It's been done before, but there was something about the picture in the targeted Facebook ad that made me click.
Stephan Bociurkiw is a recent graduate of the University of Alberta School of business. And he has made himself the most elaborate "hire me!" site I have seen in some time:
He's definitely no copywriter ("thinking outside the box"?) but the kid has moxie. Time to up your game, students.
DIY Facebook ads have long been problematic. Cheap to buy (you only pay for the clicks) and easy to create, they lend themselves to the worst sorts of hucksters.
But even worse is the practice of stealing photos for Facebook ads. It not only hurts the credibility and privacy of people who find themselves appearing to endorse random and often inappropriate things. In some cases it can be downright cruel:
According to the CBC, this Facebook ad is for a German internet dating site. (I blocked out the URL. Please don't give them traffic or PR!)
If you don't recognize the face in the ad, that's Rehtaeh Parsons, a Canadian teen who committed suicide last April after being raped at a party while too intoxicated to consent, and experiencing extreme online sexual harassment and abuse when photos of the crime were circulated among her peers.
Whether the company used the photo accidentally or on purpose is unknown. The web site the ad directs to is no longer online.
After outrage over the ad, first spotted by a Facebook user in Toronto, caused outrage, Facebook pulled the ad:
"This is an extremely unfortunate example of an advertiser scraping an image and using it in their ad campaign," a spokesperson from Facebook wrote in a statement, calling this a gross violation of their advertising policies. "We apologize for any harm this has caused."
For once, an organization famous for being so afraid of women's bodies that it even censors the word "breast" in an a non-sexual context is doing the right kind of censorship.
As you know, I'm promoting the hell out of iheartmom.ca, our online Mother's Day campaign for women's heart health starring Olympic figure skated Joannie Rochette.
Everything is in place. Now all we have to do is "go viral". One... two.. three...
Okay, where is everybody? (Just kidding!)
Fast Company says that the three keys to a successful viral idea are "emotion", "public service", and "triggers".
In the case of this video, the emotion (Joannie talking about the loss of her mom), public service (help fight heart disease in women) and trigger (Mother's day) are obvious. Plus, we have the star power of one of Time Magazine's Top 100 people of 2010.
With everything going for it, the campaign is going pretty well on Day 3. The video is on-track to hit the next milestone of 1500 views any minute now, the press is all over the campaign launch, and the campaign just got some surprise coverage from a Swiss blog:
"A beautiful example of an extremely simple social marketing campaign."
There have been setbacks, though, and these are lessons worth sharing too.
For one thing, our English homepage on Causes.com conked out mid-day yesterday. This meant that people trying to join our cause from iheartmom.ca couldn't get in. By this morning, we learned that people were still getting in via facebook invitations, so we redirected visitors to the "about" page. (If you haven't already, please join up now!) The home page is back online as of this writing.
Another glitch was the temporary loss of the French video on YouTube, which broke links and set the counter back to zero. It's back now.
As well, because we had to film Joannie on the day of the press conference, the video could not be ready in time for the first wave media blitz.
As a result, we've probably lost some opportunities. But now that we've fixed all our links, we're back on track and I'm busily working on our BR ('blogger relations") strategy — pushing the story out through my own social media outreach, and communicating with other influencers in sport, health and media who might be willing to help. Stay tuned for more results.
At the end of the day, the biggest challenge to this campaign will be to translate the rising awareness into actual donations. If you'd like to help, please join now at http://www.iheartmom.ca/ or use this handy campaign badge:
There's been a lot of chatter lately about Facebook hijacking personal photos for their ads. Wasn't that big a deal to me, because it's just a matter of updating privacy settings. That's the least of my problems with social advertising.
I'm not a big fan of most of the social ads I get on Facebook. They tend to be rather stupid. But what really bothers me is what it says about how I'm being profiled.
For example, I don't post a lot of demographic information, but my profile does say that I am married. And yet it seems to get me more "singles" ads:
And then there's my age, which isn't public info but is (I assume) read by the advertising apps. So I get this:
I just hope it wasn't targeting using using biometrics :(
And then there's the content of my posts, often about the advertising industry. Which generated this unintentionally hilarious ad:
But, as an adman, I just hate being pidgeonholed by my own people. That's why I've set out to mess with Facebook ads in any way possible.
The first thing I did was become a fan of a bunch of random things, in a number of foreign languages. But all that got me was a bunch of travel ads.
So now what I'm doing is using the "feedback" function on social ads. If you click the little "X" at the top right of an ad, it asks you why you want to baleet it:
