To be clear, these are 100% my own views (not those of Twitter) and are based on my experience running and participating in ads API programs at other companies – I worked on the ads API at Yahoo Search Marketing, oversaw the launch of the ads API at Fox Audience Network and ran a PMD on Facebook’s ads API – and conversations with advertisers about their social marketing activities as part of my role as CRO at Polyvore.

With that out of the way, here’s my advice on how to get into the running for Twitter’s Ads API program:

1. Make sure you apply to join the program. Sounds obvious but you’d be surprised how many people don’t do this. If I was running this program at Twitter, I would want to track the hundreds of applications in one place and have a standing meeting to review who gets access.

2. Do your homework on who is currently buying Twitter ads (and who isn’t) and what is holding them back from increasing their spend. My sense from talking to advertisers is that its a mix of:

• Price (CPEs are high vs Facebook, due to fewer ad units on the page and rapid creative fatigue)
• Workload (the ads UI isn’t well suited to creating hundreds of ads – trust me I’ve tried it)
• Attribution (the ads don’t generally drive direct click to conversion ROI but do raise awareness, which can be measured with the right A/B testing).

If your clients are having these types of problems, its a good sign you can add value

3. Think carefully about the tools you would build on top of Twitter’s Ads API to solve these problems. For example, Promoted Tweets don’t fall into the typical Title x Description x Targeting matrix that works on Facebook and Google. There’s also no targeting discovery tool yet on Twitter (which is essential to split testing into more efficient CPEs). Also make an honest assessment of how long it will take you to build these tools.

4. Be prepared to concisely articulate to Twitter the value you bring. E.g.

• “We are a Facebook PMD managing $50M/year on behalf of lifestyle brands against social engagement goals” is better than “We are a Facebook PMD managing $100M/yr on behalf of app developers against ROI goals”.
• “We are a LinkedIn Certified Developer managing $10M/yr spend on behalf of B2B advertisers against lead generation goals” is better than “We are an affiliate network driving leads for B2B lead aggregators”.
• “We are a social analytics company with 50 Fortune 500 brands, many of whom are Twitter advertisers who would like to tie their paid and earned media together in a single dashboard”.

5. Network with the Twitter decision makers. Since April Underwood (PM for Revenue) published the blog post, its safe to assume she is one of the primary decision makers, however the Twitter sales reps for your advertisers are probably going to be a very strong influence too (as they have account goals to hit) and are easy to get connected to via your advertising clients. The more internal advocates you can build within Twitter, the more likely you will get into the program.

The short answer is, it depends entirely on the nature of your product, your expectations of what the celeb will do for you, and your budget. To help you decide whether hooking up with a celeb is the right move for your business, here are the questions you need to ask yourself:

Which celebrity best hits your target market?

The basic idea behind celebrity endorsements is that they increase awareness and engagement within your target market. So it stands to reason that you should partner with a celebrity who hits your target market. This sounds obvious but you would be amazed how many celebrity endorsements are a result of straight up starf-cking by some exec trying to impress his kids, with little attention paid to the data. Talent agents know this and are masters at leveraging it into seven figure paydays for their clients, so when it comes to picking a celeb, don’t go with your heart, go with the data. There are three good sources:

• Use a service like qscores, which is kind of like a Nielsen for personalities – they measure the appeal of a celeb within a target market.
• Look at the Insights report on the celeb’s Facebook page. Obviously, you’ll need to ask their page admin for this.
• Look through the Facebook and Twitter profiles of users who are liking/commenting on a celebrity’s posts. Its a good indicator of who their most active fans are.

Will the celebrity want to endorse your business?

To some degree, all celebrities view endorsements as selling out – and view selling out as anti-correlated to success in their day job (Yes, even the Kardashians). So its important to understand how the sensitivities vary for different categories of celebs:

• Actors are the most sensitive because they live in constant fear of never working again and believe that endorsements make them less believable/appealing to fans. Its why A-list Hollywood actors prefer to do ads overseas rather than in the US (think Lost In Translation). If you want to work with an actor, you’ll have more success with a TV or comedic actor in their first season on a breakout show, when they aren’t getting paid that much, aren’t sure whether the show will get renewed and are trying to capitalize on their newfound fame.
• Professional athletes are the least sensitive because a) they generally have  long term contracts with their teams and b) they know anything they do off the field doesn’t matter as long as they deliver on game day. Many athletes are actually surprisingly cash poor because they have their salaries deposited into managed accounts – from which they get an allowance to protect them from blowing it all at once – so they look at endorsements as “walking around” money.
• Musicians are generally pretty easy to work with, unless they are in the middle of launching a new album or a new tour, in which case they will already have a bunch of sponsors lined up.
• Reality TV stars will generally do anything for money and in many cases will value the credibility they gain from endorsing a business.

