What privacy? You’re all for sale

That’s the message we take from this weeks various privacy issues, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent comments to Facebook’s ‘new, simpler privacy settings’ where they recommend you open your Facebook status updates to the world.

The Google situation is expertly summed up in this long, all-encompassing and very brave post by Aaron Wall highlighting Google’s hypocrisy when it comes to privacy (and others intellectual property for that matter). This is immensely brave because he’s an SEO expert, he has to ‘work’ with Google all the time. As Google’s ranking parameters get broader, Aaron exposes himself to censure by the big G.

Dan York examines the Facebook privacy changes over on his Disruptive Conversations blog.

Read both of these for background, they’re the two best blog posts I’ve read all week (and I read a lot, so you don’t have to).

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Optimising your web pages for being shared on facebook

Sharing links on Facebook is a growth activity. Is your website optimised for it?

Have you noticed when you share a link on Facebook, you can choose a thumbnail image. Facebook get the list of images by scanning the URL you want to share for any images that are placed on the page. Sometimes that works well, other times it doesn’t pick the image you want.

How would you like to be able to choose what image is selected as the thumbnail for your page when it’s shared?

Facebook’s page of advice on how to best format your page for sharing on their site

http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php – recommends putting in the head are of the html document something like the following:

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How much is a fan?

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook advertising, with relatively small amounts of money.

One of the surprises is just how inexpensive and precise you can be with your advertising on Facebook. You can really dig deep into demographics that aren’t possible with other forms of advertising.

I set up two campaigns, both as cost-per-click rather than cpm (cost per thousand). Both campaigns were for local businesses in Prague which are primarily targeted at the English-speaking expatriate population of Prague. Geographic targeting isn’t available at city level for the Czech Republic but that’s not particularly important, I was able to use the ‘language’ filter to target people using Facebook in English, which brings the potential audience down to just the people were interested in targeting.

Interesting lessons from using that criterion: choosing English US and English UK is essential. The default language for Facebook is American English, British English having been added later, so many people would never have switched.

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How to let people really opt out of your Facebook Ads

This post by Chris Brogan where he complains about the prevalence of ads for things he has no interest in, plus what I recently noticed in the Facebook ad targeting interface come together to suggest an interesting method of filtering.

Let’s face it, some ads are annoying to some users but there’s not much of a way to prevent your ad from showing up on someone’s page ahead of time, over and over. Sure Facebook put an X there for the user to say ‘I don’t like this ad’ but it seems they don’t pay it much attention – the “Over time, this information helps us deliver more relevant ads to our users.” doesn’t commit them to taking any action.

The keywords option when setting up an ad is rather random and provides only for positive associations or occurrences of words in user profiles.

Create antifans

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A good reason to outsource your Facebook ads?

Experimenting with setting up an advert on Facebook today I noticed an interesting option, the practical application of which became apparent to me immediately.

You can target people who already have a connection to a page, group, event or application you administer. (The boxes auto-complete and only let you enter the names of entities that you’re an administrator of.

Have a think about that for a moment…

Mutually beneficial targeting

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Case study – the sports bar – part three – summer update

Just a quick update on the website situation

Web traffic is holding steady (even though it’s off-season for their main sports).

Now number 2 result on Google.com (above the local 10-pack) for a search for “Sports Bar Prague”. Beating out sportsbar.cz

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

Not performing as well on Google.cz (which Firefox defaults to when you’re in the Czech Republic) because there is no Czech version of the site. Though the Czech language version of the Facebook Fan Page that we set up does make a showing lower down the first page, compensating somewhat.

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A Freemium model for Facebook

Facebook are still burning money way faster than they can earn it (OK – I’m excited about some of the advertising changes, but I don’t think that’ll square the circle). It’s been suggested before on occasion but maybe it’s time they put more thought into going freemium, even for regular users.

What would the key differences be between free and premium accounts? There’s not that much they could offer other than the following:

• Images
• Ad free (optionally)

Picture this

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Facebook Ads just got interesting for Expat Businesses

Living in a foreign country for a number of years now I’ve picked up enough of the language to understand advertising copy pretty well. I’m the exception however. A large part of any expatriate community, when faced with Facebook adverts like those in the image to the left  would have little clue what it’s about. The inclusion of language as an option when entering Facebook ads might seem unimportant to the majority of people and companies on Facebook.

For companies that specialise in servicing particular niches it is an immensely powerful, money-saving targeting tool. Coupled with the new location radius targeting this is going to make a massive change to the efficacy of Facebook advertising to a whole lot of small, local businesses. Facebook advertising becomes viable for them all of a sudden. Consider a company that serves the Hispanic market in a city in the US, a shop selling Polish food in Hammersmith, London, or an English-speaking hair stylist in Prague that doesn’t speak Czech. Now it’s possible for him to specifically target women in their 30s and 40s who live in Prague and use Facebook in English.

Adwords now has some serious competition!

Successful Social Network Advertising – An Idea

So, according to Nielsen (pdf) the big problem with advertising on social media is:

“The current level of advertising activity on social networks isn’t consummate with the size–and highly engaged levels–of the audience.”

and

“standard ad models – such as contextual search and standard unit sizes – won’t cut it.”

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