There’s been a lot of coverage lately focused on social advertising. While many brands have seen varied results, and generally have varied objectives, one thing is for certain: social advertising is here to stay and it is rapidly advancing.

Today we are going to cover trends in social advertising, the benefits for small businesses to advertise on Google and Facebook, some potential points to be cautious on and where the majority of businesses will gain the most bang for their buck. Think real-time answers to people on mobile devices, wherever they are.

To recap:

• Trends
• Benefits of Google
• Benefits of Facebook
• Pitfalls

TRENDS

While advertisers are still trying to figure out how and what to execute, sites like facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest are responding.

That said, the first benefit is that all of the social platforms are investing in advertising technology, making their platforms greater at self-serve, exchange based and direct buys. This is good news for the advertiser as your ability to reach your ideal audience and learn from campaigns are greatly growing in value.

This response has spawned new initiates where many large advertisers have at least ‘tested’ social media advertising and are either expanding on their initiatives, re-testing what platforms offer today or are coming up with creative ways to engage audiences on social media. As we can see, about 10% of dollars spent in strong holiday & commerce month of December. While you may not see Google as one of the social media advertising contenders on the red pie chart on the left, YouTube actually represents a Google company. Beyond that, in the parent chart on the right hand side, Google Search and Display represent the larger part of their respective networks. Combined, Google plays a great role in the digital user experience.

GOOGLE

With Google’s control over search, display and expanding social offerings, it continues to spend its focus on making the mobile experience finely tuned. Tremendous efforts are going into capturing what you are looking for while on your smartphone. Google has at least three advantages that serve the advertiser well here:

1. Advertising tenure – advertising is in Google’s DNA. Not outbound, but rather the ecosystems that let advertising happen on the internet. That makes for a well-tested, effective slew of options to advertise.
2. Size – Google’s networks span a single app or website. They are found everywhere across the internet. This gives advertiser a vast network to find their ideal audience(s) for every objective.
3. Ubiquitous integration with [mobile] hardware – Google perhaps, understands the business it is in and the direction it is going greater than most. By controlling the mobile experience with its Android platform, it can ensure continued user interest across digital mediums. It’s certainly a strong and multichannel approach to Facebook’s monopoly of the ‘digital identity’.

While tenure makes for a greater advertiser and user experience, the size of Google’s presence tends to be a huge benefit for advertisers. Want people to know about your products? Use Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Want customers to know what time you are open and where you are located? Use Google Search, ads will show up on desktop, tablet or mobile. Want to generate brand awareness? Or bring a customer back to your site? Use Google Display & remarketing. The opportunities of reaching the right customers within the right context are endless, and Google is making sure it stays in position to do so.

FACEBOOK

With 57% of budgets, Facebook captures the majority of social advertising. This will be something to keep a close eye on. As other social players come to the table, how will advertisers choose to spend their money? My advice is to give thought to how customers currently or may engage with your brand online. Facebook provides an environment where you can leverage sponsored stories, page post ads and standard Facebook ads to audiences. You can learn more about the different types of Facebook ads over here.

Figure 3Nielsen, 2012; http://www.tednguyenusa.com/social-media-experiences-explosive-growth-on-mobile-devices/

One of the most important recent opportunities to advertise on Facebook has been tied to this expanded set of ad types. The team at Facebook advertising has recognized it has many ways to connect the advertiser with the customer in a social setting and it is facilitating them. Want to incentivize customers to more frequently visit your store or restaurant? Use check-in offers. Want to show users’ friends if they installed your app, liked your post or liked your page? Use sponsored stories to drive this message virally to people within these same groups.

PITFALLS

There are numerous potential pitfalls to approaching social media advertising, or online advertising in general for that matter. For starters, if you are unfamiliar or new to the territory, explore resources. If you have a budget, you may certainly have dollars to spend on professional assistance. At whatever level it may be, finding the right company to assist you may greatly influence whether your campaigns are successful or not. And this can mean the difference of wasting budgets and seeing very little ROI to understanding what your target marketing budget can truly yield. The two biggest costs are time and money. Both can be attributed to financial value, whether opportunity costs or direct dollars being spent on social media advertising.

