LESSON FOR MARKETERS

For small and medium-sized businesses, I absolutely LOVE the efficiency that comes with digital / social advertising. It's highly targeted, it's inexpensive and you control the costs. If it isn't already, it should be a part of your marketing efforts.

YOUR TURN

What are your success stories with digital advertising? What are the challenges you are still facing?
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​Advertising builds Brand Awareness. And you always need Brand Awareness. You need it when you're starting out and want to establish yourself, you need it when you're growing and want to steal customers from the competition, and you need it when you're the market leader (as Tim Hortons clearly is) and want to solidify your spot at the top.

LESSON FOR MARKETERS

To stop advertising when you feel like you don't want or need more customers is to make yourself vulnerable to those businesses that are trying to steal the ones you have.

YOUR TURN

What do you think? Is it a waste?

In my previous blog post, I listed the top 10 marketing highlights from 2015. In it, I (among other things) congratulate a brand -- Big Ass Fans -- that very cleverly poked fun at Kim Kardashian and her.... um.... well, let's leave it at that. Hoping that it might be an interesting post for business owners interested in marketing their business, I decided to post it on Facebook and boost the post with some advertising dollars. The image that I assigned to the Facebook post (shown above) was of her bare back (only!). According to Facebook's advertising guidelines, that was too much skin. I chose the image because my Facebook post described the blog post as "A look back at the marketing topics that are important...", and Kim Kardashian is looking back at the camera. See what I did there? Alas, the ad wasn't approved, and I had to change the Facebook post image to something far less clever.

It got me thinking, though, of the difference between Facebook and print media when it comes to marketing and advertising. On one hand you have Facebook who earned $16 billion in advertising revenue in 2015. On the other hand you have traditional print media (including magazines), who are suffering unprecedented declines in advertising revenue. This gives Facebook the flexibility and authority it needs to insist that advertising be done the proper way. This makes print media desperate for whatever ad revenue it can scrape together. Case in point: the Kim Kardashian image I am referring to is from a recent edition of Paper magazine who, as I'm sure you know, resorted to sexism for their cover photo and to full frontal nudity on the pages inside. It was clearly a desperate move to boost circulation, which would presumably attract advertisers.

Four thoughts on the matter:

1. Shame on you, Paper magazine. Desperation does not become you.
2. Shame on you, Kim Kardashian, but that's a given, isn't it?
3. Facebook, love 'em or hate 'em, has created an advertising channel that is the most efficient and effective channel I can think of, with the possible exception of Google Adwords. They rule advertising, for good reason, and we should be happy to have the opportunity to use it to our advantage. Sure, we need to follow their rules, but at least they have boundaries... and morals (well, some at least).
4. It makes me sad when brands resort to desperate measures to grasp at revenue they don't deserve. Evolve. Create something valuable to people, not cheaply sensational.

LESSON FOR MARKETERS

1. If you're not advertising on social media, you should. At least experiment with it.
2. Ignore the trends in your industry at your peril. Paper magazine should have evolved. Black's Photography suffered a similar fate.

YOUR TURN

Am I too much of a Facebook apologist? Am I overly critical of print?    

Michael Sam, the first openly gay athlete to be selected in the NFL draft, wasn't fortunate enough to make the lineup of any NFL team. On Friday he found a home with the CFL's Montreal Alouettes.

The Huffington Post wrote about it and posted a link to their article on Facebook (image on the left), giving us the headline and the key information we needed to decide if we were interested in reading more or not. NFL.com, the click-baiters on the right, gave us nothing. They teased us, forcing (or baiting) us to click to find out which team signed him.  

In the HuffPo example, they may not get as many clicks, but the click-throughs will be engaged readers, interested in all HuffPo has to say about this story. In the NFL.com example, they will get more clicks (probably the same number of engaged readers as with the HuffPo example, and a few more of the curious uninformed) which, presumably, allows them to sell advertising at higher rates. But at what cost?

