hackbash

I’m used to celebrity endorsements, or even celebrity beauty journalist endorsements, but I’d normally expect recommendations from my friends to come up in conversation. Tooling around on Facebook, then, I had a bit of a double-take at this advert, which recommends a range of health supplements on a friend’s behalf.

Anyone else had one of these yet? If so, how did it make you feel? Did it seem natural or clumsy? Did it make you more likely to respond to the advert?

Did it make you check the things you’re a fan of, perhaps, and reconsider whether you’d be happy to advocate them to your friends?

Citizens’ advice

But it’s a crazy, topsy-turvy 2.0 world. Just as you might find yourself used in an advert, it’s easier than ever to create your own, or to put other people’s on your website.

I’m not a fan of the condescension implicit in citizen journalist, but it’s clearly not just journalism that everyone can have a go at. You don’t need much nouse to knock up a Facebook advert, or one on Google Adwords for that matter, so we’re all marketers, whether we need them or not.

Of course, we definitely don’t need celebrity endorsement, but if Web 2.0 makes us citizen journalists and citizen marketers, it apparently makes us citizen celebrities, too.

Grow your own

In the spirit of adventure, I decided to have a go at creating my own Facebook ad. If you’re interested, here are the steps involved.

Sorry for the dreadful formatting, by the way – click on any of the pics to see the full-size grab.

1) What do you want to advertise? I’m not proud: A leg-up won’t hurt Hackbash.

2) Who do you want to sell it to? You can target people by location, age, sex, education and workplace. Interestingly, you can also target by more personal things: interests (no match for ‘pedantry’, I’m disappointed to note), and relationship status.

3) Create your ad. You can attach a picture, or just write some suitably provocative text. You can’t use ‘Facebook’, I discovered, and the character count is pretty modest.

It’s here that you can choose to add Social actions, which is what Facebook calls the auto-generated endorsements that piqued my interest. There’s a Facebook FAQ with more on how these work.

4) Set your budget. You can choose a pay-per-click model, or pay for every 1,000 impressions. What’s interesting here (at least to a marketing n00b like me) is that you can start cheap, limiting your daily ad spend to about £2.50. I’m inclined to take the suggested bid price with a pinch of salt – Facebook advertising hasn’t exactly set the world alight, and when I ran through the process again the suggested bid had gone up by 37%. Hmmm.

Incidentally, I didn’t publish the advert. I’m the target demographic, and I would have ignored it.

Tags: advertising, advocacy, celebrity, citizen journalism, endorsement, Facebook