Leaving The Day Job

Archive for the ‘social networking’ Category

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Yahoo today announced that they will be supporting the OpenID authentication protocol. This could be really big news to anyone trying to build a community based site such as a forum as users can jump straight in and get involved much more easily.

I’ll explain that logic in a minute but first : what the heck is OpenID anyway? OpenID is a open, decentralised authentication system. What that means is that you get a username and password from one website and you can use it to log in to any other website which supports OpenID. Think of it as being like Microsoft Passport was supposed to be a few years back only open, free and adopted by many more websites.

Users can choose which ID provider they want to use. When they want to log in to an OpenID-supporting website they simple provide their username (which often looks like a web addresss eg fred.myopenid.com) and the website redirects them to their ID provider to log in. The ID provider then passes back a message to the website telling them whether or not the log in was successful.

OpenID has been around for a while and it’s not really taken off outside the geek community because it’s all been a bit complicated for the average user. Why create yet another login for something you don’t really understand anyway?

What Yahoo have announced is that they will become an OpenID provider meaning that users will be able to log in to an OpenID-supporting website using their Yahoo user name and password. This more than trebles the number of OpenID accounts to about 370 million.

So back to my original point: how this can help your community website. People are swamped by user names and passwords. Getting them to create a login for your site to add to the hundreds they already have is a barrier to them using your site. Instead they’ll see a button labelled ‘Sign in with your Yahoo! ID’ and be taken straight to a familiar Yahoo login page before being bounced back to your site.

By allowing them to use their existing Yahoo credentials on your site you’re making it easier and quicker for them join your forums, comment on your blog or upload their user-generated content to your site. No form filling, no validating their email address and no illegible captchas to decipher. They’ll have a smoother path into your site and as a consequence be more likely to contribute.

There are more details at the OpenID website

Entrecard has made quite a splash on US-based affiliate and money making blogs but doesn’t seem to have gained much traction amongst UK bloggers. I’ve decided to give it a try.

Entrecard is yet another social networking/blog advertising widget to put in your sidebar. The twist in this case is the fact that it’s tied in to free 125×125 button advertising.

The way it works is this: you create an Entrecard in the form of a 125×125 image and place the Entrecard widget on your site. Other bloggers come along and click on your Entrecard to “drop” theirs. This is the social networking aspect of it, when you log back into Entrecard you can see all the cards that have been dropped on your site. So far, so bog standard.

The fun bit is that you gain a credit every time you go and click on someone else’s Entrecard. You can then exchange these credit for adverts on other sites within the network. Likewise people can exchange their credits for advertising on your site, in which case their 125×125 Entrecard occupies the widget space on your blog for a day.

I’ve tried a few widgets on my site along these lines before but I’m still looking for the one that brings in good traffic and preferably doesn’t slow my site’s load time down to the point that you think you’re back on dial up. The main incentive to try Entrecard is that it’s being used by some of the biggest bloggers on the planet. For example, saving up enough credits can score you a day’s advertising on the mighty John Chow’s blog.

Entrecard is free to join, free to use and easy to install on your site (just one line of Javascript cut-and-pasted). You can try it out and gauge the response yourself in no time at all.

If you decide to join up, or if you already have, drop your Entrecard in my sidebar and I’ll come visit your blog.

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook ads for the last week or so. I’ve had some success but I’ve also been left scratching my head and wondering if I’m an unknowing participant in a very random beta trial.

The basics: you get to create an ad with a tiny headline (25 characters), a little image and a short sentence of copy. You set the maximum CPC and you pick your demographic targeting criteria and you’re off.

The pros: Ads are up and running within minutes. You can get near realtime statistics on impressions and clicks. You can change the max CPC and see an almost instant change in the rate at which your ad is shown.

The demographics targeting is really cool. I’m promoting a gift product and I’ve been able to create separate versions for men who are married, engaged or in a relationship with copy saying respectively “Buy this for your wife” , “Buy this for your fiancee” and “Buy this for your girlfriend”. These targeted ads have had higher click through ratios than non-targeted ones I ran for comparison.

The cons: sheer randomness on the stats. For starters you can view impression and clickthroughs for the last 24 hours, last 7 days or all time. Now, I don’t like this rolling 24 hour window. I want to see stats for today - as in, since midnight. It’s impossible to tell how close I’m getting to hitting my spending limit for the day when I’ve got two days stats rolled in together.

There’s also a daily stats screen which shows total impressions, clicks and costs for each day. This appears to be connected to Facebook’s random number generator. Right now its telling me I had 70-80 clicks per day at a cost of $0 each day. This morning it told me my 74 clicks had cost 91 cents. It’s also showing me a handful of impressions for today which is a different handful to the one in the stats screen in the paragraph above.

Meanwhile, there’s an account page which tells me I’ve been billed $5. It calls itself the Daily Invoices list but there aren’t any invoices to view, download or print which will doubtless cause chaos if the Revenue and Customs stop losing CDs long enough to want to audit my accounts. As yet, there’s nothing showing on my credit card statement so I don’t know if they’ve picked another random number to bill me.

Just to top it all off Facebook have taken a leaf out of Microsoft AdCenter’s book and decided to randomly reject one of my ads. Very helpfully I’m informed that it contravenes one of their terms and conditions but they can’t tell me which. There’s a few reasons why it might have been rejected depending on how pedantic or puritan they were feeling so I sent an email for clarification. The response : “Your ad was rejected by mistake. Sorry for the inconvenience”. No offer to reinstate the ad and no way to do it myself. I have tried recreating the ad and I’ve tried creating a slightly different version of the ad. It lets me do that but the ads don’t run. Meanwhile, several of my other ads, which had been running quite happily, have now stopped. Upping the CPC as high as 50c per click still won’t get them going. This another failing of the Facebook system - there’s no way of seeing what is the minimum CPC required to get your ads running.

All this is intensely annoying as the first day I ran these ads I made 150% ROI albeit on a very small budget.

If Facebook get their act together this could be a really useful ad platform but right now it’s very frustrating. For a one man business it might be possible to muddle through but for a bigger company that needs to have audited accounts the random approach to billing is just going to be a non-starter.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post I’ve been back and refreshed my Facebook ad stats and my click through count has actually gone down. In theory, this makes some sort of sense since you are looking at the last 24 hours ie I might have had a load of clicks 24 hours ago which are now out of that 24 hour window but it just highlights what a stupid metric it is.

Techcrunch is reporting that Microsoft has bought a share of 1.6% of Facebook for $240 million. The deal values Facebook at a stonking $15 billion.

Microsoft already has the gig selling advertising to Facebook’s US users and this investment will see that deal expanding internationally. Assuming Microsoft are going to tie this to their AdCenter product this might finally give the volume of impressions and clicks that they need to start attracting some serious ad spend away from Google.

Facebook is attractive to advertisers for a number of reasons. Firstly, the sheer number of users is huge. Secondly, Facebook by definition has lots of demographic data about their users making ad targetting much more accurate. (Microsoft already allow AdCenter advertisers to pay a premium to target certain demographics based on users MSN profiles). Thirdly, Facebook stills has its college roots and this late teen-early twenties demoographic is an ideal market for high value shiny gadgets (think iPods, mobile phones etc)

The question though is whether Facebook users will actually click ads. Anecdotal evidence suggests that clickthroughs on social network sites in general is poor. Users are there for the social element not to go shopping.

You also have to ask if this is more evidence of a second dotcom bust approaching. Is Facebook really worth $15 billion?