Posts Tagged: facebook

Journal — No Comments
4
Mar 10

Genius or Desperation?

I’m sorry Facebook but your ad targeting systems are wildly inaccurate and reduce that valuable screen estate to the right hand side of my browser window to irrelevant line noise. Google’s and Yahoo’s ad targeting is pretty darn good but looking at Facebook right now offers me:

  • Omniture Research; which Obama used, apparently.
  • Free laptop from Vodafone Business; I’m not self employed so a business tariff is a non starter.
  • Everyone plays Mafia Wars; except me and most of my friends.

So when I do actually look at a Facebook ad, it’s because it’s caught my attention, like this gem from the Royal Mail.

You already have the LP, the CD and the MP3 … now get the Collectible Stamp.

Royal Mail Classic Album Covers Facebook Ad

A click through yields the latest campaign from the Royal Mail which exhorts us to buy stamps (but not use them, but to collect them instead, at least I think that’s the premise) which reflect the classic albums we already own in a variety of formats (but what about 8 track or cassette tape?).

Royal Mail Classic Album Covers Ad

Given the amount of competition the Royal Mail faces and the fact that 25% of First Class letters fail to arrive on time, I’m not sure whether this latest ad campaign smacks of genius or of desperation.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
deliciousness — 1 Comment
25
Feb 10

Deliciousness: hairy landings, Twitter (mis)identity, escaped cat, the United States of Facebook and mapme.at

The latest batch of social bookmarks from my Delicious stream:

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Journal — Comments Off
2
Sep 09

You Don’t Always Get What You Pay For, But Sometimes You Get It For Free

Here in the UK we’re used to bad or non-existent customer service, so much so that it’s virtually ingrained into our genes. We’re well aware of the oft used expression that you get what you pay for except that you actually don’t; you continue to pay and act pleasantly surprised when you actually get what you’ve paid for, murmuring “well that’s a turn up for the books“. We look longingly across the Atlantic to the US and talk admiringly of the “American service culture” whilst conveniently overlooking the fact that our US counterparts get paid rock bottom wages and have to work damn hard to garner enough tips to make a living.

But there are exceptions and the global geographic reach of the Internet means that those here in the UK we get to benefit from these exceptions. Consider the following case of Internet startup (and yes, it’s a US Internet startup but let’s just conveniently overlook that for a moment) posterous.com. Now I know I’m writing about Posterous a lot at the moment but indulge me for a moment.

Whilst playing with Posterous’ free, yes free, service I noticed a slight … deficiency which I documented here. Posterous claims to handle links to images in a sane manner; their FAQ says

“We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3’s, documents and video (both links AND files)”.

So I tried a sample post with links to TwitPic, YFrog, Flickr and, pushing it a bit, Facebook. YFrog and Flickr worked flawlessly, Facebook didn’t but that wasn’t unexpected, but TwitPic didn’t and that was unexpected. So I noted this in a Twitter post directed at the Posterous Twitter account:

And there I left it, either expecting a non committal response, or none at all. Twenty four minutes later, two four, twenty four, I got a reply.

And I tested it and it worked. Conditioned as I am to the UK norm, this was pretty unheard of, hence the need to write this experience up. So on the Internet, at least, you don’t always get what you pay for, but sometimes you get it for free.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Journal — 1 Comment
31
Aug 09

In the Spirit of Experimentation

Posterous is a service that just begs for experimentation; not only because it’s a beautifully simplistic yet rich service but also because the Help and FAQ pages can be a little bit light on detail for some of the less obvious questions; probably to avoid scaring those of a less-power-user-frame-of-mind away.

So the Posterous FAQ at http://posterous.com/faq says this “We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3’s, documents and video (both links AND files)”.

Link eh? In the spirit of experimentation let’s try this, firstly from the easy and obvious one … twitpic.com

… and rival yfrog.com …

… and from my Flickr photostream …

… and finally a more challenging one, from my Facebook photo album …

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3454882&id=757562989

… there’s only one way to find out, so let’s send this to Posterous right now and see what happens; all in the spirit of experimentation naturally.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous