Yesterday, Facebook showed me the ad above for lingerie. In case you’re wondering, NO – I’m not a cross dresser who likes to dress up in baby dolls and teddies.

While it was a good laugh for my friends, this ad campaign is a typical example of a rookie mistake in online marketing: not taking advantage of targeting options in online advertising.

Online advertising is not like traditional advertising

If an advertiser could only choose a single traditional advertising channel to run their campaign, they would probably choose the channel that would reach the most people. If it was a choice between The Star, Malay Mail and The Sun, the advertiser would most likely choose The Star because it has the highest circulation and biggest reach.

But there’s a problem when doing that – not all of The Star’s readership will be interested in the advertiser’s ad.

Fortunately, that problem is abated / reduced with online advertising. On the web, advertisers can track web user’s interactions to a very detailed level. For example, they can choose to show ads based on location (by looking up your IP address), interest (based on which websites you visit) or behaviour (based on what ads or links you click).

In Facebook, you can take that even further. Facebook knows A LOT about you, so advertisers can target ads on your gender, your birthday, relationship status and even your friends.

So in the example above, Secretnite.com the lingerie store could easily show their ads only to women. This would reduce the cost of their ad campaign because they are reducing the reach (audience). This will also result in better advertising ROI because money is not wasted advertising to men who are not interested in buying lingerie. [click to continue…]

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I was privileged to have the opportunity to be involved in UNICEF Malaysia’s media engagement workshop last week. Salt Media, a young and dynamic public relations agency based in Kuala Lumpur, led the workshop and I focused on social media topics.

The workshop was attended by a group of 30 participants from local NGOs including Malaysian Aids Council, Mercy, Malaysian Child Resource Institute and Shelter Home. After an introduction into UNICEF’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, the workshop was split into traditional media/PR taught by Salt Media and new/social media taught by me. [click to continue…]

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Ganesh Kumar Bangah, Group CEO of Friendster and MOL Sdn Bhd, was in the spotlight yesterday for using social media to bad mouth a competitor.

The competitor in question is OffGamers, a company that does microtransactions for game currency. They posted a link to promote their service on their Facebook Page yesterday and Ganesh took to opportunity to post a snide comment. The situation devolved into one where the CEO of one of Asia’s largest internet companies taking cheap shots at OffGamers.

View the entire thread on OffGamers’s Facebook Page

The Friendster CEO’s actions is a case study of exactly the wrong thing to do with social media. So what can we learn from this episode? [click to continue…]

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Last week I conducted 2 separate workshops for Rockwills Business Solutions and New Straits Times. It was a challenging week that tested my voice and my stamina. It was also very gratifying to the able to share my knowledge with the participants.

The participants were superb and really encouraging. I want to thank P1 WiMAX who provided broadband for all workshops.

I also want to give a big shout out to Rockwills will writer Evanna Phoon who was admitted to hospital for pre-labour but yet wanted to Skype in to hear me deliver the rest of the workshop! Check out her video blog from the delivery room, with my voice in the background over Skype. Talk about commitment!

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When to stick with or drop an unpopular ad campaign

14 June 2010

It’s World Cup season and we’re being inundated with TV adverts in between the games. As usual there are the creative ones as well as really bad ones. One bad advert in particular is the MyEG advert featuring Deborah Henry. Twitter users were not shy in expressing their thoughts of the advert.

Count me in as one of those who thinks the MyEG advert is a poor effort.

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Fire your SEO consultant! A review of the Scribe SEO service

3 June 2010

Step one of marketing your business online is to get found. There are lots of ways to do this but the most popular tactic by far is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It’s pretty easy to grasp the fundamental, but it can start to get really technical if you really want to do it well. That’s why there’s such a proliferation of SEO consultants and “con sultans”. Luckily, you can fire your SEO consultant with the new Scribe SEO service.

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Come join me (along with Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse and Brian Clark) Inside the Third Tribe

29 May 2010

What would you give to have the opportunity for lunch with Chris Brogan? Or if you’re a blogger, how about drinks with Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) or Brian Clark (Copyblogger)? If you follow any of the 3 above, I’m sure you would grab such an opportunity without hesitation. I know I did when I had the [...]

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Facebook Contest Ideas to Grow Your Fan Pages

24 May 2010

Facebook is an important tactic in every small business marketer’s repetoire, and the key to success in Facebook marketing is to grow your Facebook Fan base. Contests are a popular way of achieving this goal, so here are some contest ideas which you can implement for free to grow your Facebook Fan page.

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The role of social media in marketing: It makes your brand human

22 April 2010

What is social media’s role in marketing? Many marketers and business owners find social media difficult to grasp. They may know they need to start using it, but failure to understand of it’s role in the marketing process lead to wrong tactics which just annoys social media users.

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Dude, you’re still obsessed about SEO? Wake up and smell the Facebook

25 March 2010

Facebook has recently surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US according to Hitwise. It’s a trend that the rest of the world will soon follow and yet, many businesses and marketers are still obsessed about their search ranking when they should seriously start to consider a Facebook strategy.

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