In my case, I'm annoyed by NFL.com. They've given me so little information that I'm forced to click to get the basic information that I need. So annoyed in fact that I didn't click on that link. Instead, I continued down my Facebook feed and clicked on the HuffPo link to read the whole story. 

LESSON(S) FOR MARKETERS

1. When you intentionally annoy people with blatant click-baiting, your brand image suffers damage. Why wouldn't it? 
   
2. If you're buying online advertising, beware the inflated traffic numbers of blatant click-baiters like NFL.com. In the above example, they may have more clicks than HuffPo, but those additional clicks are NOT engaged readers... and they're NOT likely to see your ad.
   

YOUR TURN

What do you think? Am I the anomaly? Is it worth it to annoy your readers to get more traffic? Comment below.

We've all had crappy friends. 

Among the worst of our crappy friends is the friend that likes you when he needs something from you, but completely discards you when he doesn't.

That's Facebook.

Facebook needs you. They need your advertising dollars so they can please shareholders, so they roll out slick advertising apps that allow your business to target just the customers you want to target, and they make the pricing model very enticing. It really is a great advertising model that allows for real-time testing, tweaking, measurement and results. 

But just as quickly as Facebook befriends you, they toss you aside. As Fast Company points out, your Facebook posts appear in the Feeds of your fans about 2% of the time. 2%. Unless you boost the post (give Facebook money to show it to people), brand posts are barely shown to anyone. Now you see how Facebook really feels about you. They don't really do anything for your business unless you have something to give them. Some friend.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?

1. Be the exception to the rule. Make your posts so interesting and captivating that the 2% of people that see it have no choice but to engage with it and/or share it. Not only will that viral activity allow your post to be seen by more people, but that comparatively high level of engagement helps convince Facebook that the next post should be shown to more than 2% of your fans.
2. Deal with it. That's not a great answer, but it's the realistic one. Spend some money on Facebook advertising. You'll feel like a sell-out, but it's an effective way to reach your audience. If Facebook is the friend that only likes you when you offer him something, he's also, unfortunately, the most popular guy in school. So if you want to be at the coolest parties, you have to pay the price of admission.

YOUR TURN

What do you think? Have you given money to Facebook? With any success? Are you succeeding without advertising? We'd love to hear your thoughts. 

Click-baiting. 

Teasing the social media audience just enough to compel them to click on the post to get the rest of the content promised in the tease. 

I don't like it.

It's too antisocial. 

Take the above Facebook example. "Unreal photobomb occurs at surf competition". The photo in the post is a stock image of an ocean. Wouldn't it make sense for the photo in the post about a photo to BE THE ACTUAL PHOTO?!

Instead, if we want to see the real photo, not the fake photo, we have to click through to the site. That's click-baiting.

The site wants traffic so it can capture the browser's interest in hopes of building brand association and loyalty. It also wants traffic so it can sell advertising on the site. 

I get it.  

Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Here's the antisocial part. They're using a social experience (in this case Facebook) for purely promotional means. They're engaging in tactics designed to boost revenue, within the social channel. That's not what the social channel is for! People already hate Facebook for the advertising they allow on the site (again, see image above), and now we add this advertising-tactic-in-disguise to the experience?

Imagine you're at a party and one of the guests says "Hey, I've got a great joke! But to hear it, you have to come to my place". That's bad social behaviour, and it's no different than click-baiting on social media. 

What can we do about it? As social media participants we can ignore it, we can choose not to click, and we can accept the fact that it's happening. Web sites gotta make money, and they're going to use whatever means possible.

LESSON FOR MARKETERS

But as marketers, we can make change! Post the photo! Give away the content! Make your audience so happy to have immediate access to entertaining, enriching and enjoyable content that they will use THAT as the reason to engage with your site. Who knows, it may even be more effective than click-baiting in the first place!

YOUR TURN

What do you think? Is it a necessary evil for marketers starved for opportunities to engage with an audience? Or is it antisocial behaviour that needs to be combatted?

NOTE: Facebook is combatting this issue to the extent that they can. But it will be hard for them. Here's an article explaining their plan to stop... or at least diminish... click-baiting.