At 2.6 million fans, they have almost double the runner-up, Champs, with 1.38 million fans.

But more importantly, Foot Locker has the lowest engagement rate of the top 5 retailers, at only 1.43%.  The average for athletic retailers is 2.14%.  Lady Foot Locker at 183,700 fans, has a paltry 0.38% engagement rate.

Our recommendation to the Foot Locker team is to leverage Facebook’s Sponsored Stories– to amplify word of mouth.  They can show messages relevant to what their fans want– those that like Air Jordans should see posts about the latest Air Jordans. Those that don’t like baseball shouldn’t be seeing posts about the latest Nike Diamond Turf II in red and black.  Fans within driving distance of a store should see what’s happening at just their store.  Yes, Facebook is that targeted.

Eastbay is also owned by Foot Locker, but tells a very different story. At only 1.1 million fans, this brand has 28,000 “people talking about” them– the same number as Foot Locker, which has 2.5 times more fans.  Why? They posted 122 times in the last 30 days versus only 79 times. And their posts are shorter, plus are more likely to have photos.

Their most popular post in the last 30 days is below, asking simply “Hot or Not”

94% of respondents are male, not surprisingly.

What if Eastbay or other retailers could look at what’s working well and then amplify it? How about seeing their top fans or what’s working for competitors? If you’re not capturing this data for your brand, you’re missing out. And anything that happened more than 89 days ago on Facebook is gone.  Facebook doesn’t keep your data for you.  Fortunately, Blitz does.

And you can try our dashboards for free, no credit card required. Go to blitzmetrics.com to get yours now, before your competitors do.

I noticed that the Best Western hotel chain had not only more fans than any other hotel chain on Facebook, but also the highest engagement rate.
So I took a snapshot from our social dashboard and tweeted it at them.  They retweeted it and also followed me back.

Now let’s figure out what other nice nuggets we can provide to other social media managers at major brands.  So few companies have solid benchmarks for their social performance. Who knows– maybe we’ll sell some dashboards at $500 a month here!

My hat is off to Kara and Walt for warning readers of All Things Digital about tracking cookies on their site. Today, it seems that surfing the web is akin to wading naked into a mosquito infested swamp.  You can’t avoid getting stung, but you have no choice– your home is in the middle of this swamp.  And it wasn’t because you decided to build your house in the swamp– the mosquitos saw where you lived and decided to locate where you are for convenience.

Not all tracking cookies are evil, but how is the consumer to know who is doing what with your data and where you’ve been?  Usually, it’s a good thing, such as remembering that you’ve come to a place before.  Sometimes it’s questionable, such as retargeting or remarketing, where you are followed around the web just because you went to a particular site. And sometimes it just outright unethical, such as flash cookies (which aren’t even cookies) and are nearly impossible to be removed. With new technology comes new opportunity for advertising in ways that even industry pioneers haven’t considered yet– and certainly not regulators.  Check out what Roger McNamee has to say, for example. If you’re an advertiser, what are you doing about this?  If you’re a consumer, what do you think, given there isn’t much you can do?

I met this fellow Jason Stephens on fiverr.com.  He did a killer impersonation of Morgan Freeman and Christopher Walken, which you can listen to here. Yes, I got this for only $5. And, no, this is not a paid endorsement.  I was so thrilled working with him that I wrote this blog post in gratitude.

The unintended effect is likely that Jason’s book of business will get so full from word of mouth that I’ll never be able to hire him again– at least not at this super steal of a price.  So go in and hire him for $5 before it’s too late. This is his profile.

If this was a good tip, please let me know in the comments below.

Today, Google announced their integration of Google Ad Manager and DART. Users of Google Ad Manager are “upgraded” to DFP for Small Business.  It’s free, as are most all of Google’s products, provided you have less than 90 million impressions a month. If you’re bigger than that, then you have to pay support on the premium product.

So if you’re in the business of selling ad server software, I believe your goose is cooked.  Your prospects are about as good as Netscape trying to charge you $89 a year for their browser, Omniture charging $250k a year to use their analytics software, or AOL charging you $20 a month to keep your email address. There may still be folks who will buy the black magic of ad serving, but it’s pretty clear that few firms can compete with Google on ad optimization, as arguably nobody is better at this when it comes to targeting, eCPM maximization, forecasting CTR, frequency capping, and so forth.

But there still are niches that Google doesn’t play in– or won’t play in.  One such example is social ads that inject personalized information into ad templates.  So while Google has potentially won the game of deciding which is the best ad to show to what person, they have not  gone down to the level of using social data to create personalized messages– so customized that they might have your name, friend’s images, and other details in them.

