Ranking well for the proper keywords will generate targeted, high quality leads for any business. Customers who shop or price check online are constantly using Google search, and the businesses that rank well on Google meet potential clients who found them because of their search engine rankings. Dennis’ friend recently started a racquet stringing business out of his home in Boulder, Colorado. Knowing his customers often found racquet stringing services online, he asked Dennis if he would help him climb up the Google search results for keywords like “Tennis”, “Boulder”, and ”Racquet“, knowing his customers would likely use these search terms if they were looking to get a tennis racquet strung in Boulder. Often times competition for search results is fierce, making it a very competitive field. Take the term “Remote Control Car” for example. Searching even this three word term, causes Google to display 15 million results. Obviously, the results listed first will receive the most views from prospective customers; but how do you get your business to the top of the ladder?

Dennis started by explaining that clickable links online, termed “back links”, are essentially connecting web traffic together from one site to the next. For example, any link in this article, which takes you to another page, is a back link. Receiving high quality, “back links,” from reputable sites, is one of the major components Google uses when ordering search results, particularly when a search query returns millions of results. Essentially, the amount of back links and how well they fit the target search (among other things) determines who gets to be at the top of the search. This creates multiple dimensions to the importance of back links to your site. It is important to have back links because, not only do they account for a great source of direct traffic to your website, they piggyback off other sites’ traffic and funnel it through a direct link to yours, and play a vital role in how Google ranks sites in keyword searches.

The impact of a back link is determined by the rank of the page your site is linking with. This clout, or credibility of a website, is kept in a system of scoring called “Google Page Rank.” You can easily download a page rank application, which tells you the page rank of any page you are surfing, or linking to,  displayed in the bottom right hand corner of your browser, after downloading this free tool from quirk.biz.com. The page rank scale goes from 1 to 10, but it is important to note that the page rank scale is also aggregate. An aggregate in this context, means that sites which rank even 1 level higher than others are ten times stronger than sites ranked even one level lower; exponentially rising and falling in the Google pecking order. In order to zoom past all the other search results on Google, it is important to score well on Google for back links, because Google takes into account the quality and amount of back links to your pages, ranking pages with more, higher quality back links, ahead of sites which are not as well-linked to the rest of the internet.

Although ranking a small business page requires more than simply 1 or 2 back links, even from a page rank 5 site or above, a single “PR5″ back link is usually enough to rank well on certain Google keywords. Particularly if your intended Google keyword queries return less than 2 or 3 million results, and the keyword results your seeking are not in heated competition with other websites. In more sought-after search fields, one must acquire more back links that are ranked higher; ideally with matching keywords and topics, to impact competitive search results the most. A good way to obtain back links on reputable sites is to guest-post material on other sites, for example a friend’s blog, but that is just one suggestion for anyone getting started tackling any major keyword searches.

To rank his friend’s tennis racquet business, Dennis started by quickly writing a short article on his PR5 blog, laced with keywords for Next Day Racquets, that he later hoped to rank for in Google search. He identified ”Boulder, Tennis and Racquets,” as the keywords that would work best, because the company is a start-up business in Boulder, Colorado that sells tennis racquets, and Dennis realized that it was feasible to rank even higher than his friend’s business rivals for these keywords. He again determined, “Boulder, Tennis ,Racquets,” was the ideal search term for his friend’s business by discovering that the term received an acceptable amount of highly targeted web traffic, while additionally targeted prospective local customers. Keyword research played a vital role in this process, whereby any search query with less than 2 million search results would be relatively “low hanging fruit,” that with a few steps could be overtaken on search results.

The material that ranks number 1 on Google, on average, receives 4 times the amount of organic traffic that the content ranking number 2 receives. So the importance of being ranked high, for any business, is tremendous. After determining the desired keywords, Dennis wrote a highly targeted article about,”Boulder, Tennis and Racquets,” on his PR5 blog. Dennis also went ahead and created a social media outlet, (his specialty), via a Facebook.com fan page, for his friend’s business (which it would use as a sales page for the time being). He then went on to link his blog to a new article post about Next Day Racquets, while intermingling another link into Next Day Racquet’s Facebook fan page.  After linking the PR5 blog with Next Day Racquets Facebook fan page, he went ahead with a simple little trick that quickly allows Google to index the newly posted material. WordPress blogs are already great at pinging the search ladders, informing Google instantly about the emergence of new content, but a great way to get indexed even faster is to use the Google plus 1 system. By pushing plus “+1″on the newly formed content on his blog, Dennis actually got Google to instantly crawl the post and in turn got the post instantaneously indexed on the search ladder, with no wait or time-delay!