The other dimensions to consider are amount of exposure (i.e. internet only, TV, personal appearances), length of endorsement period, exclusivity and amount of actual physical work required by the celeb (i.e. do they have to show up to a photo shoot or make personal appearances out of town). Any of these could be a deal breaker for the celeb.

What is your plan for contacting the celebrity?

Unless you know the celebrity directly, you will have to go through some kind of intermediary. Here are the options, in order of preference:

1. Manager: This is the best person to talk to. They are generally business-minded and can tell you exactly what their client (who is often a close friend) will or won’t do and for how much money. Think of the manager as the COO of the celeb’s business.
2. Stylist: If you want a celeb to wear your products to an event, or to be photographed wearing them, your best bet is to hit up their stylist. Most stylists are in LA or NY and are fairly easy to track down.
3. Publicist: Publicists are a good way in because they generally don’t make a commission off the celeb’s earnings and are viewed by the celeb as someone who will not put the celeb into a compromising situation.
4. Lawyer: Lawyers tend to have long term relationships with their clients and are trusted advisors.
5. Agent: These are the easiest people to reach, as their job is to generate revenue for their clients. The flip side is that they will probably try to sell you a consulting engagement to “introduce you to a bunch of people around town”. In many cases they also still have to go through the manager, which means you are now working with two intermediaries.

How will you convince the celebrity to endorse your product?

Assuming you can sell the celebrity on the benefits of endorsing your product, you’ll inevitably end up talking turkey. In Hollywood, its simple: Money talks, bullshit walks – simply because there are so many polished bullshitters running rampant through the industry. Here are some things to consider when structuring the deal:

• Cash is king: It gives you the most leverage to ensure the services you need performed actually get done. You’ll be surprised how much you can get most mid-tier talent to do for $10-20,000.
• Equity is more complicated: You’ll argue valuation; you’ll need to draft a custom agreement; you’ll need approval from your board to issue stock. Only recommended if your company is extremely hot.

What else?

If you get through all of the above and net out that a celebrity endorsement is a good idea for marketing your business, remember that you will still need to pay for any direct media costs above and beyond the payments to the celebrity for their endorsement. It can substantially impact your overall customer acquisition costs.

Ca$h

Simply brilliant long-con caper movie starring Jean DuJardin and Jean Reno. The plot is similar to Ocean’s Eleven but with way more twists. Plus its set in Paris and on the Cote d’Azur, which beats Vegas any day.

Anthony Zimmer

This is the movie upon which The Tourist (starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie) was based. The short story is its 100x better than the Hollywood version with the added bonus that Sophie Marceau is not at all shabby to look at.

La Liste

If like me you wondered what happened to Eric Cantona after he retired from football, the answer is he got into acting. La Liste is probably his best effort to date. Really gripping all the way through.

36th Precinct

Any time you can get Daniel Auteil, Gerard Depardieu and Roschdy Zem into a movie its going to be wicked good and 36th Precinct doesn’t disappoint at all. Non-stop action set against a backdrop of the Paris banlieues.

Ultimate Heist

Very solid heist movie set in the South of France starring Jean Reno. Admittedly you could set anything in the South of France and it would look great but this one is particularly enjoyable.

Mesrine (Parts 1 & 2)

Based on the true story of France’s most infamous criminal, Jacques Mesrine, who committed an insane number of Robin Hood style crimes and escaped from prison multiple times. Superb performances by Vincent Cassell in both flicks.

Like #WhyDoPeopleThinkItsOkTo, #SomethingICantDealWith and #IAlwaysThinkAbout, all of which lasted just a day or two in September.

