New Facebook and Double Serving

New Facebook looks like it'll have an ad wobble to over come. The note of caution is that we're just in the beta or very early release so it's not surprising that Facebook still has some wrinkles to iron. Look at this:


The new Facebook doubles the graphic ad slots. We go from one ad on the left to two ads on the right. You can see that Facebook is double serving me the same dating ad. I'd be pretty annnoyed if I was the advertiser - especially if I end up paying for two impressions. If I'm only paying for one impression then Facebook just cut their ad revenue by %50. Oops!

Facebook always targets dating ads at me. Clearly it thinks digital marketing men in their 30s should be hot chicks. I agree.

Facebook sent out the following email to advertisers to explain the new ad system.

Hi,

Thanks for advertising with Facebook. You may have already heard
that Facebook is about to get a new look aimed at making user
profiles simpler and more relevant. You can read more overall about
the new design here http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/press/releases.php?p=47448,
but let's also take a deeper look into what the new design means for you.

While the content on the site will remain the same, the new design
will shift the placement of ads on the site. Advertisers won't need
to make any changes to the ads they already have created in order
for them to appear on the new site design. The look of the ads will
remain the same, but they will be located in a different part of the page.

The most basic change that you'll notice is that ads will now appear
on the right side of Facebook pages instead of on the left. The new
placement integrates the ads into the new site design in a meaningful
way. As many as two ads may show at one time on any given page.

In addition to these changes, you will also see a new ad on the home
page. This new ad is located just to the right of the News Feed, and
will initially run a limited set of advertisers. As this space continues
to evolve and improve, we'll provide more details.

If you have questions about your advertising or how it might be affected
by the new design, please visit the Help Center at http://www.facebook.com/adshelp
or contact our team using the form located here: http://www.facebook.com/adscontact

As always, we welcome any feedback you might have to help us make
our advertising products as effective and useful as possible.

Enjoy the new design!

Sincerely,
The Facebook Ads Team

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Facebook needs to improve how it works with agencies

However are social networks like Facebook going to successfully monetize? You've heard that question to death by now. It's an old subject still without a clear answer.

A significant step in the right direction would be to make it much easier for digital marketing agencies to work with social networks.

At times I can find Facebook very frustrating. Take their payment system for example. Facebook will not issue monthly invoices. They won't bill you. Not even the most simple of all finical paperwork. I had my shower replaced a few months ago and the plumber, a sole trader, was able to invoice me! Why can't Facebook do it?

Instead Facebook will only accept credit card payments. Great! You try sorting that out if you're dealing with a hundred Facebook campaigns and nearly as many individual advertisers. Imagine some of those advertisers are franchises without a central budget. It quickly becomes a maze. As someone in our finance department pointed out; "This basically minimises their work and dumps all the admin onto us."

If I'm allowed a bit of paranoia and selfishness then I'll point out the buffer effect too. The money is spent at Facebook. We pay Facebook and the money goes from out account. There could then be a gap before the client pays us... we're paying out before we get paid ourselves (not something affiliate networks do, for example). At the very least that costs us the interest the money could have been earning in the bank.

This is not how big agencies like to work. If Facebook wants to keep the interest of big advertising agencies then it needs to get with the program. Google versus Facebook? In terms of dealing with agencies Google is miles and miles ahead.

GRUMP!

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Upcoming.org's RSS; my fault or theirs?

I'm really not sure whether this was my mistake or a yellow card for Upcoming.org. The Upcoming.org RSS feed is one of the data streams which gets pulled into the bigmouth friendfeed and the newly set up (still in development) bigmouth tumblr account.

Imagine my distaste then when I saw a generic "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" appear on our tumblr (where it'll make it way to twitter too).


As you can see it happened to the inspirational Brian Solis too.

As it turns out there are more than one RSS feed for your upcoming events. The RSS button on the left of your profile page is the 'combined events' stream. The RSS button on the right of the profile page is the 'events' stream.

The generic "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" only appeared in the 'combined events' RSS feed and not the 'events' feed. Needless to say; I've switched over to 'events' from 'combined events'.

I'm not sure "Get Going with Upcoming this Summer" belongs in either though - why would anyone subscribing to an individual or company's Upcoming RSS want to get such a generic message? Imagine you've subscribed to a number of Upcoming RSS feeds? You'd get the same generic message dozens of times.

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Fishticuffs

MSN is doing a good job of using display marketing to promote a social media campaign. To be honest it's pretty rare to see this; you tend to need an agency with an excellence in search before you'll find someone okay at social media and you tend to need to find a traditional media buyer before you can find anyone in display advertising. Yeah; there are some notable exceptions!

Animated skyscrapers like the one you see to the left are appearing all over Facebook - and at pretty generous frequency caps too.

A click takes you through to www.fishticuffs.co.uk. Yeah. That's a .co.uk address so if any of you aren't in the UK and are seeing the Fishticuff banners then let me know - as that would be poor targeting.

The main way to get to the game - and it is a game - is via the Live Messenger actions -> games menu. It's a two player game. You take turns slapping each other with fish.

A clever bit is that you can access better weapons/more fish by winning often. As a result there's a built in incentive to encourage your friends to play.



Thank you to Wenders for letting me hit you with fish in order to demonstrate the game.



At the end of the game users are given the option of syncing in to either Facebook or Bebo. The process is fairly straight forward.

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Facebook facts you might not know

I've been lucky enough to enjoy a presentation of the new Facebook Ads by Owen Van Natta who is Facebook's COO. (btw; isn't Van Natta the best surname ever!)

I'm not going to blog my thoughts about the new Social Ads! Ha! Sorry. That analysis goes straight to work, I'm afraid! Well... maybe a little. Beacon looks interesting and I suspect we start to see some other social sites (even forums) start adding Beacon enhanced events (such as starting a thread) and eBay will love it! Pulse becomes a hugely important social media analytics tool if Facebook lives up to today's promises.

Okay! Some stats!

Facebook has 80 applications that have over 1,000,000 users.

Since Facebook Ads launched last night over 100,000 'ad pages' have been created. I know they're free but that's incredible! (Have you noticed any 'fan' mentions in your news feed or mini feed yet? I've not).

London is Facebook's biggest city audience (so bigger than New York, LA, Tokyo, etc) and the UK is the third largest geographic is the system. If I can read my scribbles correctly then I wrote down there are 7,000,000 UK users.

Facebook recruits 250,000 new users per day. That means it doubles in size ever 6 months.

50% of Facebook users return to check their profiles every day. With (currently) 50,000,000 users that means there are 25,000,000 people checking out Facebook each day.

Facebook serves 40,000,000 impressions every day.

I was sitting beside *censored* from MySpace (who work's Display department knows well) and the only comment I could get from him was 'interesting'. Darn. Far from the blogging scoop/scandal that I was hoping for!

[This is one of my Engage 07 posts.]

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