The result? Next Day Racquets ranked number 1 for the keywords, “Boulder, Tennis, Racquets,” in 15 minutes! By simply writing a high quality, keyword articulated article, on a reputable site (his own blog), then linking it to his friends business fan page and then “+1″-ing the results, Dennis instantaneously brought the Google indexing spiders running to the site and had it ranked number 1 on the search engine keywords just as fast. Dennis achieved what most business owners never do; he ranked Next Day Racquets in the top 5 of Google search for important keywords and search terms. Not only that, he did it quicker than I could have ordered a Domino’s pizza. After a few weeks the listing did fall from ranking very 1st on the ladder, down to number 4 on the search results. Even so, Dennis Yu was able to get his friend more Google recognition in 15 minutes than home businesses ever get at all! Not only that, he didn’t use any unethical business or black hat S.E.O. and instead properly mounted Next Day Racquets on the search ladder, for the long run. Dennis Yu is truly a professional. Check out more on his blog www.Dennis-Yu.com.  I hope this article helps people maximize their search engine opportunities; it sure helped me!

-William Larsen, BlitzLocal Analyst

Original at Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal Ranks Small Business #1 on Google in 15 Minutes! BlitzLocal

Depending on the term, it could be 90%+ of these searches not being relevant, and at $5-10 a click, that’s a lot of irrelevant clicks to pay for to find a winner, even if that winner will pay you $10,000 for a new website.

The biggest problem with B2B is that when someone types in “dentist”, you don’t know if they are a dentist or if they are looking for a dentist.

The die-hard PPC folks will argue that you’re just not choosing the right keywords (go for more specific terms), don’t have enough negative keywords (exclude anyone searching with city terms—since these are likely consumers), or you’re not writing specific enough ad copy (supposedly, consumer won’t click on your ad if your title is “Hey Dentists!”) While these comebacks are true, they are missing the big point.

In B2B marketing, you must target WHO the user is, not WHAT they are searching on.

In search, you don’t know who the user is, but you have a clue by the nature of their search terms. In social, you know WHO the user is and you’re catching them before they search.

STEP 1: Isolate the Target

So while you can get a ton of consumer traffic by targeting “dentist” in Google, when you interest target “dentist” on Facebook, you’re targeting by job title and profession.  Try it. In fact, try a number of job titles and see just how many chiropractors, teachers, plumbers, administrative assistants, and marketing managers there are out there.

Voila!  Now you’ve pinpointed all the dentists, dental assistants, students studying to be dentists, retired dentists, and folks who have a dentist fetish—all of them on Facebook. Now narrow down to the specific target you want by age, location or even specialty—maybe you want to talk to just cosmetic dentists in California.

Add in lateral targets—magazines they read, associations they’re a part of, and so forth.  You can read more about micro-targeting here.

STEP 2: Get Your Testimonials and Trust Signals

You probably thought I’d next talk about ads, which is what most people do.  Nope, in social people don’t search—they are interrupted with banner ads. You can focus on ad copy in Google PPC because people are actively looking. In Facebook, you have to gently nudge people to take a look at you and momentarily distract them from spying on their friends, or whatever they happen to be doing on Facebook.

So you need distraction-worthy content, which comes in the form of what their friends are doing. If that potential dentist client of yours is perusing through what her friends did yesterday, she might be persuaded to click on news where those very friends are talking about your business—maybe how they used your software to get more traffic to their website, streamline billing operations, etc.

When you have a TON of testimonials (across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on), paired with content that you’ve published in major outlets, paired with positive things that other reputable organizations have said about you—then it’s more likely they are coming to you versus you coming to them. Some people call this “inbound” or “pull” marketing because you’re leveraging that prospective friends to do the selling for you. Because, despite your Harvard MBA and years of business experience; sorry Charlie, they trust what their friends have to say more.