For marketers, its extremely hard to take advantage of these as by the time we’ve setup a Promoted Tweets campaign, the moment has passed.

But dig through the data (as I have been over the past month) and you’ll find trends that seem to have staying power. They may not make it into the top 10 national trends every day but they do trend in at least one major metro area on most days, which makes them interesting for marketers looking to understand and tap into the most active segments of Twitter’s audience.

Here are the top 10 Twitter Trends for September 2012, ranked by the number of days on which they trended in at least one major metro area in the US.

1. #nowplaying: (29 days) -
2. Bonanza: (26 days)
3. Cali: (26 days)
4. #job: (26 days)
5. #oomf:  (24 days)
6. #blessed: (23 days)
7. Facebook: (22 days)
8. Calm: (22 days)
9. Netflix: (21 days)
10. #news: (21 days)

Plenty of food for thought here for marketers, I think.

Walmart appears to be selling its suppliers promoted posts on its Facebook page, just like it sells its suppliers shelf space in store and half pages in their catalog. Yes folks, co-op marketing has arrived on Facebook.

Look no further than yesterday’s promoted post on Walmart’s page, on behalf of Colgate Optic White. It looks like a banner ad that Colgate would run on Aol or Yahoo:

Now check out another post from yesterday, this time on behalf of Wild Harvest’s Natural Bedding for hamsters, gerbils, rats and mice. If this seriously supposed to be an organic post, then heads need to start rolling in Walmart’s social media team.

In fact it looks like Walmart’s pet department had free reign of its Facebook page this weekend, with ads for Pennington Seed…

…and Purina’s Be Happy dog food:

Not to be outgunned, the Walmart beauty team snuck in their placement for L’Oreal makeup on Friday afternoon too, right before the dog food ad. Awkward!:

Snarking aside, while the execution clearly lacks finesse, in theory the approach Walmart is pioneering here has some merit. After all, the world’s largest retailer spends $39M/year on Facebook ads and has acquired a whopping 21M+ likes so far. Its distribution dwarfs that of the brands who are paying up for promotion on Walmart’s page:

• Wild Harvest appears to just be getting started, with a whopping 6 likes.
• Pennington’s Wild Seed has fewer than 6,000 likes.
• Purina’s Be Happy has a paltry 120,000 likes.
• Colgate has a respectable 1M likes on its main community page, however its Optic White brand is only currently big on Facebook Thailand.
• L’Oreal Paris has a fairly decent 1.5M likes.

The obvious next questions are, 1) how much is Walmart charging suppliers per post and 2) how much profit are they making on this?

Based on my experience running Adly, where we experimented with (and got banned for) selling posts by celebrities on Facebook, my guess is Walmart is charging at least $50,000 per post, if not more.

At Adly, we charged $7,000 for a post from a celebrity who at the time had about 2M likes.That was about 2 years ago, since which time the Facebook newsfeed has generally become more cluttered, leading to lower engagement.

However, Walmart has way more negotiating leverage with brands than Adly ever had and no doubt these promoted posts are tied to Walmart holding certain stock levels of product. Its a fairly easy decision for a CMO of a CPG brand to allocate dollars away from her own social media program towards Walmart’s, when its tied to sales of the product.

As for how much of the fees they are pocketing, my guess right now is the answer is zero.

If I was Walmart I would be re-investing 100% of the co-op fees into buying Sponsored Stories for these posts, as they would drive additional likes for Walmart. This not only subsidizes Walmart’s investment in Facebook ads but also enables them to raise the co-op fees as they grow their fan base.

This is how most supplier-funded co-op marketing programs operate when they first start out. However, over time as the retailer is able to raise fees without raising the costs of running the program, the marketing program turns into a profit-center. In fact, its this exact approach that enabled Amazon to achieve profitability a decade ago.

But wait, isn’t it against Facebook’s TOS to post 3rd party ads on your page?

According to Facebook’s TOS for Pages, “Third-party advertisements on Pages are prohibited”. Technically, Walmart is advertising 3rd party products on its page. However, when you are spending $39M per year with Facebook and Zuck comes down to schmooze you, I guess the TOS don’t apply. The bigger question is, can other retailers follow Walmart’s example here or will they get spanked by Facebook?

