Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook

I’ve been meaning to gather some of the more interesting bits of publicity around our newly-launched book. To start, two random online marketing notes:

• When you search for ‘friends with benefits’ on Amazon, our book is the top result. Take that, erotica.
• Our book site is FriendsWithBenefitsBook.com. I count myself very lucky that there’s currently nothing more than a domain squatting page at FriendsWithBenefits.com. I recently talked to an author who failed to renew her personal domain and had it snapped up by a porn star who shared her name. What could she do? I didn’t have a lot of good ideas, save the fact that most porn careers are surely short-lived.

I did a couple of short TV pieces with GetConnected, talking about business blogging. I know, I know, I’m as surprised as you that we’re still talking about this stuff in 2009:

The second piece is about how to set up a blog. If you want to hear still more about self-publishing an ebook, here’s a short interview I did back at BookCamp Vancouver.

There have been a bunch of reviews of the book, all surprisingly positive so far. I’m still waiting for one that tears a strip off the book. After all, the negative ones are more fun to write. This one initially had promise of satisfying my need for abuse:

I really wanted to dislike this. It was sent to me by the publisher without my requesting it and I’m sure I groaned out loud when I opened the package and saw the subtitle. Social Media? I HATE social media!

Aaargh! OK, I’ll read the damn thing, I thought. Maybe there’s enough fodder here for a scathing review - tear the skin right off the authors and roast them on a spit! That’ll teach that publisher not to send me junk when I don’t want it. I sat myself down on the couch and started reading.

Hmmm. Something’s wrong. Where’s all the crap about getting 4 zillion Facebook followers? Where are the shady tricks, the spammy tactics? What’s WRONG with these people?

I guess I’ll just live in hope. Here, also, is an interview that Julie and I did for The Engaging Brand podcast.

Long time blogger and podcaster Joseph Planta did an interview with us about the book, and friend and broadcaster about town Tod Maffin recorded an interview (MP3) for a possible new radio program.

Lastly, last night I sat on a panel on social media and ROI for the International Internet Marketing Association. I typed up a few notes, and then heavily marked them up before and during the panel. I said I’d share them with the audience, but I wanted to annotate them with links first. I’m using Flickr to do this, but you have to visit the actual pages to see the Flickr Notes I’ve added.

Incidentally, I was looking around for a tool like Flickr Notes that would enable me to add linked notes to a much larger image. Flickr only permits you to work with the 500-pixel wide image, and I could do with something twice that size. No, sorry, I have too much self-respect to make an image map.

We were delighted to receive our first shipment of books in time for the official “Friends with Benefits” book launch on Tuesday, November 24. We had a full house of family, friends and fans all ready to celebrate the book’s christening with us.

Thanks to everyone who raised a glass to “Friends with Benefits”, especially those who participated in the writing process, whether you were interviewed by us, appeared in a case study, or helped with proofreading. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Want to buy the book? It’s available at various online bookstores, including Amazon.

The web is all abuzz about Twitter advertising and the concept of ’sponsored tweets’. News comes about an official ad program from the company itself, and a bunch of people are discussing the controversial topic of ’sponsored tweets’. There’s a whole flock of companies in the space: Ad.ly, Twittad, Magpie, SponsoredTweets and so forth.

Things get punchy whenever people explore monetizing a new channel. Let’s begin by thinking about some other controversial forms of advertising in social media, and how sponsored tweets might relate:

• Static ads on blogs - Not particularly relevant. In my experience, the majority of income from blogging comes from one’s archives, not the front page flow.
• Sponsored posts - The blogosphere dabbled with these for a few years, but I rarely see them anymore. This could be because I don’t read the sort of blogs that would employ sponsored posts, or because they’re utterly forgettable, but I don’t think they’ve caught on in any significant fashion.
• As in RSS feeds - This is somewhat germane, though I usually see these ads not as separate feed items, but rather as add-ons to existing posts. Sponsored tweets are standalone units of content.
• Ads in IM conversations - In a way, this seems like the most relevant comparison. That said, I’ve never actually seen an ad in an IM chat. I mostly use Skype or Google Chat, though. Maybe something like Omegle will start inserting one-line text ads into its hosted, serendipitous IM conversations.

There’s also the Facebook Beacon debacle, among others. In short, people’s tolerance for advertising in their social media channels feels pretty low.