Ideally, get this content to live on your website or Facebook page, although this is not completely necessary. Let’s say that you wrote some compelling article in an industry journal. Send ad traffic directly to that site so you can leverage their trust. If you wrote your article correctly, the by-line (about the author piece at the end) will have a line or two about what you do. And if you did a good job creating real value in that article, as opposed to selling, they’ll contact you. No need to scream at them or place popup windows in their path—they’ll find you.

Step 3: Turn Your Ads On 

You wouldn’t have a grand opening party without first making sure your place has plenty of food and drinks, right?  In the same way, make sure you have the compelling content from Step 2 before you start advertising. Otherwise, you’re just wasting money.

Take the interest targets that you set up in Step 1 and pair it against the content you have in Step 2.  Think about WHO you are talking to, not WHAT they might be searching on. For example, if they are a dental hygienist, what content is most compelling to them? What if they are a receptionist—what might they find interesting? You’ll find that you might not have super relevant content for everyone. That’s okay—you’re just testing at this stage. Later you can mix and match what combinations work best.

Note that this is NOT landing page optimization, which is more superficially about elements that comprise the landing page—the image, the size of the button, the headline, and so forth.  We’re talking about the whole lead gen. lifecycle—creating a clear path between the targets, what we say to them, and what we want them to do. That last piece is the landing page—to get them to call the phone number, fill out the form, watch the video, etc.

Step 4: Run the Math

Set your Facebook campaign budgets low, perhaps $10 a day. Use the default CPC bids, since you don’t need to get into the nuances of how bidding works—this is not Google. What you care about is your Cost Per Click and conversion rates.  CPC divided by conversion rate is your cost per lead, by the way.  We created a calculator for your use, in case you are rusty on first semester statistics:

This is B2B, so your cost per lead could be over $100. Maybe you’re at $2 a click and 1 in 50 clicks results in a phone call.  Maybe it’s a lot more because you’re selling something that costs thousands, so that a hundred dollars is an acceptable price. Or maybe you’re competing in New York City, where the price is exorbitant from all the advertisers that overlap one another from poor targeting.

Whatever the case, if you’re doing this on Facebook, you have to be prepared for seemingly negative ROI for the first few months.  Why? Because we are catching people well before they are searching, so it could be months before they want that new website, CEREC machine, billing system, or whatever it is you’re advertising. With Google, the conversion timeframe might be that same visit. This is unlikely in your case, unless your product is an impulse buy and also under $100.

Some final thoughts:

We are often asked a common set of questions, so let’s address some of them here:

How big should my interest target be? You don’t need a thousand ads—just a handful that target just the people that you want to hit. If your interest target is over 10,000 people, then either you’re doing something wrong or your audience is nationwide.

Do I need new landing pages for Facebook? Probably. Video is what converts nowadays, so you probably need to fix your other landing pages while you’re at it. Camera shy? They aren’t choosing you for your good looks, so get your Flip video, some good lighting, and film a 2 minute intro. Say what you’d say if that dentist was sitting right in your office—don’t be “fake” or talk like a newscaster.

Will BlitzLocal do this for me? Sure, if you have at least $10k to spend in fees, not counting advertising budget. If you’re a dentist, we require only $2k a month in total (labor plus ad spend), since we’re targeting just one region and because our dental campaigns can be replicated. If we have to build something that is not reusable across many clients, then we have to charge more for it. We are not the cheapest game in town.

Do you offer free articles and training?  I would love to use your service, but cannot afford it. Sure. Send a note to info@blitzlocal.com and we’ll send you some of our internal training materials. You can also post a question at facebook.com/blitzlocal, where others can see and benefit from what you ask.

 About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. You can reach him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, his blog, or good old-fashioned email at dennis@blitzlocal.com. BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook, and has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues.

Original at Marketing B2B via Facebook: The Most Common Mistake You’re Probably Making BlitzLocal

The graveyard of failed startups is littered with the bodies of companies that have gone after the Microsofts, Cokes, and Proctor and Gambles of the world.  Why not? The reasoning is that just one Coke as a client can be worth 1,000 little clients, and is perhaps even enough to sustain your venture all by itself. Unfortunately, when you have one big customer that accounts for most of your earnings, they can also jerk you around; more on the “Wal-Mart” problem later.

