Unjournalism

The digital marketing world experienced a collective jaw-dropping moment when the Wall Street Journal — and many major blogs and all sorts of re-reporters, retweeters and the like — reported that Twitter’s Promoted Tweets advertising option was being sold to advertisers for “upwards of $100,000.” [...]

If an advertiser is paying “upwards of $100,000″ with this approach, he or she is getting an outrageous amount of exposure. In my experimenting with Promoted Tweets on behalf of a client, I can safely say we couldn’t even find ways to spend $100,000 at this point. We’re seeing tremendous returns — loads of impressions and clicks, and a far higher engagement rate than most Web ads — but there’s neither enough competition (the program is only open to select brands) nor search traffic to rack up costs that quickly. [...]

Twitter has been rather tight-lipped about its advertising options, especially the costs associated with using them. The company seems to only discuss those matters with the digital marketers within the brands who’ve been lucky enough to experiment with the program in its early stages. But by not weighing in to clarify this matter (please, correct me if I’m missing something), Twitter is potentially turning off future advertisers who will write off these promotional opportunities as too little bang for too much buck.

Read the rest of this article as it was originally published on the Fast Horse blog, Idea Peepshow.

Tags: advertising by Mike Keliher
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A year and a half ago, we at Fast Horse set out to create a Facebook page for the agency — to put our flag in the ground within this massive and still-growing social networking site. But we wanted it to have a purpose, a specific reason for being — which is more than can be said for many organizations’ Facebook pages.

It seemed natural for us to use Facebook as a place to build a community of budding marketing professionals and to offer them a resource that would help them in the early stages of their career. We created the Fast Horse Experience as a place for college students and recent grads (and, of course, other folks are welcome) to gather, to learn about the industry and our agency, and to learn some things that might help them land their first or next job — whether at Fast Horse or at another shop across town or across the country.

During the past 18 months, we’ve learned a lot about the folks who are just starting out in this profession, and they’ve had a chance to learn a lot about us. We’ve hired several people from within this community, of which more than 1,800 people are now members. We’ve created a place to learn, to share, to connect and to have fun. Isn’t that what all of this social media stuff is about, anyway?

Every single one of us at Fast Horse has played a significant role in making our Facebook community what it is, but it’d be nothing without those 1,800 friends. I want to thank all of those people because, today, I find myself beaming with pride for what we’ve collectively built. All the work we’ve put into building this community received a great bit of validation from none other than Mashable, one of the most popular blogs on the Web and, surely, one of the social media world’s biggest tastemakers. Mashable writes:

When Fast Horse launched its Facebook Page, it didn’t want the campaign to just be a megaphone for the work they were doing, but rather they wanted to use it as a place to interact with job candidates, sort of a digital informational interview, says [creative director and founder Jorg] Pierach. The company directs job seekers to its Facebook Page so its employees have a place to share information about the company, their culture and what they do.

“So instead of a resume disappearing into a file somewhere, we have a way to keep in touch, and the Fast Horse experience is the way to do that,” he said. “We started this about a year and half ago and we’ve hired about four or five people this way. They started a dialogue, and when a position opened up we already had a good idea of what that [person] was about.”

Yes, I’m bragging. But I’m pretty sure we’ve earned the chance to do a little bit of that. Do you have a great example of community building efforts paying off? I’d love to hear about it.

Tags: community by Mike Keliher
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