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Apparently Rock Videos Can Still Be Cool

One of my amazing colleagues at ROI DNA, Mark Chasse, recently introduced me to Red Fang by sending me a link to the video for “Wires.”

First, I really dig this band – I downloaded the album (yes, album) “Murder The Mountains” almost immediately and have been bobbing my head to it quite a bit during my walk to work. Red Fang sounds to me like (stealing a bit from Blaine Cartwright here) Fu Manchu making out with Badmotorfinger-era Soundgarden while Black Sabbath watches. Maybe Helmet shows up later to get in on the fun.

OK, never mind the crazy-ridiculous attempts at describing Red Fang’s sound. I like it. A lot.

I gave up on music videos about the same time music videos started existing. It’s true that videos can occasionally add something that the song cant’ do on its own, but I think that videos are mostly just really bad marketing of really bad bands. I go out of my way to avoid them, as I do with most things that I find to be offensively stupid.

The gentlemen in Red Fang, however, make some awesome videos. Rockin’, fun, and hilarious – right up my alley. Check out “Wires” and “Prehistoric Dog” below.



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Facebook Confirms: Real-Time Ad Targeting for 100% of Users Coming Soon

Soon, like this week – less than two weeks since AdAge revealed Facebook was testing real-time targeting for Facebook Ads. I received an email from my friendly neighborhood Facebook Ads rep today, telling me:

Happy Monday,

In the coming week, we will expand our Real-Time Targeting test for Facebook Ads on Marketplace to 100% of users worldwide. This targeting feature can speed up the delivery of ads in real-time based on a set of qualified actions a person takes on the site. We’re using the same data that we already use to serve ads to our users, but this enhancement will allow users to see ads updated in real-time based on their activity. We’re excited about this test, because we think it makes your ads more relevant to users by allowing you to reach users at a prime point in the purchase cycle – right when they are indicating intent. There is no change in the ad product itself or to user privacy, and no action is necessary on your current Marketplace Ad campaigns—real-time targeting will happen automatically for people who become a part of your target audience.

How it works:

A user takes one of the following actions:

  1. Updates their status on Facebook
  2. Posts content on a person/Page/Event Wall
  3. Likes a Page from the Search Results page

In real-time, we can target specific keywords from the text the user entered or the Page they liked and update the 1-5 Marketplace Ads they see that is relevant to the keyword/concept.
For more info on real-time commenting, please refer to the following article:

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=496077348919

Happy Monday, indeed. Seriously – this is big stuff.

On one hand, I’ve talked to some folks who are freaked out and think there’s some new privacy issue here. It’s the usual “OMG! They’re watching me! I’m quitting Facebook!” News flash: they’ve been watching you all along.

On the other hand – for advertisers, this is huge – we can engage Facebook users in the moment. TONS of potential.

But the jaded side of me thinks we’ll keep seeing more of the same poorly targeted ads. The tools have always been there, but lots of advertisers still do a really bad job with their Facebook campaigns. Poor strategy is poor strategy – making it faster doesn’t make it any better. AT&T  will still show me their “Sign up for AT&T” ads every time I post in frustration about the “network quality” in San Francisco- they’ll just be quicker about it. And I’ll get more of this ridiculousness, in real-time!

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Friday Afternoon: Writing My Bio

One of the most useful pieces of feedback I’ve gotten from my mentors is “You rock. Don’t be so uncomfortable calling yourself an expert.” I hate talking about myself – it always feels like an exercise in self-aggrandizement, even if I’m just saying “Yeah, I guess I make a pretty good cup of coffee.” So every time I have to come up with any sort of bio, I agonize over it way more than I should, worrying that I’m not quite dialing the mixture of  my skills, knowledge and expertise with my punk/rock ‘n’ roll/DIY/gearhead roots and attitude.

Anyway, I had to write a new bio this week. Here’s my rough draft:

“Surj is a seasoned, passionate ecommerce devotee with experience in many industries. An online marketing generalist with deep experience in all forms of customer acquisition and retention, he’s most passionate about email marketing, search marketing, and affiliate programs. A die-hard gearhead, if he’s not contemplating his latest world domination perfect customer acquisition plan, Surj is most likely riding his motorbike in search of good rock ‘n’ roll or coffee.”

Aw crap, I forgot “Likes to play poker, but not very well.”

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Solving Customer Experience Problems with Social Commerce: Infused Facebook eCommerce

Go Smile, where I’m General Manager of eCommerce, was featured in the Jill’s Steals and Deals segment of the Today Show in late 2010. Obviously, this was huge in many ways – the traffic spike was unbelievable. The website was almost instantly brought to its knees.

