For the longest time I didn’t think too much about Facebook Ads. It doesn’t take much to realize that they have amazing reach, but I had heard some discouraging numbers (and continue to hear actually) and didn’t think they were too relevant to B2B – which is often my concern.

Granted, CPC advertising isn’t what I do everyday, but I try to keep my head in the advertising game since it’s central to the products I build – and it helps keep Argyle going.

Recently I had a few minutes to ponder FB ads, and realized that they make perfect sense if you think about them like ads on TV. Here’s a quick run-down on why they are similar:

• The ads have little to do with the medium
• The audience is often passively engaged in the subject content
• The ads see little direct interaction (hence the discouraging numbers)

And here is why those are good things:

• The ads can be relevant to the viewers interests – FB targeting is fantastic
• The audience often doesn’t have a real purpose, so they can be distracted by ads more easily
• Lower interaction – yes, but awareness is valuable. That’s hard to measure, but most likely occuring

So even though I have heard a number of anecdotal stories of low performance campaigns for FB ads, I think the targeting and audience that it has is compelling. As a tool to bring awareness to a very specific audience when their mind isn’t busy working too hard on other things, it excels.

I’m a convert, Facebook is definitely a powerhouse mass media advertising platform, and I want to be there more than ever.

I’ve worked on product pricing more times than I’d like to recall. It’s a tricky business, you have to balance value, cost, perception, competitors, market factors, marketing, and many other considerations. In short, it’s a pain, and it’s not easy.

But pricing is very important to your business. It can not only give you an edge in the market, but it can also help define who you are in the minds of your customers.

But most importantly, Pricing helps to define value in the eyes of your customers

Don’t get me wrong, you can’t dictate value. But pricing specific add-ons, features, or services at a premium can have a very real impact on how people perceive the worth of those items.

Netflix’s most recent move to price streaming separate from DVD-at-home was smart (see their blog post). It was clear that they were leaving a lot of money on the table. It’s also clear that they felt that they were undervaluing their DVD-at-home service.

(Side note, being a long time Netflix customer, I always thought they were undervaluing streaming. Their blog post reveals that their internal view was actually flipped from mine; they saw the DVD as an add-on to a streaming service.)

Pricing changes aren’t something new to Netflix, their world is moving fast and they’ve had to shift things around a few times to keep prices in line. And this recent change will probably be followed by a few more.

Now bring into the mix that fact that Amazon has started to get more seriously into the streaming movie market. Now we can expect some fierce battles shaking out in this arena – there’s a lot of money to be made in movies at home.

So this brings me back to where I started – with pricing establishing value. This move is strategic in that it allows Netflix to clearly look at their streaming service as it’s own viable product with distinct profits and costs.

This will allow them to better measure, manage, and grow their streaming offering as the market heats. In the end, we can only hope that that will provide more value for all of us.

Today I had the pleasure of listening to Peter Shankman (@skydiver) talk social media at the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association monthly luncheon. This was one of the best social media talks I’ve heard, as @DjWaldow pointed out, it was on par with @GaryVee.

I tried to take notes on his big points, I’m dumping them here with a little bit of formatting. My thoughts are in italics. Please feel free to ping me for clarification.

All in all, this was fantastic. If you have a chance to see Peter speak, do it, you’ll love it.

A lot of people are trying to make use of twitter for their business. There is no doubt in my mind that it can work. But there are so many ways to get it wrong. Want a short list? fine.

• Just hooking something up to your rss feed
• Pretending to be a company, instead of yourself
• Following everyone you can
• Only posting once a week
• Posting every hour
• Not replying to people

I could keep going, but you get it. Well, how about a small non-tech business that is getting it right? There are plenty examples of that too. Here’s one I just saw in tweetdeck from @SixPlates. Here we are, 4:00 on thursday, if there is a time of the week that I need a beer, this is it.

It’s personal, it’s short, and it gets to the point. I wasn’t really thinking of grabbing a beer, but now all I can think of is a nice cold beer in my hand. This works.

Building on my last post, Chris Brogan just put up a guest post on mashable about building and managing your brand on the web – whether it’s personal or business. Definitely more comprehensive than mine. Definitely worth the read.

Remember, your brand is your responsibility, and it’s not going to happen on its own.

Let me start by saying that I probably visit too many social sites. I’ve cut back, but it’s still quite a bit. However, one thing that I do is always try to get the same name at each one (covati) and always use the same picture.

I know it’s fun and cute to use a new picture of your child, cat, boat, favorite martian, etc. But when it comes down to it, you are creating a personal brand, and that brand needs to be identifiable.

So I would recommend the same for you, if you have a presence in multiple locations, try to keep it the same. Even though they are different services you want your audience to be able to immediately identify you no matter where you are.

I recently had another article of mine posted in an industry pub. This time it was an article about standards for html email rendering published in Marketing Profs. Ooooh Exciting! Right? Ok, I get it, it’s not really that exciting. But it is important.

Here’s an analogy, because I’m a big fan of those, imagine if every type of car ran on different gas. I’m not talking about different octane, like 87, 89, 93, I’m talking about different types of gas. It would make the cost of gas so much higher because each gas company would have to make so many different types of gas. That would be silly, so much wasted time and effort. If there were just one type of gas then the companies could optimize their process to create one better grade of gas at a cheaper cost.

Well, right now email marketer have to do something similar. They have to try tailor their messages to work in all sorts of different email clients: Yahoo!, Outlook2003, Hotmail, AOL, and two of the worse Outlook2007 and Gmail. If emails rendered the same in more of these clients it would make things a lot more simple.
The impetus for this article was the email standards site, email-standards.org. A great site and a great movement. BTW, I love their project to get GMail to notice them, project grimace, which I contributed to!

The guys over at google are always introducing great new products and apps. But it’s not always the products they introduce, but how they introduce or educate you about them. Check out this video from Google Russia showing what you can do with gmail. It happens to be in russian, but it’s still a great video to watch.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCNSWwAJNZE[/video]

For more info and detail into this video, check out the blog post from google’s blog.

I just got back from a great conference, Email Evolution, out in San Diego. Ever since joining Bronto Software, myself and DJ Waldow have really been getting involved with the email marketing community out on the internet. DJ especially has been ferocious in his efforts to add something to the already amazing resources that are out there.

We’ve really worked to push Bronto to commit to providing a valuable resource for marketers in general, not just our customers – and it is something that Bronto has now achieved through the combined efforts of our team.
Well this week we finally got to meet up with a number of the other bloggers and industry experts that we have been trading links and blog posts with for the last year or so. (Such as Chad White, Tamara Gielen, and Dylan Boyd just to name a few)
It was fantastic.

This is a really enthusiastic community, after having spent just a few days with everyone it is easy to see that we aren’t driven by competition with each other, but rather cooperation and a genuine love of email marketing.

I just got a little more PR for myself and Bronto yesterday. An article I had written this summer finally got some airtime. This time over at DMNews, the article was on the main page yesterday, along with a shot of my mug. This one is a fun review of bounce messages, likening them to ice cream flavors. I think it’s worth a read, if only just to see mention of Moose Tracks and Ben & Jerry’s in an article about the technical aspects of managing rejected email messages. Check out the article – 31 Flavors of Bounce Messages – the article isn’t up anymore, but you can check out the original blog post at Bronto.

I was pretty psyched (and I still am a bit) when this got picked up. I hadn’t been blogging here long when I wrote this article, but I thought I would go out on a limb and write something different, just to see if it would get noticed. I guess it worked.