Look out for social ad serving companies that go beyond retargeting and BT networks. In the same way that there is unintended personalization on Facebook– expect that to spread to the general web.  And once the wave of spammers have had their fill, expect local businesses to run smart local ads using social data.

As common practice, Google also released a few videos with this product update. Below is one for the DoubleClick For Publishers on trafficking in the UI.  Notice that related videos are “sex trafficking in Cambodia”, “human trafficking”, and the like.  Perhaps Google DOES have a ways to go with their targeting capabilities.

Yesterday, I had the honor of being part of the Privacy Roundtable put on by the Federal Trade Commission, held at the University of California at Berkeley.  The other 6 panelists were Chris Conley from the ACLU, Tim Sparapani of Facebook, Nicole Wong of Google, Erika Rottenberg of LinkedIn, Lillie Conley of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Ian Costello of Living Social. I want to thank Peder Magee and Michelle Rosenthal of the FTC for inviting me to be part of this esteemed audience.

Highlights and personal observations:

• To what degree is privacy an issue and what role should regulation have?  Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook echoed a similar response that users are, for the most part, quite savvy.  ”Users trust us” and because of that fact, they feel safe to share their lives with their friends and community. “And we trust them”, by allowing communication to flow relatively freely and to not have a heavy hand in regulation.  Technology changes so fast that it’s difficult to write rules that would inadvertently cause friction, since “data is the lifeblood of social networks”.
• Portability is key: Nicole mentioned that Google engineers have a penchant for starting their own movements– and one of them is the “Data Liberation Front”, where they want to allow users to be able to migrate or remove their data freely if they so chose.  Of the couple dozen services that Google offers, the majority of them do allow you to leave freely and easily.  For example, you can export all your gmail and relationships and move to a competing service.  Users knowing they can leave freely at any time, as opposed to having to act on it, has been important to transparency and growth of their services. Erika of LinkedIn and Tim of Facebook noted that there are many social networks– the bar for entry is low and users can pick up their data and go.
• “We absolutely compete on privacy“: There are dozens of social networks and search engines out there and the leaders are those that maintain user trust. Google has cross-functional privacy teams that meet regularly to review issues and ways to give more control to users. At the same time, implementing fine-grained privacy controls is difficult– to allow users to place their friends into groups and even place sharing rules at the individual message level is an engineering challenge.  
• No one size fits all: It’s nearly impossible to set smart defaults on what data is shared with whom. Chris Conley of the ACLU noted that a gay student was outed when friends in his hometown discovered that he was a fan of a GLBT page on Facebook.  As an aside, the relationships between people are so powerful that we can predict who you are just by knowing what your friends like and do– we don’t need to know much about you. 
• A free model creates incentives for advertising abuse: Third party developers often have to choose between playing by the rules or maximizing their earnings. There is certainly a trade-off.  This trade-off exists for the social networks themselves, too, as they do not charge a monthly membership fee (LinkedIn being an exception).  Yet, market forces encourage playing by the rules in the long run, since short term abuse by running deceptive ads will hamper long-term growth, as this Dennis Yu guest post details.  The crowdsourced feedback model, where users can report bad behavior, helps create a self-policing system.

I’m excited to see how regulation adapts to the growth of publicly shared data across an increasing number of devices.  Certainly, privacy is not “dead”, nor can it be unilaterally and suddenly be stripped away from hundreds of millions of users. The problem with regulation is that it applies not just to the bad actors hiding in the shadows, but also to the good guys.  And abuse may not necessarily be of malicious intent. Should there be sufficient examples of unintentional sharing– perhaps a senior citizen’s health records are accidentally revealed because a mobile app accesses that information on this person’s phone or a woman’s child is publicly revealed to be autistic– and we’ll potentially have laws like HIPAA come down.  Lack of harmonization across countries on privacy laws makes this even more complex.

I concluded in my final remarks that oftentimes regulation as a solution is a blunt tool– like trying to fix a broken watch with a sledgehammer.  Education is the right answer, as that will help minors and adults alike in being able to protect themselves.

