If you want to understand the radical shift taking place in online advertising, you need look no further than two recent Wall Street Journal articles. The first cites research showing that kids don’t like it when social network sites include advertising in their profiles without their permission. But 20% of them do post advertising and marketing material on their own profiles when it aligns with their needs or interests. The second discusses the fact that people across the age spectrum have developed selective blindness when it comes to banner ads.
We’ve been paying attention to these developments, and we’re factoring them into our marketing strategy for the upcoming conference. We realize that it’s much better to add value for people than to pander to them.
That’s why we’ve spent some time over the past few weeks developing an application for Facebook platform that we hope to roll out in beta form later this week. It’s our first attempt at an app, so it’s functions are limited. But the goal here is to build on the community of blogging experts currently using Facebook to spread the word about what makes a great blog and to hopefully drive some traffic to the conference.
So what’s our application called, and what does it do? It’s called BlogTips and it…
- …displays a user-submitted “blogging tip of the day” each day with a link to the tipster’s Facebook profile.
- …allows users to submit their blogging tips right from a friend’s Facebook profile.
Each day, we’ll go through all the submitted tips and select the next day’s tip. Then, on August 17th, we’ll have our speakers vote on the best tip. The top tipster gets a free pass to the three-day Blog Business Summit this September.
Yes, we’re shamelessly self-promoting. We spent the time and money to develop this widget to drive traffic to our conference. But we know that this application won’t take off unless people find it legitimately useful. And we think it’s a contribution to our community that goes beyond a marketing initiative.
Personally, I was thrilled to manage the development of this application because it gave me the opportunity to witness the new Facebook API in action. I have a million new ideas for applications that I would build if only we had unlimited time and resources. Some of them might even add value for our clients, both existing and potential.
So if you’re interested in engaging with Facebook’s users via an application, give us a buzz at (206)-229-9335 or an e-mail and we’ll chat.
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