Some people call this the problem of the elephants, deer, and rabbits.  It’s sexy to go elephant hunting, but the trouble is that it takes a team to kill the elephant. That team may have to wait for months on-end before getting anything; often starving in the process. It takes sophisticated tools and plenty of unpaid labor to get an initial meeting, much less deal with all the various levels of decision makers needed to get your first dollar.

Rabbits are small, plentiful, and easy to catch.  These are the small businesses that have $10 a month for your software, but can be such a pain to service that you get a case of “rabbit starvation”. Yes, it’s true; if you live in the woods and subside only on rabbit meat you will starve, since wild rabbit meat is so lean that it takes more energy to process than it’s worth.

So in true Goldilocks fashion, the rabbits are too small and the elephants are too big. And thus, startup advisors say, you should chase deer—medium sized, not too hard to catch, and enough meat to make it worthwhile.  Trying to serve the middle, however, is like trying to be everything to everyone. With no focus in the marketplace, you are unable to differentiate and unable to dominate a niche.

Back to “Paul” again; he has had minor success selling to elephants.  He is personally well networked, and one of the best salespeople I’ve ever met. But he is just one guy and there is only so many of him that can perform magic. It’s not scalable.  Further, the $10,000 proof-of-concept deals don’t seem to materialize into $100,000 deals, despite what the Excel spreadsheets to the board might represent.

He may have spent (gambled) $50,000 in energy to get the $10,000 deal. And the big brands that he’s dealing with know this full-well, and are happy to take advantage of the discounts their name can leverage. It’s like the prom queen that can be mean to the adolescent boys; teasing each of them into an endless stream of favors. And it is here that startups die.

In engineering projects, we know that you have to multiply the estimates by a factor of 3. If they say it will take 5 weeks, then you can assume 15 weeks is a more realistic estimate.   Same is true of sales. That deal that is 60% likely to close is actually 20% likely to close.  And instead of 2 weeks, it will be 2 months. You might be ready to go, but the main client contact may be slow to respond to email, the accounting people have some arduous PO process, or some new person wants to evaluate your software—starting the clock over.

Meanwhile, you’re burning cash.  It’s not like you can put payroll or your rent on hold. What you’ve expended so far is a sunken cost, so you just keep going like the gambler who bets double or nothing.  Even if you get the deal, you might not be paid until you complete the work, plus net 60.  So if the project takes 90 days to complete and you’re paid 60 days after completion, you have to float 150 days of cash.  If the pre-sales process took 90 days, you’re now looking at 240 days; not an uncommon cycle to close a big deal.

In those 240 days, anything can happen.  Facebook or Google comes out with a product or feature set that eliminates the need for your product. The company you’re dealing with has a re-organization, so your internal champion isn’t the decision maker anymore. Maybe you lost a key engineer—hey; lots of places are notorious for folks who are disloyal, jumping to whatever the sexy thing of the moment is. Your board or investor begins to pressure you, forcing you to spend more time on convincing them that you’re “so close” to hitting it big, while actually taking your focus away from execution.

Napoleon had his Waterloo because he overextended his supply chain. In other words; the clock ran out on him. If you’re going after the big boys, it’s easy to underestimate what it takes to win.  Mind you, self-service software is a different matter—we’re talking about selling deals to household brands that are used to dealing with big agencies who will roll out the red carpet with not a penny of cost on their side for months.

So here are some key insights to help you avoid a prolonged death—to have a decent shot at success versus running out of gas.

•       Law #1: Enterprise software is not bought, it is sold. Companies don’t just walk up to you and say they want to order the #2 meal, supersized.  Expressing interest after reading about you on TechCrunch is a long way from getting your first penny.  Enterprise software is sold via a network of experienced sales reps that have inside connections at the client company. That rep may have been an agency player with a big black book or someone who was internal until recently. If you don’t have teams of folks who can navigate these landmines, you’ll be constantly scratching your head as to why you got so close, but some inferior vendor won the day. You’re column fodder, buddy—the client was happy to waste your time to get you to fly in and pitch, just so they can say they talked to 3 other people before selecting the vendor they had in mind all along.  Moral of the story– don’t enter a battle that you haven’t already determined you’ve won via inside connections. In other words: never go into an RFP situation blind.        

•  Law #2: Ask for a token payment. Sure, you might be dealing with someone from General Motors. But does that person have power to sign a check? We no longer do custom work for free or do a ton of free consulting. If they want a proof of concept, we charge a nominal fee.  Even if it’s only asking for $1,000, the prospect’s reaction to this will be quite telling if they are serious. Case in point—one of the largest newspapers in the world wanted our help with Facebook marketing. They wanted every PowerPoint presentation we have ever done, some one-on-one meetings on-site, and some technical help to troubleshoot. We were flattered. But when we popped the question, they balked. I knew this person’s boss, who told me that this person was preparing a strategy to present as their own. This person was just swapping our name for his name and taking credit with no intention of engaging with us. It happens all the time. Watch for it now and you’ll see it often. A payment of a few thousand dollars is a gesture of good faith between both parties. And if you are looking at doing a partnership with a larger, more established company, be wary of “partners” that want you to take all the risk.
•       Law #3: Decide if you are positioning yourself as cheaper or better. You can’t be both. Even if you are, the marketplace won’t believe you. Plus, you’d be leaving money on the table if you can justify yourself as being of higher quality. Would you trust a heart surgeon that is offering surgeries this week at 50% off?
•       Law #4: Triple your prices. You’ll lose some customers, as you should. But the ones you lose are likely the ones that are causing you the most headaches which, in turn, prevent you from focusing on the guys that are happy to pay you more. Spend time on the customers who love you. Don’t abide by the squeaky wheel management philosophy. If you have 30 clients paying you $5k a month each on average, wouldn’t it be so much easier to have just 10 clients paying you $15k a month?
•       Law #5: Ignore the armchair quarterbacks. Often the most well-meaning of family and friends will insist on giving you advice.  While you trust their friendship, it doesn’t mean they can weigh-in on complex business decisions.  How much of your precious time are you selling to folks who aren’t going to buy your software or can’t help you refine your offering?  You’re talking to the wrong people, though many enjoy the entertainment of verbal jousting at your expense.
•       Law #6: Sell through a partner. If you can’t afford a sales force, leverage the client base on someone who already has a Fortune 500 client base.  That’s what BlitzLocal does with Webtrends, who opens doors for us that we would never get on our own.  In fact, we get to work with existing clients who have Webtrends as their analytics provider, which makes deals so much easier. It’s a win-win for everyone.

So that’s what it takes to go after the big boys.  If you’re not extremely lucky, you need the cash, connections, and focus to weather lengthy sales cycles. So think twice if you want to get Nike as a client.  They won’t even let you publicly mention them as a client if you do, so the referral value may be less than you anticipate.  But when you can find those particular clients who are partners that care about your success, too—then you’ve found a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

If you found this helpful, let me know in the comments below. If you want to argue, feel free to voice your opinion, too.  I can’t promise I’ll respond, but I will certainly try to respond to folks who ask for help. You can also reach me at facebook.com/dennisyu.

About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising.   BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues. He is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook. BlitzLocal serves both national brands and local service businesses.

Original at Why Startups Fail to Win Big Deals BlitzLocal

I decided to play a little trick on my boss using the Facebook advertising techniques he taught me.

Using  the “Location” section in the ad tools, I entered Portland, Oregon which is where Blitzlocal headquarters is located.

In the “Demographics” section, I targeted males ages 30 to 40.

For “Education and Work” I typed BlitzLocal LLC and WebTrends.

The result ended with an estimated 80 people targeted.

About 4 days later, I get an email from my boss:

And this only cost me 6 cents.

Knowing that you can target down to where someone works, where they live, and how old they are– how might you use this in your business?

Original at Using Facebook Microtargeting to Play a Trick on My Boss BlitzLocal

• Like addresses in same genre: Consider two chiropractors who share the same office but have different suites. The addresses are too similar and the listings will likely get merged. However, a chiropractor and a mechanic within the same complex are less likely to be merged.
• Like business name: Let’s take “Atlanta Pest Control Inc” and “Atlanta Pest Control Service LLC”. Too close. If you are trying to create a similar listing, you might notice Google ask if you are “Atlanta Pest and Bug Control”. Ultimately, the guy with the most credible references matching his name, address, phone number, and website will gobble up the other listings. Some merges end with a mix of the two companies– His name, your phone number. We’ve seen this happen with large franchise clients. So you should add more content to your local listings, not just for Universal Search, but to prevent your listing from getting merged accidentally.
• Same business name, but different locations: Franchises may see their listings merge. Key reason– identical website address and phone number across the listings. Thus, it’s a good idea to have specific landing pages for each location, plus a local area code, not a toll-free number. If your locations are “fake rental mailboxes” or “virtual offices”, then you are at a higher risk and may be guilty of locksmith spam. Ranking and trust factors also likely play a role here– to what degree, Google won’t say.

