I thought for a while that the advert for Loop 11 was just everywhere. But of course it was just a good case of Behavioral Retargeting. It dawned on me when I was on Runners World which is clearly not a tech Website (thats where I would normally be online).

It's obvious to me why retargeting is so powerful, I am a user of both of the services advertised on this page, SMS and Usability Testing. Google has used it's extensive history on me to serve up highly relevant ads providing an excellent service to their advertisers.

With the #ge11 kicking off this week I thought it would be a good idea to put down a quick post on what makes a good political facebook page.

Here are a few pointers:
1: Make your page a "business" page, not a personal profile page.
There are a number of reasons for this but most importantly if you a career politican you may wish to connect with more than 5000 friends (this is the limit on facebook for personal profiles). By having a business page you will easily be able to launch facebook ads targeted at your constituents.

2: Make it look good:
Add a decent profile image using as much of that left hand area available. Our own facebook page gives an idea of how best to use this space (hint. like us at www.facebook.com/screengrab )

3: Custom Tabs:
For added functions such as taking donations through your page you will need a developer (*cough, cough) to help you with the FBML programming required.
This will open up a myriad of possibilities to help you engage with those floating voters. You can upload your manifesto, upload vidoes, start discussions or engage with the people a number of different ways. Importantly you can do all this after it too late to knock on doors. Ireland has a short campaign time so you need to use every hour to gather every possible vote.

4: Monitor and engage:
Obvious but often overlooked, don't forget to respond to comments and posts from people on your page, you can do this via your smart phone on the go through the facebook or hootsuite apps.

Hope that helps and if you need anything in relation to your page feel free to call us.

Regards,

Gerry

It must be a great pleasure and relief for marketing managers to able to quantify with such ease the return from an advertising campaign. The level of reporting that can be returned from online advertising is highly traceable and it is often easy to put an exact € figure on your return from an online advertising campaign.

The report published today by PWC and IAB shows a growth of 12% on last year. Notably a good proportion of this is based on classified ads, which shows the direct migration of traditionally old media advertising switching to the Web.

As more and more people use the Web more frequently we should see the trend outlined in this report continue after all why would you take a chance when you can have a sure thing?

Links: See http://www.iab.com/index.php

We find it strange that the same companies that pay thousands of Euro for a stall at the Horse show in the RDS or at the ploughing championships will not invest time or money into an ecommerce strategy.

What happens online is a little less tangible for some companies because it lacks the face to face contact that other marketing outlets can provide. This attitude needs to be seriously redressed. Having a professional online presence that has taken time to consider its target market will provide highly relevant sales leads. The article mentions the need to have international considerations addressed, language and currency options for instance. In the case of ecommerce there are an abundance of solutions to provide dynamic currency conversions on Websites. This allows the customer to pay in their own currency without the Website operator needing additional merchant accounts or technology.

www.screengrabecommerce.com

these elementary tips.

1: Twitter; Put in your full bio and company URL. I have seen far too
many profiles without links back to the company homepage. Send an email
to all staff reminding them to so this.

2: Facebook; Ask all your staff to "Like" your page and to suggest it to
their friends, the viral effect can greatly increase numbers. This
profile increased Likes by 500 in two days which is a fantastic return.
The restaurant can now directly market to 500 local people.
www.facebook.com/cluskeys

3: LinkedIn; Again obvious I know, but an email to all staff making sure
that their profiles point back to the company Website will reap some
benefit.

1: Twitter; Put in your full bio and company URL. I have seen far too many profiles without links back to the company homepage. Send an email to all staff reminding them to so this.

2: Facebook; Ask all your staff to "Like" your page and to suggest it to their friends, the viral effect can greatly increase numbers. This profile increased Likes by 500 in two days which is a fantastic return. The restaurant can now directly market to 500 local people. www.facebook.com/cluskeys

3: LinkedIn; Again obvious I know, but an email to all staff making sure that their profiles point back to the company Website will reap some benefit.

Part of this evolution will require the integration of Ecommerce applications for online retailers. This is a natural fit because quite often a companys' Facebook page might have more visits on a given week than it's own standalone site.

Payvment is one such ecommerce application and is currently in free Beta mode. It allows users to quickly set up an ecommerce tab on a Facebook business page.

We will be launching our first trial of the service next week and will be eager to see how this channel progresses.

Check www.payvment.com

It is worth looking at what we mean by this or maybe what we don't mean.

An Ecommerce manager is not someone who can create your banner ads, manage your adwords campaigns and drive your social networking campaigns while at the same time writing all your blog posts and uploading new product info to your Website.

An ecommerce manager is the person who gets all this done.

The point here is that based on many of the job descriptions your will see for ecommerce managers they are expected to have a very wide skill set. In many cases their skills should cover Coding, Graphic design, Online marketing, photography and so on. Thinking about it, you would be extremely lucky to find a person with such a diverse skill set.

The ecommerce manager should know about all these disciplines and be able to manage the people who have these skills.

If I had to put together a job description for an ecommerce manager it would be more like:

• Knowledge of ecommerce technologies
• Hands on experience of Online Marketing
• Project management experience
• People/Negotiation Skills

-- Screengrab ecommerce www.screengrabecommerce.com info@screengrabecommerce.com

Maintaining up to date content is becoming increasingly important. The challenge facing businesses now is how to create enough quality content on a continual basis to satisfy the Real-time results that can be pushed onto the web. Using your own staffs knowledge of your products is crucial in meeting this challenge. By dividing the responsibility of creating new content among various departments and staff members it is possible to have a frequently visited blog/news section that will draw in valuable visitors.

Google have launched their "Caffeine" platform recently. This can provide search results the instant a source site has been updated. Previously these results would have to wait for the page to be crawled and indexed by the search engines.

Another platform used to push real time data to the web is PubSubHubub or PuSH. They have created quick video (Link below) which excellently explains the how the application works while reminding us of the appetite for fresh content from you regular visitors.

Links:
Caffeine: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
PuSH: http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

-- Screengrab ecommerce www.screengrabecommerce.com info@screengrabecommerce.com