Content vs. Conversations

Robert begins a thoughtful post about sponsored tweets with this sentence:

I believe that people who produce content should be able to make a living for producing that content.

I do, too. But I’m not sure that’s the right assumption to make about most Twitter users. Does the average Twitter user think of themselves as “producing content”? I doubt it. The medium has become incredibly conversational. Excluding the one-to-many power users who have thousands and thousands of followers, Twitter feels more like a townhall meeting or a chat down at the pub.

In that context, sponsored tweets sound pretty weird. Consider this example of an ad-enabled SMS conversation:

Feels a touch anti-social, doesn’t it?

Or imagine that, after telling an amusing anecdote to a half-dozen people at a cocktail party, you tell them that funny story was brought to them by the good people at Yuk Yuk’s, Canada’s finest comedy club.

These examples are both kind of farcical, but they highlight the importance of context in these channels. Context gets more and more important the smaller the unit of content. It might be totally acceptable to see ads (if not sponsored posts) around a fictional blog that’s telling sci-fi stories. On the other hand, I can’t really imagine that people would put up with a sponsored tweet in the stream of, say, @ShitMyDadSays.

I mostly use Twitter as a broadcast and chat channel, so I don’t intend to include sponsored tweets on my account any time soon. For the same reasons, I doubt I’ll care much about other people’s use of advertising. I simply don’t think it will catch on and become viable for more than a tiny fraction of power users who are delivering high value to their followers.

More importantly, why would you expend that hard-earned social capital in exchange for ad revenue? I can imagine a hundred other ways you might gain more–socially, financially, karmically–through other kinds of ‘asks’ than “click this ad from a company I may or may not care about”.

Last month Julie and I attended BookCamp Vancouver, and sat in on a bunch of fascinating sessions about the changing world of books. Mark caught me in a hallway and did a quick two minute video interview, mostly about the ebook we wrote before “Friends With Benefits”:

Over the past year, we’ve taught at least fifteen day-long workshops and at least two dozen shorter sessions, including a couple of classes for UBC Continued Studies. We’ve seen a variety of students from all sorts of different industries with a wide range of tech-savviness. I’ve taught people who still think you can pay to get to the top of Google search engine results, and people who can name far more Twitter tools than I can.

We can often, however, divide our students into two big groups: those who get it, and those who don’t. Those who get it nod when we talk about the exciting possibilities of Foursquare, and say they’re inspired by the case studies we share. Those who don’t tend to fret about and focus on perceived barriers like copyright and privacy. They look for reasons to discount social media as a viable marketing channel.

Who is Most Resistant?

Clearly it’s our job to help everybody get it. And we work hard to do so. But we don’t reach everybody.

I’ve been puzzling over why this happens. Specifically, who is most resistant to adopting these tools? Certainly some industries are late adopters (the publishing world for one, based on my experiences at BookCamp Vancouver and the Surrey International Writers Conference). And those come from industries threatened by technological innovation–the media, for example–tend to be more hesitant. But neither of these seemed really satisfactory. Then Julie hit on the answer.

Our unhappy students were hoping for magic beans.

She was referring to a great blog post by Seth Godin, in which he compares traditional TV ads (and, I’d add, advertisements in other media) to magic beans. Things used to be simple, Godin explains. “Buy enough ads, don’t screw up, you’re rich.”

Marketing on the web, Godin continues, is different:

Marketing online takes too much measurement, patience, creativity, technical knowledge, flexibility, speed and authenticity. It requires too much thinking and not enough going out for dinner with clients.

Perhaps there will never be magic beans again. Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts.

Maybe some of our students come to our talks hoping to hear “just do these three things, and you’re sorted. You’ll have this social media thing beat.” In many of talks, we actually say “there are no secrets”. Of course, then we go on to show one tiny pseudo-secret, but, trust me, it’s underwhelming.

The truth is that this work is a marathon, not a sprint, and often involves learning new skills or thinking in new ways.

So those unhappy students go away with lots of work to do, but without any magic beans.

Am I wrong? Are there magic beans out there that I just don’t know about?

We’re not ignoring this site. Trust me. Well, we sort of are. Really, it’s just in stasis for a few more weeks. As we’ve mentioned in the sidebar, we’re working on a hard copy edition of the book, entitled “Friends with Benefits”, to be published by No Starch Press and distributed by O’Reilly Media. We’re almost done, in fact.