How to Unmerge

1- Fix Claimed Listing: First check and perhaps fix it in your Google Places. If the info is correct in the listing then try making another edit, like to your description, so that your Google places has the most recent edit. Note that this may cause another request for verification. If it does then simply comply and wait for the verification.

If you have not claimed the listing and it says owner verified, then you will want to claim the listing for yourself. Simply click on the text “Owner Verified” and it will take you to Google places. You can create your profile there and claim your listings. This will take time as you will have to wait for Google to verify you and then sort out who the real owner is. There are ways to weight this judgment in your favor.

2- Correcting the information elsewhere

Your first line of attack in correcting online local information is: InfoUSA. This one site feeds thousands of other directories. Fix your info here. Add your info here. It will take some time to spread, but they are a key ingredient. If two legit business exist with similar addresses, then make sure both are added. Yes, you are doing your neighbor a favor, but you are also protecting your listing.

3- Adding more information

Google scrapes content from other sites. Make sure you are listed on those sites. (Superpages, YellowPages, Insiderpages, Yelp, Yahoo, BrownBook, Dex, Mojo, UrbanSpoon, Your BLOG). MAKE ALL OF YOUR ADDRESSES CONSISTENT. Use the exact same punctuation, abbreviations, everything. Make it either “Suite – C” or “Suite C”, “Avenue”, or “Ave.”, “West” , “W” or “W.” Yes, Google should catch all of this and they do a good job for the most part, but Don’t leave it to Google. Even the littlest of inconsistencies could give you a huge headache later.

4- Wait for it.

Google usually doesn’t show edits immediately. Some updates will take place very quickly, within a couple of hours or a couple of days. Most unmergers will take months. These steps should solve your merging problems and even unmerge listings. If you had reviews with your previous listing then you want an unmerge. Google stores all the previous information. Just check the reviews.

Old Review Sample: In this case, the review is still in Google’s system but is not associated with a local listing. If you get the error, “We no longer support this location” then your listing was banned. If your listing was merged with another location then they will merge the reviews as well. Creating an unmerge should bring those reviews back over, as in the sample review the original address that was associated with the review is still attached to the review.

5- Last Resort: Create a new listing.

If those steps do not fix your problem after 3 months then you may attempt to create a new listing all together. You will probably lose your reviews. Make sure that you still follow Step 2 so that other sources are parroting your business information. Without outside references your business listing will not stick.

Original at Help! Google Merged My Local Listings – Causes and Fixes BlitzLocal

For more information, tune into the web class, “Killer Facebook Landing Pages—What Works and Why” with Dennis Yu on Wednesday, October 13th at 10:00am PDT/1:00pm EDT.  Sign up for free here: http://landingpagesuccesssummit.com/.

Dennis Yu is an entrepreneur and internationally recognized lecturer in search engine marketing. He has written articles for and been interviewed by such media outlets as National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox, and KTLA-TV. He has spoken at Search Marketing Expo, HostingCon, Affiliate Summit, Affiliate Convention, and Ultralight Startups. Yu has also counseled the Federal Trade Commission on privacy issues for social networks. Yu is co-founder and chief executive officer of BlitzLocal.

Original at Top Ten Things Local Businesses Can Do To Get More Social BlitzLocal

• Enable frequency capping so you don’t waste inventory.
• Allow negation targeting or placement targets (maybe you don’t want to run inside a poker app, for example)
• Allow agencies to create multiple accounts for clients under a single domain (client1@blitzlocal.com, client2@blitzlocal.com), though there is potential for abuse here.
• Provide a desktop tool like Google AdWords Editor.
• Enable CPA bidding to allow for conversion optimization.
• Add more metrics to the Facebook Ads API.
• Reveal the ad Quality Score, like Google does.
• Better UI reporting– show trends as opposed to raw output data.

Original at Facebook Ads now more agency friendly– allows sharing among users BlitzLocal

That’s right. They have 36,180 users out of the 1.3 billion people in China, 9.6 million users out of 1.2 billion people in India, and the list goes on. They do have 42% penetration in United States, where 126 million of their base of almost 500 million users reside. Facebook may appear to be the dominant player in social networking from a US perspective, but they are getting creamed by in other countries:

* In Russia, Odnoklassniki and VKontakte each have over 30 million users, while Facebook has 1.1 million.
* In Korea, Cyworld has 18 million users out of a population of 48 million, which is about the same dominant ratio Facebook has with US users.
* And don’t forget Qzone in China with 376 million users, just behind what Facebook has.
* And the list goes on.

So if you’re truly a global brand, you need to be on these other sites– many of which you may not have even heard of if you live in the United States. Even MySpace, which has lost 20% the last year, versus the 30% gain that Facebook has had, is still a force at 1/3rd the size of Facebook.  And that’s not even counting the formidable other properties owned within the Fox network.

The world is not accurately represented by Facebook.

Click here to see the country stats from last year.

Original at The world is not accurately represented by Facebook. BlitzLocal

Facebook Feeding Frenzy: Targeting Opportunities, Privacy Challenges
Facebook and other social media platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn) offer tremendous new segmentation and ad targeting opportunities to marketers. Ahead-of-the-curve marketers are already researching segments, evaluating strategies, testing ad creative, and getting into the weeds measuring performance in this unprecedented targeting playground where interconnected users are willing to openly share their interests and content.

But is it all too easy for marketers because Facebook et al. are cavalier about privacy and disclosure? Is a user backlash or a regulatory firestorm on the horizon? Canada is notorious in that its Privacy Commissioner openly challenged Facebook on its default settings and disclosure. Which way will the wind be blowing in a year’s time? Panelists explore both the opportunistic and paranoid perspectives on social media marketing. Take your pick.

• Moderator:
  Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board & President, Page Zero Media
  
• Speakers:
  Mark Rosenberg, Of Counsel, Sills Cummis & Gross P.C.
  Dennis Yu, Chief Executive Officer, BlitzLocal

Original at Dennis Yu speaks on Facebook targeting, privacy at SES Toronto BlitzLocal

The My Kitchen Sucks campaign run by IKEA in Australia has set a cracking pace in the first two weeks. The brief that Thinq (digital agency) worked around was ‘Drive kitchen sales over a period of 2 months’. The target group was women who were in the market for a new kitchen. A restriction on the campaign was that the message should only be available in two Australian cities (franchise ruling).

What Thinq did was turn the tables on the campaign. They knew that buying a kitchen is not an instantaneous decision but they knew that they could influence that decision. Along the way they would pick up impulse shoppers, raise brand awareness and create buzz.

Brainstorming campaign ideas, it was decided instead of selling the virtues of IKEA kitchens that they would let IKEA kitchen buyers talk about themselves and their kitchens. Let them let it all hang out, the good the bad and the ugly. The problem was managing negative comments which are always a huge headache and worry for management, and this campaign had the potential to open IKEA to a lot of negativity.

The trick was to channel this negative feedback into something positive. What they came up with was a social competition that allowed people to show how bad their kitchen really is. The winner which would be voted upon would then win a new installed kitchen from IKEA. The clincher concept to the campaign was ‘don’t give people a chance to win, ask them to earn it’.

The voting mechanism setup was built along a points system which people earned as they shared their kitchen with their friends. As people share their terrible kitchen so they gathered points and the person with the most points wins a new installed kitchen. Points are earned for submissions that are shared across Twitter and Facebook.

Two weeks into the campaign:

• Facebook has become the number one referrer site.
• Customers have setup their own viral campaigns.
• The campaign is currently earning $60,000 a week for IKEA.
• Over 1,100 kitchens were submitted in the first week.
• Thousands of tagged kitchen images pointing back to the competition.
• The leading kitchen has received over 800 votes.

One of the great things about this campaign was the small budget. Beside production costs of the real estate only AU$4000 was spent in seeding the competition. This was done via two bought email lists, which received one blast each.

Some user generated viral things people are doing to earn their new kitchen are …

Original at Social Media DownUnder: contest, points drive Ikea kitchen sales BlitzLocal