Think Multicultural

For those of you in the L.A. area, I highly recommend you stop by the Multicultural Media Expo taking place at the LA Convention Center 3/11 - 3/12.

In addition to an exhibit floor with lots of multicultural media and advertising companies, there will be 13 different panels discussions that should be very interesting. You will also be able to hear Danny Allen from Admixture and myself rant in person about various multicultural media and marketing issues. Stop by and say hello if you can.

For those of you who can’t make it, we’ll be sure to provide you with coverage of the event on ThinkMulticultural.com

It will be funny if just a few months after Microsoft’s gigantic investment in Facebook, Bill Gates started an exodus.

I got this message today, from Facebook.

Sxxxxx sent you a message.

——————–

Subject: Leaving Facebook

Hi guys and gals

In the interests of removing stuff from my life that doesn’t seem to achieve a lot I am deleting my Facebook account this weekend. I am not quite sure what Facebook is meant to achieve but I am not getting much out of it and there are too many people to keep up with everyone properly.

I would love to stay in contact with everyone so if you want to drop me a line and say hi my email address is “sxxxxx_sxxxxxx@email.com” and my UK mobile +44 - (0)xxxx - xxx xxx.

If you are dreadfully concerned about losing contact with me - as I am sure you all are OR you have some photos that are worth me seeing, make sure you send me your contact details so that I can drop you a line and say hi from time to time.

Have fun

Cheers

S.

Google’s quarterly earnings report for Q4 2007 had lots of good things in it about higher revenues and higher profits. The one bad thing in the report had to do with social networking. As Ed Sim points out, Google is not seeing the results they expected from social networking advertising.

The people at Google are generally considered the “smartest guys in the room” wherever they go, so if they’re not getting the results they expect from social networking (SN), what does that mean for the rest of us?

The great promise of SN advertising is that the owners of SN sites have tons and tons of data about everyone on their site, so they can target ads to the consumers who are most likely to be receptive to those ads. However, as with other behavioral targeting models, the closer you get to custom ads, the closer you’ll get to backlash from the privacy police. Just look at how long Facebook’s new Beacon advertising system lasted.

So what’s a marketer to do? On the one hand you can dump tons of money into ads on SN sites, hoping to strike a chord and stay relevant, despite low click rates and lots of noise, on the other you can spend your money elsewhere and have to answer to your client when they demand to know why their ads aren’t on the coolest new SN site.

SN ad targeting technology will continue to get better, and everyone agrees that there’s gold in those hills. In the mean time, it’s a real puzzle.