In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to mention some upcoming all-day workshops that we’re running in Vancouver and Victoria:

Building on the sold-out course we taught for UBC Continuing Education this winter, we discuss the dos and don’ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette.

The first ones we scheduled sold out, so we’ve added a second Vancouver date and will probably add a second Victoria one as well (we’re also considering other Canadian cities).

I know, I know, it’s been a wasteland around this site for months. It’s the cobblers’ children problem. When we do web-based PR all day, we don’t really feel like coming home and writing about it.

And besides, we’ve had other, more papery fish to fry. A few months after we released our ebook, we got a contract from No Starch Books to write a dead tree version of our ebook for publication. So–along with our busy day jobs–that’s what we’ve been doing.

In fact, we’re probably soon going to move this blog over to a new domain which reflects the new title for our book. I can’t quite divulge the title just yet (the dust hasn’t settled), but stay tuned.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some information that I thought might be of interest. Since we launched, we’ve been tracking conversion data in Google Analytics, to get a sense of where our book sales are coming from.  Here are some conversion rates for the sites that sent us the majority of our traffic over the past 14 months. Where relevant, links go to the particular pages that are sending the most traffic within that domain.

Capulet (our professional site) - 7.9%
YouTube - 6.4%
Facebook - 6.2%
TopRankBlog - 5%
Direct (reflecting offline marketing, mostly) - 4%
Common Craft - 2.9%
Web-Strategist - 2.5%
Flickr - 1.27%
DarrenBarefoot.com (for a while I ran an ad on all 4500 of my archived pages) - 1%
Seth Godin - 0.8%
Google (organic search) - 0.7%
Twitter - 0.7%
StumbleUpon - 0.0%

A couple of notes about these numbers:

• Most of these numbers reflect what I see in our client sites. One exception is YouTube, which, based on my experience with other video projects, seems surprisingly high. Julie suggested that it might be because visitors have clicked through to YouTube from another site, and the video ‘closed the deal’ as it were.
• We more or less stopped promoting the ebook in March or April of 2008, and started spending that time researching and writing the new book. That’s possibly why, for example, Twitter is converted so poorly. Or, equally possibly, visitors who follow links from Twitter are transient by nature.
• Obviously the nature of the content on the source site matters a lot. A single link is unlikely to convert as effectively as a profile or positive review.

What do you think of those results? Are there any surprises in these numbers for you?

Quite by coincidence, I’ve encountered a few statistics on Facebook’s advertising platform. I thought I’d post links to the results I’ve uncovered, in case anybody is wondering about average CTR rates for Facebook.

First up, Rod Boothby got a click-through rate of 0.01%:

This week, I ran $105 worth of Facebook Fliers. That bought me 52,500 impressions. It looks like the flier bought me about an extra 500 site visits. That’s about $0.21 per hit.

Michael Ferguson ran a bunch of Facebook ads for Kinzin:

Click-through rates are abysmal. I was running the identical ad in about 15 different regions (you need to run them as separate ads to get the stats broken out), getting just over 10M views. Our average clickthrough rate was 0.06% (that’s 1 in 1513, for those counting at home). The best we did anywhere was 0.14%.

He later reports that the conversion rate was “at a pretty reasonable clip” at about 5%. By ‘conversion’, I think he’s meaning people who actually signed up for Kinzin’s free service. All of this stuff is contextual, but if visitors had to lay down money, the conversion rate would be considerably lower.

The folks at Valleywag report similarly dismal numbers:

Media buyers — the agency people who book campaigns — report that the college social network is a truly terrible target. They’re mainly students, with low disposable income, of course; but, beyond that, the users appear to be too busy leaving messages for eachother to show much interest in advertising. Facebook’s members appear indifferent even to movie advertising aimed at their demographic. Clickthrough rates, the percentage of time users click on an ad, average 0.04% — just 400 clicks in every 1m views — according to one report seen by Valleywag.

From AllFacebook:

Fred Wilson has been updating the world about his venture in Facebook advertising over the past week. Today, Fred posted and updated screenshot of his ad campaign’s performance and it doesn’t appear to be too stellar. For one of his campaigns, out of 10,080 impressions there were only 8 clicks. The average cost-per-click for Fred was $0.08 and the average CPM was $0.06. This is a less than stellar performance. This is nothing new though.

And lastly, from a digital student marketing blog in the UK. This would seem like a natural fit for Facebook’s audience:

Our most recent campaign saw 1.4 million page impressions delivered at specific universities – and only a 0.04% clickthrough rate. Ouch.

