Author: david

This is a Facebook ad I have scheduled to start running later this week. What do you think? Puns on my last name got kind of old for me back in Elementary School, but maybe I’m old enough to have gotten over it. Bigger question is whether the right people would click on it.

Targeting people:

• who live in the United States
• who live in Florida
• age 18 and older
• who like advertising, business, business owner, entrepreneur or marketing

I’ve been rethinking the whole marketing approach for my practice since re-reading Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing. Need to keep experimenting to find what works.

Recently, I’ve been exploring the tools Facebook provides for posting notes and links to only a subset of the people I’m connected with on the service. In particular, I wanted to do a better job of keeping personal and political activities separate – not an easy thing in this crazy, mashed up world.

Although I make no secret of my political activities, it’s not necessarily the first thing I want to broadcast about myself to professional contacts. It’s much easier to maintain a fairly clean separation on LinkedIn, which is all business. But although I am more active about seeking out professional contacts through LinkedIn, some of them have sought me out on Facebook. And there are also a lot of old friends and former colleagues I stay in touch with on Facebook who may or may not care for my politics (I think of myself as a moderate, reasonable guy, but it’s all about your frame of reference).

Also, when I try to promote a local fundraiser or other political event through Facebook, contacts in other parts of the country don’t necessarily need to see those headlines. So just as a courtesy, I’d like to filter the links and messages I publish.

I knew there was supposed to be a way to do it, but it took me a while to figure out how — even as a supposedly tech-savvy guy. So I thought others might find this useful. This could apply just as well to postings on another topic that only a subset of your FB friends care about.

For some time now, I’ve been trying to tag new contacts as belonging to one or more of a few categories — personal, professional or Lyman Hall (those high school folks from Connecticut). You can do this when you add a new contact, like this:

I can either choose an existing group or type in the name of a new group I want to create. These groups are just labels for types of Facebook friends within my larger contact list.

I haven’t done this as consistently as I might have, and wasn’t doing it at all when I first joined Facebook. So I also had to go back and do it retroactively by choosing the “Edit Friends” off the Account menu —

— and then categorizing individual contacts.

Now, when posting a status update or link, I can click on the lock icon to get options for restricting the item’s distribution. I then select “Customize” off the list.

Within the customize options you want to restrict to “Specific People”

At this point, I could type in a list of people’s names. But what I’m going to do instead is use the group keyword for my political friends.

Notice that I could make this my default setting. But no, there are plenty of other links I share that are not political. And sometimes I may want to share a political point even with those who might not agree with me (I just want to be able to pick my battles).

Once I click “Save Settings,” I am returned to my home screen, where I can post this my message by clicking the “Share” button. But now, instead of being shared with everyone, the item should only be displayed to the people on my “political” list.

The re-launch of rebelcook.com comes as something of a milestone. Rebel is a Commercial and Industrial Real Estate specialist and well known in Palm Beach County as the leader of the Economic Forum of Palm Beach County.

I’ve updated the Economic Forum website twice over the past couple of years, adding event scheduling and RSVP functionality and most recently converting it into a WordPress site. Over that same time period, I’ve produced a couple of draft redesigns of rebelcook.com, but never quite convinced Rebel to sign off on one of them. Classic case of her not knowing quite what she wants until she sees it. She paid me for my work, but stuck with her old website, even though to my eyes it was quite outdated. As I became more active with the Economic Forum, she would introduce me to people as her webmaster and then brag about being my “most difficult customer.”

Part of the problem was that we had mostly worked on these designs long distance. I had tried collaborating with her over GoToMeeting web conferences, and we got the latest economicforumpbc.com redesign done that way. But coming to an agreement on rebelcook.com was tougher, maybe because the original design had been produced by her son. We seemed to keep getting closer to agreement without ever quite arriving at it.

Finally, it got to the point where I had implemented a feature she really wanted, integration with the LoopNet directory of real estate listings, on the unreleased test site but not on the live site. The breakthrough came when I convinced her that the best way to cut to the chase was to schedule a time when I could come to her office, make changes to the site on the spot, get immediate feedback, and make more changes until it was done. We did that on Friday, and by the weekend the new site was live.

I’ll have to remember that it may pay to get more work done face-to-face with a client, rather than long distance.

Some of the design elements such as the logo and “graph paper” background are holdovers from the original, created for the firm by her son. But this version runs on the WordPress publishing platform, making it easier to add new listings (published as blog postings), as well as press clippings from her frequent quotes on the state of the real estate markets in the local newspapers.

Most of the firm’s listings are actually published through the LoopNet service, but those listings are framed so they appear within the same navigation scheme as the rest of the site. We’re running two or three featured listings on the home page, plus the residential listings Rebel’s firm manages, since LoopNet doesn’t handle the residential stuff.

Next likely upgrade: the addition of a MailChimp email list, similar to the one we recently introduced for the Economic Forum.