Good ol’ P.T. Barnam. He famously said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Oh how often I see that to be true. Then just when I’m getting a little bit of hope – the next thing hits. Love it or hate it, the Internet has been making suckers of more and more people for a good long time now.

The latest incarnation for me has just appeared in a recent “Page Invitation” on Facebook. I was invited by a friend to become a fan of the First 20,000 Fans Get a $1,000 Best Buy Gift Card!!! page. Really? Can reasonable people actually think that something like this would actually be true? You think Best Buy would spend TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS on getting Facebook fans?

Ahhhhhh… classic! Time to party like it’s 1999 – or 1993 – or anytime on the Internet because hoaxes like these have been going around forever. I remember getting my first one via email even before there was a World Wide Web. Snopes even has a nice listing of several of the classic schemes.

So this is nothing new. But it is the first time I’ve seen this type of ploy on Facebook. Turns out it’s going strong, as this particular “fan page” has nearly 10,000 so-called fans. Ten thousand people who either actually thought this offer was real or who decided that the barrier to entry was easy and harmless enough to at least give it a shot.

And that’s the kicker.

Becoming a fan of something on Facebook seems innocuous enough. What harm can it do? Probably not much. But it does get you on a list of profiles at least. It might help people target advertising to you. It might indicate you are gullible. What else do you let people know about you through your Facebook profile? Any of that information becomes easy to get to when you join a group or become a fan of a page.

Then it’s a matter of who set up the page and why. Is it a joke or the prelude to a phishing scheme?

Facebook is just the latest breeding ground for scammers. What I see as the big difference is the inherent trust that people currently have of some communications on Facebook. It’s a community made up primarily of people you know. People you have accepted into your network voluntarily. So information coming from them should be more trustworthy, right?

Not at all.

Most people know that email can’t be trusted anymore. Even if it comes from “someone you know” most people have started to recognize the basic characteristics of strange emails. Uncle Toby usually sends questionable PowerPoint shows, not offers to save money on your mortgage. Facebook is different, though. And people don’t use the same filter on Facebook as they do for email. Not yet, anyway.

A Facebook blog post from last summer recounts that phishing and spam are at an all-time high. Please – always use your best judgement and think about what’s being presented to you as an offer online. The medium makes no difference.

Be careful out there.

Ed. Note: Barnam may not be the originator of the actual quote, but since everyone basically thinks he did, it sounded better in writing. Plus – I did say “famously” and not “actually.” See? Gotta watch what you read online…

… and now Lindsay?

Lindsay Lohan has sued E*Trade for $100 million, saying the “milkaholic” baby girl named Lindsay in one of their recent ads improperly invoked her “likeness, name, characterization and personality” and that Lohan has the same “single name” recognition as celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.

If you haven’t caught this ad on TV, have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEXZ2hfD3bU

In 2009 there was a lot of buzz about the potential opportunities offered by location-based applications and functionality for local marketing use. What if a coupon could be delivered via your cell phone as you walked by a Starbucks? Read More

Know your target market: Even though you may be tempted to go for a logo design that is pleasing to you, it’s important to remember that your logo is for your customer and not you. Focus on your market segment, design for that demographic, and your brand will be successful.

Corey Meyer and Scott Rowe will make a presentation titled “Internal Branding and Communications” at the AIM Institute, IT Leadership Academy April 2, 2010.

The AIM Institute and its business members have collaborated to create an annual IT Leadership Academy. The goal of the Academy is to help IT managers develop and enhance their leadership skills to more fully leverage the talents and contributions of the local IT workforce.

Kim Mickelsen will present “Outsmart the Competition” at an education workshop for the La Vista Chamber on March 26.

Today there are so many creative and low cost opportunities to market your business that with some thought and perseverance you can outsmart the competition.  In this session we’ll talk about some strategies to target your best prospects, to leverage the power of the internet and especially search and social media as well as provide some tips for few unorthodox but effective (and inexpensive) guerilla  marketing measures.

According to MediaDailyNews.com the long-predicted tipping point has arrived, with total U.S. digital advertising and marketing revenues set to surpass print revenues in 2010, according to a new study from Outsell, a consulting and research group serving the information industry.

Altogether, U.S. advertisers and marketers plan to spend $368 billion in 2010, Outsell found — up 1.2% from about $364 billion in 2009. Within the 2010 figure, 32.5% ($119.6 billion) will go to digital, versus 30.3% ($111.5 billion) for print.