Click-through rates seem to sit around 0.04%, which is profoundly lame if you ask me. I’m no online advertising expert–it’s not really our thing–but I’ve run a bunch of Google AdWords and other contextual advertising campaigns. We regularly get click-through rates of 3%, and I gather that’s nothing special.

Here’s my theory on Facebook: it’s a silo. People visit the Fun House of Facebook, and conceptually treat it slightly different than the rest of the web. They’re in Facebook, interacting with friends, playing games, sending messages and now chatting on IM. As such, they’re really unmotivated to leave. Who wants to leave the Fun House?

We’ve seen similar results across Facebook. It’s really difficult to drive visitors out of the app and to your own website.

BusinessWeek first published an article entitled “”Blogs Will Change Your Business” in May, 2005. Yesterday they updated the article with twenty-odd pop-up edits and notes, which reflect the changing social media sphere. I thought it would be handy to gather some of the more interesting facts together–we might use some in a future version of the book:

• “According to Forrester, 11.2% of online adults in the U.S. publish a blog at least once a month. Of the same group, 24.8% read a blog and 13.7% comment on a blog at least once a month.”
• “The numbers are higher for youths. Of online youths, 20.8% publish a blog, 36.6% read a blog, and 26.4% comment on a blog at least once a month.”
• Technorati Chairman Dave Sifry says that the site monitors about 112 million blogs, but only about 12.3 million of those have been updated in the last two months.
• FeedBlog CEO Kevin Burton thinks two to four million blogs is a more accurate number.
• “Sifry estimates that fully 99% of the blog posts reaching search engines are spam.” Does that mean that 99% of the aforementioned 12.3 million blogs are splogs? Probably not, because splogs would generate posts at a much higher rate than humans. Plus, Technorati tries hard to keep splogs out of those that they monitor.
• Tim Bray “says that 4,000 bloggers at Sun, about 10% of the workforce, have had virtually no problems.” Of course, your technologists are going to be savvier than the average blogger.
• Mike Kaltschnee runs Hacking Netflix, and gets treated like a journalist by both Netflix and Blockbuster. His site gets 300,000 to 400,000 unique visitors per month.
• “Research company eMarketer reckons the market for podcasts in the U.S. was 18.5 million people in 2007, and will reach 28 million in 2008. Advertising revenue for podcasts totaled $165 million last year.”
• Federated Media, an ad network for about 150 popular blogs, earned $22 million in 2007.

Monique linked to a couple of interesting studies about marketing and trends in the book industry. They may float your boat, but I wanted to discuss the first paragraph of the report on the Publishing Trends survey on online marketing:

It’s unanimous. Publicists think online is the way to go for promoting their authors’ books, but before you cancel your next pub party, read on: Publishing Trends polled publicists at publishers, independent publicity firms, and agencies, and sent a companion survey to members of the book-related media to find out what publicists claim they’re doing, and what the media report they’re actually doing. Nearly all (70.9%) publicists said they devote up to 50% of their resources to online marketing. The remaining said they do even more.

There’s so much wrong with his paragraph. Remember that these are people who work with words. You know, for a living. :

• “Unanimous” means “fully” in agreement, not “slightly more than two-thirds”. Because, speaking accurately, that’s what 70.9% is.
• By the same token, 70.9% does not mean “nearly all”. It means 7 out of 10. If I eat “nearly all” of a chocolate cake, it means my sisters only get a sliver, not more than a quarter of the thing.
• Also, if 7 out of 10 publicists devote “up to 50% of their resources”, it’s not a foregone conclusion that “publicists think online is the way to go”. Let’s illustrate these numbers. Say that “up to 50%” averages out to, generously, a 30% online spend by those 7 out of 10 publicists. Now imagine that 100 of the surveyed publicists each had $10,000 to spend. According to these results, they would spend just $210,000 or 21% of the total budget online. Clearly publicists are still pretty centered in the offline world.

I have no stake in these results either way. In fact, given my day job, I’d probably support this kind of online boosterism. But this is a bit silly, don’t you think?

I’m not saying this survey is without merit or interest–just that their approach to describing the results is faulty. I don’t know what Publishing Trends’ motivation is here. Maybe they have a stake in promoting online publicity in the book industry? Or maybe they were just looking for a way to frame the survey results. That’s important if you want to make it palatable to the media.

If so, they picked the wrong frame.