The social media class I am currently taking got the opportunity to Skype with Dennis Yu today. Dennis Yu is the CTO of Blitz Metrics. If you are not familiar with Blitz Metrics, it is a site that collects and monitors content from social media for your brand. By collecting and monitoring content you are able to improve your engagement with consumers and know what content you are creating and/or sharing is the most successful. It also allows you to create custom reports from the data collected, figure out which demographic is most active for your brand and assist in expanding your reach. Blitz Metrics is a dashboard concept that puts all of above information together in one place, so that it is easily accessible. To learn even more about what Blitz Metrics can do for you, check out their website: http://blitzmetrics.com/
Dennis Yu did not focus a lot on the Blitz Metrics information I just shared, but that was okay with me. He let us in on some of what is going on behind the scenes of Facebook and options that aren’t so well known. I had no idea all of the things that Facebook could do for targeting audiences and advertising. Yu introduced us to graph search on Facebook, which is available to everyone, but none of us had checked it out yet. I officially think graph search is awesome. It allows you to narrow down to such a specific audience, so specific I didn’t even think you could be that specific. He showed us an example of this by searching for friends of our professor (Dr. Freberg), who are 40 years old and like ice cream, but no results were found. He let us know that this does happen and you can be too specific sometimes but you just have to try and if it does happen, just take the last characteristic you added off.
Yu shared with us a personal story of something that happened to his friend and what he did to help him out through advertising on Facebook. He referred to it as the manipulation of media and I just love that term. I had never considered manipulation and media but once you really think about it, they often go hand and hand. But back to the story, his friend was basically being jerked around at a dealership, it sounded like, and Yu told his friend to write an article about it and he did. Well Yu took the article link and made it into an advertisement through a site like www.powereditor.com and shared it on Facebook. I couldn’t believe it was as cheap as only $5 to sponsor an ad on Facebook for every thousand times you share or promote the ad. But through targeting the correct audience Yu’s friend received a call the very next day about getting his car fixed and of course they asked him to remove the negative advertisement. The power of advertising never ceases to amaze me. Below is a screen shot I took of Yu showing us how to select the target audience
There is a couple of other things that don’t go directly with the topics I’ve just discussed that Yu told us about but they were just so interesting I had to share them with you all. Yu got to have lunch with Mark Zuckerberg! How many people can say they get a call to have lunch with Mark Zuckerberg? Okay, it’s probably more than I think, but still that’s just awesome. Another thing is that with any other social media site you cannot go as in depth into data as you can with Facebook, because they just don’t the amount Facebook has. Also, a really random fact is that if Nike is your client, you cannot let it be known that Nike is your client. I was floored by that information as well-known as the brand is. Probably the coolest thing that Yu showed us was that everyone on Facebook as an i.d. number and through that number it can be determined how long you’ve been on Facebook. If you remove the www from a person’s Facebook account and simply put in their i.d. number their account will still come up too! Also, you would think Mark Zuckerberg would have the very first Facebook account, but he doesn’t, he is actually account four and accounts one through three just don’t exist. Needless to say I learned an awful lot from this guest lecture! Thank you to Dennis Yu and Dr. Freberg! Follow them both on Twitter at: @kfreberg and @dennisyu.
Rachel Cleary 