are the place for book lovers to discover amazing books from a wide variety of topics. All lovingly hand-curated by people who know and love reading.

Source: ShelfJoy

Interesting messaging bot for Facebook Messenger that was just released today. Once you add Shelfjoy to Messenger, you “chat” with it to discover books in various categories (or “shelves” as they call them). If you find something you like, you click “Buy” and you’re handed off to Amazon to complete the purchase with the Shelfjoy affiliate code.

Clever.

We’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while with affiliate marketing and niche recommendations. I had a friend who developed a chat bot for AIM (remember that?) back in 2003 that gave you suggestions about products based on your chats. What we haven’t had is the ability to do so in format like Facebook Messenger that already has all of your social graph data (friends, likes, credit card etc) already tied in.

I expect to see more of these and more intelligent versions of these as Messenger and Google’s upcoming Allo and Siri / iMessage continue to become more “intelligent” and tied into our existing data profiles.

Pretty soon, you’ll be paying your bills and ordering your pizza via voice with your messaging platform of choice (while forgetting how to type on a physical keyboard).

Facebook Drops Branded Content Restrictions

On Friday, Facebook dropped its restriction around how branded content can be distributed on its social network. Anyone who runs a verified Facebook page — a publisher, brand or celebrity, for instance — can now post articles, videos, photos, links or other content to that page that someone else paid for without needing Facebook’s permission or cutting the company in on the proceeds.

Source: Facebook drops branded content restrictions for publishers

Interesting move. Typically on the web, the FTC frowns upon this type of “branded content” without proper alerts for audiences.

Facebook has built in “tagging” to try to offer some disclosure, but I’m not sure that’s going far enough for most FB users:

There’s another catch: any eligible account posting content paid for by a brand to its Facebook page has to tag the brand so that the top of the post carries the line “[Publisher] with [Brand].” That tagging creates a way for marketers to be notified when a publisher posts content that’s paid for by their brand so that they can share it or promote it as an ad.

The ultimate arbiter, of course, is Facebook’s algorithm itself. Shared items that have a promotional “feel” to hear typically get throttled by the algorithm, which limits exposure on users’ newsfeeds, even if they’ve Liked a page.

It’s amazing how rapidly social algorithmic feeds such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat etc are changing the notions of what is permissible and profitable in the marketing world rather than conforming to tried-and-true tactics or even federal guidelines.

Like it or not, branded content is one of the most successful online marketing strategies over the last few years, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing as brands, publishers, and social networks continue to figure out how to innovate around the concept.