But this is a terrible user experience. Won’ t it hurt Walmart in the long run?

My guess is Facebook will soon enable Page admins to target posts by interests, in addition to the demographic targeting capabilities that were introduced a couple of months ago. This will put their Facebook co-op marketing efforts on par with their similar in-store programs, where for example promos for pet foods would be in the pet food section of the store. When this feature rolls out, it will actually enable Walmart to increase the number of promoted posts it sells per day.

As for Walmart’s competition, you can bet your bottom dollar that Target (with 19M likes) and Amazon (with 12M likes) are watching very closely to see how this unfolds.

1. When was the time you were most passionate about what you were doing?

I like this question because it cuts through the bullshit of prepared answers, gets the candidate to open up and eliminates the need for hiring manager and candidate to labor through an entire resume during an interview. As a hiring manager I’ve found it crucial to understand up front what kind of work excites my staff, so that I can give them work that makes them happy and productive. Let’s face it, everybody has had jobs they liked and jobs they didn’t, so this question really helps both the candidate and hiring manager quickly figure out if the role at hand is going to be the right fit.

2. What’s the biggest misconception that people have about you?

I like this question because it tests a candidate’s self awareness. A candidate who has trouble answering this question will have trouble fitting into the type of non-hierarchical, highly collaborative culture that is common in today’s knowledge-based workplaces. If a candidate says “I really don’t think there are any misconceptions about me”, its probably time to end the interview early.

3. What’s your favorite movie?

I like this question because it tests the candidate’s ability to think on their feet and quickly form an opinion. This is essential in fast moving industries, where we don’t always have the time to gather and analyze every piece of data and create that perfect powerpoint preso. In answering this question, it doesn’t really matter which movie the candidate likes, what matters it that they can quickly pick a movie and subsequently defend why they like it.

4. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made that you don’t regret?

I like this question because it demonstrates whether the candidate is aware of what they’ve learned from their past mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes at work, its impossible not to given the pace at which markets move. A candidate who gives a good answer here is one who is not going to get discouraged when the company hits a rocky spot, rather is going to look at it as an opportunity to develop further.

5. If you joined us as <insert job title> tomorrow, what would you like to have accomplished in 3 years?

I like this question and usually leave it to last because it tests how much the candidate has thought about what they can really contribute once they are in the door. Many candidates focus way too hard on impressing the hiring manager with their own achievements and way too little on what the job itself entails. Getting a job is a little like getting married – its less about the wedding and more about the marriage itself. If they can’t seen themselves in the job they aren’t going to hit the ground running once you hire them.

The decision to have a minimum bid seems to be driven by one or more of the following 3 myths:

• Myth #1: “If we don’t have a minimum bid, everyone will bid $0.01 and we’ll make no money.”
• Myth #2: “If we don’t have a minimum bid, our sales people will lose sales to the self serve channel.”
• Myth #3: ”If we don’t have a minimum bid, we’ll attract a bunch of shitty advertisers.”

The reality is all of the above are bullshit and should be obvious given that the three largest self serve ad platforms ever created (Google Adwords, Facebook Ads and Microsoft AdCenter) each have minimum bids of a penny, each are making more than a billion dollars per year and each have huge direct sales and online sales sales organizations successfully co-existing.

However, given that we still have hold outs like AOL Sponsored Links at a $0.15-$0.50 min bid and LinkedIn Ads at an astonishing $2.00(!), here are the 4 reasons why they need to let go.

1. Minimum bids discourage innovation.

All of the most successful self serve ad platforms in the history of online advertising scaled because of the early adopter entrepreneurs, who sensing an opportunity to create value, dived in head first: For Overture and AdWords it was SEM shops like Efficient Frontier (now part of Adobe) and iProspect; For Facebook it was Ads API partners like TBG Digital and AdParlor; For Twitter its going to be a new breed of social agency. There’s no way these entrepreneurs would have dived in had the minimum bids been $0.50 as there’s simply no margin for innovation as a 3rd party.