Gather some interesting statistics and then make a chart out of it– and you’ve got yourself an Infographic.  Examples are showing a map of the world and income for each country displayed by green bars.  Or perhaps it’s the price of gasoline over the last 2 years graphed against milk prices to show some interesting trend.  The goal of an InfoGraphic is to visually stimulate people with statistics and get them to tell their friends or blog about it.  A few days ago, I saw an InfoGraphic showing the percentage of times people tweet after having sex. Certainly that drew some attention, although I’m not sure how accurate their methodology is.  It’s not as if you can set up hidden cameras in bedrooms across the world to measure this.  The percentage is 36% in that study, by the way, if you’re wondering.

There are 4 steps to getting this done:

1. Get the raw data-- some folks will do a survey, which is easy enough to do via Facebook and twitter.  Just do a web search and you’ll see a number of sites that allow you to create free or inexpensive polls. The plus– polls are easy and you can get data fast.  The cons– massive sampling bias, as you’re not getting a random sample, plus your sample size is likely too small to have statistical significance.  The best results are where you can scrape from a large dataset– but this may require you to spend money to get that data via a gnip, addtoit, or other service. Some are free and some require no programming.
2. Crunch it– slice, dice, and manipulate the data.  Some Excel wizardry– or SQL queries if you have a larger data set and need to load it into a database– and you have your aggregates.  Group by keyword, geography, type of user, or other attribute.
3. Make an image-- Easiest and most common tactic is to do a map overlay. For example, look at the beer drinkers in America by state.  Or you can do something silly, such as The Onion’s mockery of MySpace’s privacy. Not a great designer?  Just find someone on rentacoder or odesk for $100, telling them what imagery to imitate.  If you’re doing an Infographic on how many cups of coffee Americans drink, broken out by state.
4. Promote the heck out of it: If you’ve done the previous 3 steps right, you’ll go viral. Make sure that nobody can nail you on poor methodology– bad sampling, incorrect assumptions, or other flaws in your research. Blog about it, get your friends to Digg it, post it on your Facebook and Twitter.  A good headline here can make or break the result. 

If you generate enough controversy or have something hilarious and/or interesting, then watch this go viral– and the links to your site will start flowing.  Brent Csutoras, the best social media linkbuilder on the planet (in my opinion), told me that he can sometimes get tens of thousands of links from a single post.  That includes a smattering of PR7 and PR8 links– if you hit a home run. But perhaps a typical viral campaign will generate just a few hundred links– you never really know. 

Now compare those results against trying to buy links or reaching out to bloggers one at a time. Even if you could buy links without getting in trouble, what would the comparable cost be?  Matt Cutts, the Google spokesperson for SEO, says that this link building methodology is completely white hat and legitimate.

So what are you waiting for?  What interesting factoids and tidbits can you assemble for the website that you’re trying to promote?

If you’re a stay at home parent, your job options are typically quite limited.  There are a range of multi-level marketing opportunities,  get rich quick schemes, insourced call centers, and general selling of questionable products. But a few major trends have converged:

• In the last year, we’ve seen stay at home moms become addicted online gamers, playing daily for hours a day.
• Mobile has become huge– look at Google’s acquisition of AdMob and the rise of FourSquare and Gowalla.
• Social networks such as Facebook comprise up to 25% of pageviews in the United States.
• Small businesses are fleeing the yellow pages and moving ad budgets online.

Thus, the confluence of local, social, and mobile is a “perfect storm” for stay at home parents to service this flood of small businesses. The tightened economy has accelerated this shift, as businesses are scrutinizing their dollars more carefully. The lower cost of getting online and tools that provide more effective advertising further the trend.

And moms are going to be there to benefit from this. To serve local businesses, you need local resellers.  And those folks– the hidden army of local entrepreneurs– are already in their communities.  They will be more effective at selling and servicing the people they already know and trust.  Would you rather buy from a hard pressure sales guy calling from a NYC boiler room or from the person your kids have known for years and lives next door?

Add to that the fact that small businesses are starting to demand transparency, and you have stay at home moms that can show how much business their online marketing efforts are driving.  If you’re a business owner and your analyst can show you what you spent (down to the keyword and click), as well as how many calls it drove (down to the actual recording of the call), how can you argue the ROI versus another form of advertising?

In a few weeks, the folks at BlitzLocal will be unveiling the new Blitzlocal platform.  Yes, it slices, dices, and chops– but more importantly, it’s a user-friendly interface that nearly anyone can use.  If you can play Farmville, you can play BlitzVille– the game is slightly different, plus you earn real dollars instead of virtual ones.

If you are a stay at home mom, stay at home dad, or someone who is looking for a bit of extra income, shoot me an email at dennis@blitzlocal.com and you can get on the waiting list.  