While the digital figure includes online advertising mainstays like display and search, it also includes direct marketing, represented by email, as well as investments in company Web sites, which will 53% ($63 billion) of the total digital spending.

As in previous years, print ad revenue declines will fall heaviest on newspapers — with Outsell forecasting total ad revenues of $27 billion in 2010, down about 8% from 2009. Outsell also sees revenue for print directories falling about 8% to $11.6 billion. But it’s not all bad news for print, as Outsell predicts a 2% increase in ad spending for magazines, rising to $9.4 billion.

Not every part of the digital market is buoyant. One surprising prediction in the report has mobile advertising revenues sinking 16% in 2010 compared to 2009. On the television front (combining broadcast and cable), Outsell has total TV ad revenues falling 6.5% to $59.6 billion.

So where do you fall into the picture?  If online advertising is not in your current marketing plan I would strongly suggest that you look into it.  Online advertising allows us to marry consumers with brand involvement.  And in this day and age brand involvement and engagement is key.  

With online advertising you are able to target your market much more efficiently and effectively than with many traditional advertising strategies. Online advertising also offers the benefit of providing detailed and thorough statistics that allow you to tweak and optimize your campaigns to the fullest.

With traditional advertising, there is little you can do to track the success of small changes within campaigns or one campaign as compared to another. However, with online advertising you have a huge array of information at your fingertips.

Over the past few weeks I have been writing about who has actually been watching the Olympics and how viewership has been influenced.  Here are some interesting post-Olympics viewership statistics provided by the Nielsen Company. Read More

Feeling data rich and insight poor? We’re inundated with data. It’s everywhere. We have performance data from our marketing efforts. We can slice and dice it every which way. Drill down into minuet detail. Yet, the sheer volume can sometimes be more confusing than helpful. Making it easy to overlook the obvious.

I was talking to a marketer today who was struggling to glean some insights from a mass of campaign data. He had an impressive amount of data on every imaginable part of the campaign, but he simply didn’t know what the data told him that was of value in moving to the next step of a comprehensive rollout plan. After a few minutes I asked him about the overall CPA (cost-per-acquisition) of the campaign versus that of various segments within the campaign. I could literally hear him slap his head and sigh. Because of all the rich data he had at his fingertips and could mine, he overlooked a basic metric that could provide a simple insight into ROI.

Make sure you look at the basics first, before you do the data deep dive. Looking at cost-per-acquisition is a great place to start. CPA, also referred to as cost-per-action or cost-per-sale, is a metric used to measure your spend rate per conversion and answer the question “How much do I have to spend to get a sale?”

CPA is a metric that matters because you need to know if the cost to get a new customer is within your margin or if you are investment spending. Plus it’s a quick and simple way to look at the effectiveness of a campaign and its parts. And it’s one of the easiest to measure. Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) = Cost of campaign/Number of sales.

So let’s say you spend a total of $20k and you get 250 sales.  Your overall CPA is 20,000/250 = $80. And if your margin per sale is $99, then you are making more than you are spending on the overall campaign. You can then dissect each part of the campaign in the same way to see the effective CPA of each piece. Below is an example of a CPA on a PPC campaign.

In this instance we see that the PPC campaign had a lower CPA than the campaign overall. You can look at each piece of your campaign to see how each stacks up and deep dive into the other metrics to see if there tactics you should cut or can optimize in some way.

If you start from this simple premise, you may save yourself from spending too much time looking at data that simply doesn’t matter.

Here’s a nifty little CPA calculator from ClickZ to calculate your CPA from your search campaigns (with cost-per-click [CPC] pricing) versus your display campaigns (often priced by cost-per-thousand [CPM]).

For more on turning data into intelligence, check out this article from our quarterly newsletter.

Ok, so we all know the results from last nights’ Oscars: Sandra Bullock was awarded best actress, Jeff Bridges was best actor and Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win Best Director. But here’s something that may surprise you that I found while doing a quick scan of the news today.

In the 44 films in 2009 that topped the box office for at least one weekend, an Apple logo or device could be seen in at least 18 of them. (That’s almost 41%.) In some, Apple products even eclipsed their human scene partners.

The Awl put together a great piece examining the popularity of Apple products in film. Not editors, effects specialists, composers, or photographers using Apple products, or even celebrities owning iPhones–but the insane frequency with which Apple shows up in movies, without it being official product placement.

Apple’s Greatest Cinematic Achievements from The Awl on Vimeo.