Facebook Advertising

We met last week in Sydney at Facebook Studio Live and he took some pretty bold stances based on stupid large volumes of data from inside both Goog and FB that essentially discredited the Tipping Point theory, citing the correlation vs. causation argument among other countless case studies, that amounted to his central theme:

We are *all* strong influencers of very small subsets of our friends (less than 10 in each group), on different topics for each subset, and that the old advertising model of interruption and diversion of attention is becoming less and less effective, even if presented to all the right groups of tipping point people.  

He continues, of your average 147 friends on FB, these friends are broken into smaller groups of less than 10 people in each group where a narrow set or even singular interest is shared. If a message touches you and is worth sharing with that group, you will pass it on (not to everyone, but to that subset). Second, and paramount to success, the trick is to engineer your message so that it's social by design... so that the fundamental heart of your campaign is socially worth sharing.  If what you have to say is socially relevant to one of your subsets of friends, you will share it.   

He said at one point that marketers wished / hoped that tipping point theory is how it happens, and yes, in some cases it does, but then demonstrated case after case of truly viral messages inside of Facebook that circumvented the globe and millions of users within minutes, just by having enough people within a niche group all experience the message at the same time and then share with a few of their friends.  

I can't remember if it was Gladwell or someone else who wrote about the 10% of a

population theory, but if your message can reach 10% of an intended audience, and the subject matter of the message has social appeal, the viral effect will kick in.  (I'll dig out that reference somewhere later.)  Well, now that we can easily reach 10% of just about any target demographic via Facebook alone, the crux of engineering a viral campaign now comes back to this Social By Design concept.  Why do I care? And why am I going to share? 

Seems obvious on the surface but agency after agency continue to put out the old interuptus thy attention, yell at us, crap. 

Challenge your advertising agencies to not only think this way, but execute this way!  And commit enough of your ad spend to this model, so that you can get the required reach.  Coming from within Facebook: "Most people in marketing & advertising misunderstand Facebook." - Paul Adams   If you feel you are in this camp and see competitors executing better than your own ad agency, give us a bell and let's talk about it over a coffee or wine.  

Pilot programs were made to challenge the status quo and remember, when it comes to online strategy, if you're not A|B testing your strategy it's only a matter of time before you're left behind. 

  

Cheers, 

Ken Brickley

+64 21 657 278