In the last couple months, we’ve been testing with some alpha users of our system and I’m quite impressed with the results.  A lot of people said that having an external analyst force was not as reliable as having an internal sales force that bangs on the phones. Others said that it was impossible to find folks who could both sell and service clients– that the operational efficiency of having one contact was a cost savings not possible.  And most folks said that our model of being transparent with our pricing and actual spend (we spend 70% of every dollar we collect) was suicide, since the other guys spend half that and are able to maintain a healthy margin.

Well, it’s good to know that we have some early success here– that you can find those eager, dedicated moms out there that might not initially know much about SEO, PPC, or any of those acronyms. They have kids to take care of and other responsibilities, so they’ll put forth great effort.  If you believe in them and also give them the right systems, they can succeed and place the high dollar consultants to shame.  What a way to root for the little guy (or girl)!  Our experience so far has affirmed my belief in the goodness of humanity– that success is possible for anyone given the right attitude and effort.

I stopped in at a Jack in the Box today and noticed no employees at the register.  Customers were ordering through a kiosk.  This beautiful touch-screen marvel spoke in English and Spanish and upsold you at every turn– would you like bacon on that?  How about upgrading to a large?  Just a little more for seasoned fries! 

A couple hours ago, I had a similar experience checking in at the airport– except I had to swipe my credit card first and then they asked if I wanted to upgrade to first class.  Same thing at the supermarket, where they eliminate clerks (who aren’t going to reliably and aggressively upsell every customer in that cheery voice), but also will tell you that there’s an unexpected item in the bagging area.

  If you’re at least in your 30s or have watched older cartoons, you might remember the Jetsons.  They had a touch screen display where the family could order dinner items, too. To make the analogy complete, Jack in the Box would merely have to automate the back of the store, too– to have a factory method as efficient as Toyota making Camrys with robotic precision.

Trouble is, as great as this utopia sounds (if you’re a fan of Deming or other efficiency gurus), in practice, it’s not so simple. The fellow ordering above tried to order a value meal no less than 4 times– not being able to navigate the menus and submenus and finally giving up.  It’s not easy for everyone, even with picture menus.  Sometimes you just need a human involved.

But in the long run, I believe that social game dynamics will simplify a complex process, whether it’s buying a hamburger, checking in at an airport, getting your annual physical at the hospital, or configuring your local search campaigns. Games and points will make complex processes easier, especially those that don’t appear to have video game dynamics at first thought.

Watch the gaming models permeate nonprofit fundraising, factory methods– or maybe even serious stuff such as CPR training.  Do you remember when McDonalds first implemented those timers next to each cash register, so that everyone could plainly see how many seconds the average order was per cashier?  You’ve taken a mundane, hourly job and turned it into a video game because now there’s a score.  No other process improvements or bonuses for better service– there’s just an added element of measurement. And that’s enough.  Imagine adding a timer next to airport check-in counters. Think it would work?

Any system or set of processes is really nothing more than a video game– as it contains a series of rules with rewards and punishment, with accompanying stimulation. A Las Vegas slot machine is nothing more than a malfunctioning ATM.  That blue collar timecard punch clock is the most boring video game ever— as it doesn’t blink, make satisfying sounds, or dump coins into the collection tray in exchange for good work.  

Is there something in your business or your life that can be made more pleasurable or efficient by re-evaluating it from the lens of game dynamics?

On November 4th, 2009, the new Facebook promotional guidelines took effect with little notice.  Whether you’re selling Maggianos or marijuana, the rules have a major impact on you and are strict.  For example:

• You can’t require the user to post, friend, or comment as part of being entered into your contest.
• You can’t notify winners via Facebook’s platform– comments, posts, email, whatever.
• You have to even place this specific text as part of your promotion:
  • “This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. You understand that you are providing your information to [recipient(s) of information] and not to Facebook. The information you provide will only be used for [disclose any way that you plan to use the user's information].”
• You can’t mention Facebook anywhere, as people may easily be confused into thinking that Facebook is sponsoring it.
• You have to get written approval from Facebook at least 7 days before you run a contest.

I’m paraphrasing here, so you should read the whole article in its entirety itself.  It’s well-written and clear.  Most of the brands I see running promotions and contests on Facebook are breaking these rules. Now let’s see whether Facebook actually enforces these rules.  If the past history is an indicator, Facebook writes policy more to allow enforcement against the bad actors, than to try to bust anyone that may run afoul, but doing so in a non-spammy way.

Confused by these changes?  Need help from a Facebook advertising agency?  We might be able to help.