Fun Twitter Fact of the day: There were approximately 5,000 tweets PER SECOND Hash-tagging or @mentioning Obama or Osama Bin Laden during Obama’s speech last night. figures for facebook are unavailable, but are estimated to be even higher than that. Still doubt the power of social media?

Pandora gets sued, Facebook Upgrades (again), and Twitter makes some gas money

Good Morning Crime Fighters!

(side note: don’t know why I keep saying that, but we’re gonna roll with it)

I apologize for not keeping up with my posts. It’s been hectic the past couple weeks and it’s only gonna get more hectic until May with graduation only 3 weeks away. But a lot has happened in the world of Social Media; Lawsuits against Pandora, a new Facebook ‘broad category’ targeting tool, and the possibility of Twitter implementing advertisements soon.

Here are some links that I will hopefully discuss soon when time permits.

Pandora Lawsuit:
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/04/06/paying-for-privacy (NPR broadcast of ‘On Point’ discussing Pandora lawsuit and Privacy online)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576020083703574602.html (initial WSJ article)
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TEC_PANDORA_SUBPOENA?SITE=ALMON&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT (AP article)

Facebook Broad Category:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/03/08/broad-category-ad-targeting/
http://blog.gigcoin.com/facebook-tests-broad-category-ad-targeting-is-it-effective-for-advertisers%E2%80%A8/

Twitter Advertising:
http://adage.com/article/special-report-digital-conference/twitter-offer-marketers-geo-relevant-ads-tools/226846/ (Adage)

Don’t worry crime fighters; another post is on the way!

The Google Haiku Part 1: Structure

Google Text Ad Campaigns.

This will be the first in a series of posts about Google Text ad campaigns. In no way do I claim to be an expert on this matter, but I do have a lot of experience that I wish to share with you. My findings and advice has come from personally writing, creating and managing campaigns as well as several calls and webinars with Google. I am currently working on getting my Google Adwords certification and I will continue to monitor and edit this series as I learn more.

Another disclaimer: you can use these same principles for other text based ad campaigns such as yahoo, however they do have different rules and regulations that I am not familiar with, and thus will not comment on.

The Google Haiku
With word count and thesaurus,
Ain’t hard to Master

Well, I’m really good at REAL Haiku’s but it seemed appropriate.

What is a Google Haiku? Simply put, it is a metaphor for the construction of Google Text ads. Why? Well like a real haiku, a Google Text ad is limited by how much you can put on each line.

A Haiku is broken down into three lines, the first with 5 syllables, middle with 7, and last with 5. Google Text ads are also broken down by line but with characters (including spaces) instead of syllables.

Allow this visual representation to help explain

Title (25 Characters with spaces)
Body Line 1 (35 Characters with spaces)
Body Line 2 (35 Characters with spaces)
Display URL (35 Characters with no spaces (cause it’s a URL silly))
Destination URL (Display URL + Gibberish)

(From now on, when I mention ‘characters’, assume that I am also implying ‘without spaces’.)

Don’t worry, I will break this down further.

Title (25)
The first line will be the title of the ad. It is limited to 25 characters. It will be blue and underlined.

Body Line 1 (35)
Body Line 2 (35)
The next two lines are the body of the ad which are limited to 35 characters each (70 total). If your ad wins the bid for the first three placements, the body will appear as one line with 71 charictars. Google will automatically put a space in between line 1 and line 2, so you do not need to compensate for this with an extra space in line 1

Display URL (35)
The last thing that will be displayed is the Display URL, which shows the destination of the ad. You can write the ad without the ‘www.’ If you want; it is optional.

Destination URL
The last line there in grey is the actual Destination URL. Google has strict guidelines that state that the destination MUST be sent to the link that is displayed in the Display URL as to not confuse the customer and to avoid scams. The destination URL can include more than what is displayed, in the Display URL such as the full website address beyond the 35 character limit or a third-party click tag used to measure traffic. ALSO, the link you are sending the customer too CANNOT be a redirected page.

(Before I move on, many of the examples will have a reoccurring theme. You see, before I started getting paid in the advertising world, I worked at a certain shoe store for most of High school and all of College. For legal reasons, I cannot tell you what it was called, but I’ll let you know that it was kind of like a carnival of shoes.)

Here are a couple more examples of complete Text ads with their characters in parenthesis.

Shoe Circus Shoe Store (22)
Quality brand name shoes you (28)
can trust at discount prices (28)
ShoeCircus.com/Discounts (28)
shoecircus.com/discounts/?gclid=CI-V-62Y5acCFYpN2godejcHSw

It’s a Circus of Shoes! (23)
Crazy prices for brand name shoes. (34)
Its Crazy, it Wild, its Top Notch. (35)
ShoeCircus.com/Crazy (30)
shoecircus.com/crazy/?gclid=CI-V-62Y5acCFYpN2godejcHSw

Second pair Half-Price (22)
Buy one pair of shoes, get the 2^nd (34)
one half price! Only at Shoe Circus (35)
ShoeCircus.com/bogo (23)
shoecircus.com/bogo/?gclid=CI-V-62Y5acCFYpN2godejcHSw

A handy tool for writing text ads is the word count tool featured on Microsoft Word. The default location is in the bottom left corner (you should see ‘Words: xxx). Highlight the line you wrote, click the word count button, and check to see the ‘Characters (with spaces)’ line. Make sure there are no extra spaces at the end of your line.

Now you know the structure of the Google Haiku. Next week, I will dive into how to make your Text ad Stand Out from the clutter.

Please, feel free to ask questions and also provide feedback.



Socially Awkward Media

Can I start first off by saying that the word ‘Awkward‘ is the most awkwardly spelled word in the English Language? (with the exception of ‘awkwardly’) Just saying.

 

So what exactly do I mean by Socially Awkward Media? To answer that, let me tell you a little bit about myself:

I am a 22-year-old Media Assistant finishing up my final semester of College while working part-time at a local Advertising Agency in Orlando. I’ve been Interning on and off since High School, following passions as they slowly evolved into a love affair with Advertising and Graphic Design. Although it was what initially interested me in this field, I am afraid to admit that I am NOT a graphic designer. Over the years, I slowly self-taught myself Photoshop and Illustrator until my workload became too heavy to maintain any extra disciplines outside of selling shoes, studying for classes, and getting paid to scare people (more on that some other time).

It has been almost a year now since I stumbled upon this amazing opportunity at the Ad Agency I currently work at, where I interned at for 7 months and eventually got hired part time. After careful guidance from several mentors and friends, I came into contact with Social Media.

Now of course, this was not my first encounter. I, like 600 million other people, do own a Facebook, and I (regrettably) changed the background on my MySpace more than once, and I do owe a majority of my life online to Stumble Upon.

to get the point, I find almost every aspect of Social Media to be extremely awkward; from the occasional Mafia War and Farmville invites from a person that I met once to the not too often comment or wall post from a friend whom I haven’t talked to in years. Whether or not your vice is Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Reddit, or WordPress; you will almost certainly, at one point experience that awkward moment when you connect with a distant acquaintance or stranger, or someone you think you know dearly will surprise you where you can only respond with ‘…lol…‘.

And the title of my blog has a double meaning which I just discovered now. Since I am still learning about Social Media and Advertising, I would like to share my findings with you, the reader, as I strive to find normalcy in this inherently Awkward field of Social Media.

 

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