Some key factors to address as you get started, are:

• Identifying campaign objectives
• Setting a budget & timeframe
• Stakeholders & duties
• Identify targeting: audiences, interests and locations
• Building out messaging & offers for these objectives
• Measurement, testing & optimization
• What success looks like

Now of course this list is by no means all-encompassing, yet it is however an important group of items to address as many approaching for the first time will do a combination of these, but not necessarily all together. In doing so, you can expect to be well-planned, executed and insightful about your advertising program. The added benefit here is that beyond any quantitative results achieved, qualitative insights will be gained from your campaigns about your customers, prospects and advertising channels.

CLOSING REMARKS

In Paid Search, Google owns around 70% of the market, where Bing Ads controls most of the rest. While many advertisers only choose to focus on Google as it has the lion’s share, this could be a costly mistake as you are tuning out nearly 1/3 of your potential audience. Additionally, the playing fields are different. As many do not think to advertise on Bing Ads, competition can be sparse at times, leaving a blue ocean of opportunity with lower CPCs, higher ad positions and more ideal advertising circumstances. I encourage you to not necessarily choose Google or Facebook, but rather, choose how much you want to break down your budget for each. Again, with Google owning the majority of online advertising experiences for users, use that as a guide for a starting point.

Have you tested ads on Google, Facebook, Bing or somewhere else? We’d love to hear your experience.

About the Author: Erik Ford is Head of Product for the leading creative optimization platform, BoostCTR in San Francisco. For nearly 10 years he has been trusted as a partner for leading, fixing & advising businesses from seed stage to mergers & acquisitions. Erik is best known for building products, reporting & analytics platforms, monetizing big data & driving strategic partnerships that truly impact revenue potential for clients & organizations.

At a glance, Erik has driven data science, big data & advanced analytics for publishers and networks such as Walmart, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Facebook. In working with these partners, he has driven advertiser campaign strategy, analytics and optimization for every Fortune 500 client in Search, Social and Display.

Connect with Erik and learn more:

LinkedIn | www.linkedin.com/in/erikford/

Facebook | www.facebook.com/eriktford

Twitter | www.twitter.com/erikford

Blog | www.eriktford.com

It looks like twitter may be learning early lessons about it’s new ads program.

A recently promoted post by SalesForce has lead to a slew of replies containing foul language and sarcastic remarks. What do all these tweeters have in common? A relatively new existence to twitter with little followers and few tweets. Not to mention clearly forthright bio’s and recent tweets that exemplify they ‘speak their mind.’

The full tweet and responses:  https://twitter.com/salesforce/status/302537779563356160

Between seeing this, testing ads on my own with twitter, and a slew of feedback from other brands, it’s clear twitter needs to spend more time honing in on their audiences and monetization with their network. Top tier advertisers will not stand to spend $2+ a click or follow for this type of brand bashing on a network. 

Also, I find it funny that against every other digital media entity in the biz, twitter calculates clicks as impressions x CTR = clicks: 

Instead of (Clicks/Impressions) x 100 = CTR.

Feel free to give me a call twitter, we can get this sorted out-

After reading this article by DKR on Svbtle, an astounding point was made. Well a few actually. 

Don’t be intimidated by your data

Data has a multitude of uses. However, far often than not, it is relegated to ‘data experts’ in order to mine, structure and evaluate for reporting purposes. To me that’s a great oversight in the true potential of it’s usage. When the business side of a business has requests, they are asking within the limited scope and understanding of what the data can provide. 

Know Where You are Going with Your Data

Or rather, what you are looking to accomplish. Approaching both top down and bottom up views of the data you are working with will significantly bolster yield of information. Depending on your position, involvement and tasks, you may already start with one of these approaches very naturally. If you are an analyst, don’t be afraid to jump out of your comfort zone, take a step or two back and think of big picture. On the flip side, I also see executives, business leaders and managers be averse to becoming more familiar with the tools or data itself. Put this fear aside and collaborate. The opportunities are endless.

Use Data to Design Product and Deliver Extraordinary Value

Data has the potential to change the way that you look at your product and even your business. For well established businesses, great leadership is quickly recognizing the important use cases of how data can transform a business. At a high level, these are numbers that guide the ship. Financial direction, operational efficiencies throughout each department and a slew of other ‘business metrics’ have become ever-present in executive meetings. Yet I challenge to bring on more. The proliferation of tracking, incredible economics of storing data and the widespread availability of tools will only be further advantageous to those that utilize them. Data can yield insights on how a product is used. How a business is efficiently or non-efficiently servicing customers and a slew of many other historically experience based functions. In digging deeper, taking risks and learning more, we have the keys to unlock incredible gems that will transform not only product but business overall.

The Bottom Line

Use data to your advantage in designing and pioneering intuitive product experiences that yield extraordinary value-

“Once you decide on your occupation, you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That’s the secret of success… and is the key to being regarded honorably.”

Jiro Ono in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.”

dwellman:

fastcompany:

The 5 rules of happy employees.

1. Happy employees don’t stay in one role for too long. Movement and the perception of improvement create satisfaction. Status quo, on the other hand, creates burnout.
2. There is a strong correlation between happiness and meaning; having a meaningful impact on the world around you is actually a better predictor of happiness than many other things you think will make you happy.
3. A workplace is far likelier to be a happy place when policies are in place to ensure that people regularly get acknowledgement and praise for a job well done.
4. Recognize that employees are people first, workers second, and create policies that focus on their well-being as individuals.
5. Emphasize work/life integration, not necessarily “balance.”

Is your company a happy company? If so, why? 

Fast Company and Workplace Happiness:

• How To Make Your Employees Happier
• The Corporate Pursuit of Happiness
• The Formula for Creating Happiness at Work
• The Sharp Drop-Off In Worker Happiness—And What Your Company Can Do About It

[Image by the Minimalists.com][Post by M.Cecelia Bittner]

You know, Cancer is a surly thing. In time, we will likely have solutions that augment or solve it altogether. For civilization, this will be a trans-formative era. Scientific progress will have influenced solutions to facilitate large impact cures for the greater good. A Bill and Melinda Gates foundation core focus for certain.

In practice. Illness and serious life challenges are public and present every day now. With Social Media being not only a conduit to broadcast weddings, food, babies, pets and more, but also challenging life events. Cancer is clearly one of them. Sometimes there are stories of hope, stories of challenge and stories sadness.

What I look to do with this thought is share an incredible gesture to help loved ones signify their care and love for a victim of cancer. For those that require chemo/radiation, it is quite the unpleasant experience. And while those that are not in the same position will ever be able to understand just what one is going through, a conscious attempt to empathize.

For example/as a suggestion, those that wear bandannas these days generally are undergoing treatments. Especially women. So a coordination of friends to wear bandannas throughout the day and document (photograph, video, etc.) it would potentially be quite impactful. Just think, sharing prayers, telling stories about the person and committing to a day of sacrifice would be a a tremendous act of courage and love for the one that is undergoing challenging times.

So next time you ask yourself how can you help someone that has cancer, especially if they have their basic needs covered, coordinate friends and family to live a day for their life and then share it with them. It may transform them for the better. It may make all the difference.

It’s funny. I’m exactly what I want to be. Exactly what I can be.

When interviewing with Boost in early 2012, our CTO honed in on my experience and capabilities with reporting and Analytics; our CEO on marketing and the ad tech biz. Frankly, I’m proud to look back and see how effective I was in channeling and communicating my relevant strengths to those stakeholders.

Since inception, I have been able to excel in both at a stable, effective pace. While as always, one needs elasticity with each subject depending on internal priorities, it has been an excellent opportunity to mature in the ad tech space at a leadership level to an absolutely incredible team. Now as Head of Product, I have the alignment, resources and agenda to continue to make big things happen!

Culture can be greatly undervalued. It strikes the very core of passion and motivation.

What motivates your team? Money, goals, milestones? Or changing the world, changing your industry, adding incredible value to your customers lives?

Whatever it is, I’m sure the perception of your entity and its products follow suit.

Be sure to step back every once and a while and make sure you’re design the experience you look to deliver-

erikford:

For a number of instances now I’ve said that the next decade (2010-2020) will no longer be about the internet, computing and communication devices, but rather how technology will start to ubiquitously meld with our day to day lives through hardware (and other currently non-electronic devices). 

futuramb:

Ford, GM Open Their Dashboards to Outside Developers | Autopia | Wired.com

LAS VEGAS — Automakers, hoping to get ahead of the technology curve for once, are opening their dashboards and APIs to outside developers in a bid to ramp up the number of apps you can use behind the wheel.

Ford and General Motors rolled into CES saying they want to make it easier than ever for developers to create apps that will make their infotainment systems more entertaining, more engaging and more useful.

The moves are desperately needed, because developers have been slow to code for cars.

I still don’t understand why any one would like to write apps for the car when we everybody have the iPhone, iPad or Android based devices in our pocket. If Apple and Google et al are working on good eye glass interface you don’t even have to fiddle with the device in your lap…