Archive for March, 2008

Social media like LinkedIn and Facebook provide for more segmented and relevant marketing, through their intensive and extensive mapping of personal interest.

Unfortunaltely, they are all focused on American standards and the English language, which are limiting the potensial results for e.g. Scandinavian advertisers.

Let me give som examples:

Linkedin.com segment their users in American business sizes. The interval 1-10 employees are their lowest segment, in essence defining a startup company. In NOrway the business sizes are different, because the amunt of people in the nation is smaller, making the markets smaller too.

If I was to market startups I would like to target companies with 1-2 employees, maybe 1-3, not any more. Combine that with the linkedin parameter “Owner” and we have a good case.

The reason for me reacting to this, is that I and an email dialog with linkedin.com about a markleting campaign, and their price were 6 times what we normally pay. Their reason was better targeting, which could have been the case, but for Norwegian startups it really isn’t.

Another case is Facebook. They have very good segemntation on age, that give me value, but the interest section doesn’t give any utility. Why is that? Because Norwegian users use Norwegian terms, and such does not fit into the English language categorizing supplied by Facebook. I can guarantee that there are thousands of Norwegian Facebook users interested in Business, but that’s not the term we use… The consequence is that Facebook cannot offer me the targeting value of interest that it can in English speaking markets.

Will something change? Norwegians have the highest interenet penetration in the world (88%) and the second highest Facebook penetration (22+ %) in the world, only beaten by Canada. Unfortunately we’re only 1.000.000 millon users and 4.5 million people, so we are rather small in absolute numbers…

On behalf of Web Analytics Association Finland, I’m glad to say that WAA Finland official website is now live (as beta). Check out the site at http://waafinland.com. If you have any recommendations or development ideas regarding the website, events and WAA Finland operation, please contact Country Manager Kalle Heinonen. Last WAW event on February was a big success with approximately 80 people attending and the high conversion rate of feedbacks.