2. Minimum bids lock out entire customer segments.

Imagine Facebook Ads had started off with $0.50 minimum bid it. It would never have got off the ground. The early advertisers on the platform in 2008-09 were social games developers like Zynga and Playfish. Game development was in its infancy, nobody knew how much a user was worth. It was crucial that game developers be able to acquire users as cheaply as possible in order to provide enough of a runway to optimize the payback period. Fast forward to today and its the same story all over again on Facebook, this time on mobile. Marketers are still figuring out how much an iOS app install is worth. Without a minimum bid, marketers can experiment cost efficiently. Its crucial to figuring out what the inventory is worth.

3. Minimum bids cost you coverage.

Not all user targets generate the same ROI, so having a minimum bid prices the market out of covering all your inventory. In paid search, there are generally two types of queries – informational and commercial. Commercial searches have always been very competitive, due to users having high intent to purchase immediately. Informational searches used to have virtually no competition, as marketers saw lower click-to-conversion rates that did not justify the $0.10 min bids that Google and Overture used to have. But once those bid floors were eliminated, marketers started to see that they could use informational queries to drive the user to a more content-rich landing page and from there into the purchase funnel.

4. Minimum bids keep your sales team focused on the right customers.

A common objection from your sales team is that if there’s no minimum bid on the self serve platform, the salespeople won’t be able to sell at rate card. There are a couple of reasons why this is completely wrong. Firstly, if the client is willing to use the self serve platform instead of going through a salesperson, clearly that salesperson is adding no value and should be directed towards clients that aren’t willing to self serve. Secondly, having an active marketplace of self serve advertisers creates a baseline eCPM below which salespeople cannot sell because their clients’ campaigns will no deliver.

First of all, realize you’re not alone. Engagement rates have been trending downwards across the board since fan pages first launched two years ago. In fact, the latest studies reveal that most brands only see around 1% of their fans engaging on Facebook.
The good news is there are a few tactics you can easily deploy to immediately improve engagement.

1. Post After 11am Local Time.
From looking through dozens of different pages, it seems that users are more inclined to like, comment or share content from mid-morning through the end of the day, than they are first thing in the morning.

Perhaps the morning is for checking the news, getting the kids to school or just focusing on their real job – who knows – the data just point to increased goofing off at work/school/home engagement after 11am.

Be sure to look at your Page Insights to see in which cities you have the most fans. For example, if your fans are predominantly east coasters you’ll want to post after 11am EST, whereas if they’re left coasters you’ll want to adjust to PST.

2. Post Photos. Not Links.
Conventional wisdom has been to post links to content on your site. After all, you want to drive people to check out your product, right? Wrong! Users apparently prefer to stay on Facebook rather than visiting your site. Its the complete opposite of search.

The conspiracy theorists will tell you that Facebook somehow penalizes linking out as part of a master plan to control the world. Whether that’s true or not, if you want to be successful on their platform its better to play with them, not against them.

Posting photos seems to consistently drive the highest levels of engagement. But not just any photos. Users have emotional responses to photography. A photo that is unique, well framed and high quality will get more likes and comments than one that is stock, poorly lit or blurred.

3. Post No More Than 2x per day.
Facebook is not Twitter. Posting throughout the day does not work at all. In fact the data points to a 50% fall off in engagement with each additional post on a given day.

So if you’ve linked your Twitter account to your Facebook page, unlink it now! Twitter posts have no business being on Facebook.

4. Enlist The Help Of Your Top Fans.
This one is a little trickier, but well worth the effort. In general, you’ll find that 5-20% of your total fans have at one point engaged with your content in the newsfeed.

Within this group you’ll find a sub-group of highly active fan who are responsible for generating at least 50% of the total engagement on your page. If you can enlist this group to be your connectors (e.g by reaching out to them directly and creating a Facebook Ambassador program) and grow the group over time, you will grow your overall engagement.

As a page admin, you can identify your top fans via Facebook’s Open Graph API. You’ll need some basic coding and data handling skills to get the data into an actionable format. If you don’t know how to do it, contact me and I’ll walk you through it.

5. Acquire New Fans Who Are More Likely To Engage.
In your page insights you can see the age and gender segments of your total fan base and of your fan base that is Talking About This. If you see a segment with a higher percentage Talking About This than in the overall fan base, then you have found your sweet spot.

Simply run a Facebook ad campaign targeting the sweet spot and you will gain fans who are more likely to engage with your page.