I’d been talking to the folks at Infused Commerce about their Facebook Store solution, and reached out to them to see if we could get something live quickly enough to help serve the massive number of folks coming to the site as a result of the Today Show deal. Keep in mind, this was short term demand – the deal was supposed to last 24 hours, and although we had upgraded our servers in preparation for the traffic, it wasn’t enough. We were turning away site visitors – a bad experience for would-be customers, and a loss of opportunity in terms of new customers, email signups and brand reputation.

Incredibly, the guys at Infused were able to get our Facebook shop live within hours. We posted the link on our temporary home page, and by the end of the day had processed a huge number of orders through the Facebook store – almost twenty times our normal daily website order volume in a single day. The launch was a resounding success, and really helped mitigate the poor experience experienced by some folks having issues ordering on the main site.

Unfortunately, due to some issues we ran into while trying to integrate with our fulfillment partner (who will remain nameless) we had to take the store down temporarily. We thought it’d be down for a few weeks at the most, but due to a an ridiculous comedy of delays and freakouts from the fulfillment company, it took months to make the integration happen.

We finally launched the Go Smile Facebook store again last week. We haven’t been pushing it much just yet – taking a few orders and watching for issues with the fulfillment integration. But I’m planning some excellent campaigns very soon – this is a powerful tool to drive not only orders and revenue, but fan count and engagement. More to come on that soon.

Right now, the Infused Facebook shop application works in typical product feed fashion – very simple. The store itself is a Flash app that lives in an FBML tab on your company’s Facebook page. If you’ve sold stuff or advertised on Amazon, you’ll be able to set up your Facebook shop in your sleep. The Infused team sets up the store with your brand colors – you just need to provide some basic files like a logo and a “front door” image along with your product feed, and you’re ready to roll. The orders are pulled from a secure URL. Easy peasy.

I can’t say enough nice things about the Infused team. While the curent beta version of the Facebook shop sports a pretty basic feature set, they’re moving fast – they’ve made vast improvements to the product since I first talked to them a few months ago. There are other companies doing this, but it’s been a pleasure working with them. It’s a classic startup story – they’re new and hungry, with a small agile team capable of moving very quickly. Their customer service has been excellent, and they’re attentive to our needs. They eat up feature requests like candy, and in some cases stuff I’ve asked for has shown up a few hours later! The pricing is excellent, too – less than most companies give up to affiliates, and there’s no commitment.

Small brands – this is an easy, effective way to make your Facebook page a powerful tool in your customer acquisition toolbox. The buy-in is very small, and implementation is incredibly easy and fast. Do it now!

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Distance to Discount Ratio? How About a Work to Incentive Ratio?

Today, TechCrunch called out some numbers from the folks over at JiWire that quantify how far people are willing to travel to get higher levels of discounts. Wait – people will travel further for bigger discounts? No way!

Kidding aside… first, this overly simplified take on the data makes me think a lot of people way undervalue their time. 40 percent of respondents will travel up to an hour for a 40% discount on a $100 item? People – haven’t you heard of Woot?

Second, while the implications of this are pretty obvious for location-based promotions, I’d love to see some data that tells the story of how much “work” people will do in exchange for incentives online. How many friends’ email addresses will Joe sell out share in exchange for more vegetables for their virtual farm? How many completely irrelevant offers will Franklin click on to build up points for a gift card? How many times will Susie refresh a page to get a free sample worth less than a buck? What are the incentives required to get engaged users of your product to enthusiastically tell their friends?

I ran a promo in late 2010 where a beauty product that’s normally $89 was offered on an extremely high profile national TV show for just $10. The resulting traffic to the website was roughly 500 times average. The site slowed to a crawl, and would-be customers had difficulty purchasing. One of the most amazing things about this offer was the number of people who complained angrily via Facebook and the more traditional customer service channels that they’d been “refreshing for ten hours” to make the purchase. Important feedback, and very helpful in understanding the level of emotional investment in the product, but the time investment people were willing to give up was way higher than I’d have suspected. The vocal folks in this case were a small minority compared to the overall sales, and I think it’s important to not place too much value on the anecdotal information. Still, ten hours of refreshing to save $79 on a non-essential cosmetic product?

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Now THIS is Email Personalization: LinkedIn Connections Email

Screenshot of personalized email from LinkedIn.

I almost always spend at least a few seconds (practically a lifetime, in the context of email marketing!) looking at the emails LinkedIn sends my way. The “LinkedIn Network Updates” are particularly interesting. I’m curious—I like to know what folks are up to. Previously, these emails have been pretty much HTML text with links on my connections’ names. Last night, LinkedIn sent the first email I’ve seen from them that really takes advantage of one of the powerful assets they have: user photos.

Screenshot of personalized email from LinkedIn.
“Surj, 48 of your connections changed jobs in 2010 – and here are pictures of every last one of ’em!”

This isn’t an entirely new concept – MailChimp has had some social features for a while, although they had to rework them recently. One of the changes was the loss of the Faces feature. And Twitter’s “new follower” email has incorporated the user icon and basic info for a while now. But this LinkedIn email takes it further.

“Email personalization” still means “insert FNAME in the body somewhere” to a lot of email marketers. LinkedIn sent me an email with pictures of 48 people I know. You’re damn right I clicked on every one of them. Ok, maybe it was just most of them, but this is a very compelling way to drive visits to LinkedIn—here come the ad impressions!

Is this a test to see how users respond to photographs, before including photos in the network update emails? I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing photos in the regular updates emails soon.

What can we learn from this? The vast majority of email marketers don’t get to send their subscribers pictures of their friends and colleagues. We personalize based on purchase history, previous activity, and (hopefully) intelligent guesses. So how can we get creative and take our email personalization to the next level? Yes, I said “take it to the next level”—sorry. How about “raise the bar” instead?

Another question: why is Facebook still sending plaintext email notifications, instead of taking advantage of the vast wealth of stuff they have at their disposal? Is it concerns about privacy and privacy settings, or is just that most Facebook users are simply on the site so much more than LinkedIn, and don’t need as much enticement to be sucked back in?

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Apple(weak)sauce – It Just Works. NOT.

Maybe it’s just daylight savings time that has me a bit grumpy this morning. I prefer to wake up when it’s still dark, or at least gray.

Or maybe I’m grumpy because my iPhone – an allegedly smart phone – failed me this morning.

I knew, or at least suspected, that it was going to happen. Both Angelica and I have iPhones, and reset our alarms last night, but just in case, I set the regular old alarm clock too. This morning, I was awakened by the beeping of that dinosaur, not either of our iPhones.

Look, I get that software is extremely complex. Mistakes are made, and missed in QA. Fine. I’m not a developer, so I’m not even going to bother theorizing about the nuts and bolts of why my alarm clock didn’t go off today. (Even though I’d have thought there’d be some best practices in place by now for automatic handling of alarm clocks and Daylight Savings Time. It’s not like this is bleeding edge stuff.)

Apple has been aware of the issue for at least a month, and even created a support article about it. But in typical Apple fashion, they were pretty quiet about it. In fact, if I hadn’t heard about it from Angelica, I wouldn’t have known about it at all. I’m a busy guy – I don’t pay attention to all the iPhone/Apple chatter. I shouldn’t have to – this thing is supposed to just work, right? Judging by the noise on Twitter this morning, I’m not the only one who didn’t notice until too late.

Just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, I connected my iPhone to my MacBook Pro and fired up iTunes. Nope – no software update, no warning, no messaging at all. I did have to agree to YET ANOTHER iTunes Store Terms and Conditions update – maybe there’s a new clause that explains that the alarm clock doesn’t actually work.

This is a missed opportunity. Apple should have sent an email campaign with the workaround instructions, rather than relying on the blogosphere and the media, maybe even done some PPC marketing on keyword phrases like “iPhone alarm clock fix” with the support article as the landing page.

Hell, even AT&T could have done it, by email or text message. It’s not like they don’t need every bit of goodwill they can get from iPhone users.

Instead, we get a support article that doesn’t even make the iPhone Hot News page. Instead, we get people waking up late for work. Instead, we get people pissed off at Apple and maybe looking at one of those slick new Android phones instead of following the default next-gen iPhone upgrade path.

Listen up Apple. I love your products. I’ve sent a lot of cash your way. But dumb errors like this (and even dumber handling of them) makes me want to drink someone else’s Koolaid.

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Subject Line Experimentation: Special Characters – Genius or Garbage?

Macworld email marketing subject line experiment screenshot.
Macworld getting a little crazy with the subject line.

I subscribe to a LOT of email – I like to see what other email marketers are doing. Because of this, I get so much email that I’m in constant email overload mode (sounds familiar, I bet) and it takes something pretty spectacular – or really lame – to get my attention.

Taking a peek at my subscriptions inbox this morning, I saw an email from Macworld with a three character subject line: –>. That’s not me pointing at something, that’s the subject line. An arrow.

Ever the jaded online marketer, my first thought as I glanced through my emails was “Oops, someone screwed up personalization again.” Then I thought maybe some really crappy spam had snuck into my inbox somehow, until I saw the from: Macworld Gems.

I think overly gimmicky subject lines can be a bit of a risk, and tricks like this are usually one-shot deals. But, as we always say, “test, test, and test s’more!” So what were the email marketers at Macworld thinking on this one? Maybe in a vertical preview pane, the “look over here” arrow mechanism works. Maybe they just thought it’d be eye-catching.

For me, it just looked weird, like a mistake. But… I noticed it. What would a “normal person” (non-email marketer) think of this?