Facebook Advertising Supper Club Recap

Last week I organized a revival of the WebInno Supper Club – a dinner gathering of a dozen or so entrepreneurs and operators who want to connect to discuss and share experiences focused on a specific topic .  The discussion on “Facebook Advertising” over pizza and beers was a very in-depth and engaging one given that we had a number of online marketing practitioners who had tangible experience to share with the entire group.

A few of the lessons and takeaways which I drew from the discussion were:

1. Creative matters even more in Facebook Ads when compared to other online channels like affiliate programs and Google Adwords.  It’s all about the images – faces are especially drive much higher response rates, as do maps, and not surprisingly, “sensational” images.  Also, Ads which talk about or mention Facebook or the internet broadly receive much higher conversion figures – even if the tie between those and the subject is very loose.
2. Facebook as a channel is cheaper comparatively than other online channels, but it is much more labor intensive.  However, depending on target metrics, it often can result in much lower conversion rates on the back end because users are still in “browse mode” mindset.
3. The “Sponsored Stories” are definitely the newest and most effective ad units in Facebook, but access to them are being limited to those brands with 50K likes or more.

For this discusion, we had a great set of folks that joined us:

• HOST - David Beisel, Found of Web Innovators Group, Partner at NextView Ventures
• Aaron Dunn, x-Dir Product Marketing, Box.net
• Alex Nauda , Architect, Time Inc.
• Ben Jabbawy, Founder, Privy
• Brian Balfour, Co-Founder, Boundless Learning
• Cappy Popp, Founder & Principal, Thought Labs
• Charles Johnson, Manager, SCVNGR
• Dave Campbell, Co-Founder, Giving Something
• Jason Pavel, Director of Marketing, TurningArt
• Jeff Sable, VP Sales, Moontoast
• Jeffrey Peden, Founder, Crave Labs
• Peter Wexler, Sr Dir Strategic Partnerships, TrialPay
• Phil Jacob, Hacker Entreprneur, 
• Randy Parker, President, SMBApps LLC
• Will Sulinkski, Head of Product, Shareaholic
• SPONSOR - Greg Hoffmeister, Managing Director, T3 Advisors

All of us gathered around a table as one big group to discuss… I posted a couple photos on Flickr.

Look for more WebInno Supper Club events coming up in 2012 around additional subject areas.  If you have an idea for a particularly engaging topic, please reach out and suggest it: david at web innovators group dot com.

And don’t forget that our next large group quarterly WebInno event is on March 5th: http://webinno33.eventbrite.com/.