I’ve really loved Apple’s Screen Time feature. It’s got me paying more attention to what I’m doing and being a little more intentional with the way I use some of the different apps I’ve come to rely on. One thing it’s taught me is that I spend way too much time on Quora.

I wrote up an answer to a question earlier today about buying Instagram ads that didn’t target your followers and it got me thinking about something I’ve noticed a lot over the course of the last year.

A lot of really smart people still buy Instagram ads directly through the Facebook business manager. I realized that I hadn’t done that in a really long time, and that I hadn’t seen a ton of great posts about how you can avoid doing that.

There are a few situations where you might want to do this. I can think of two.

The first is that you’re trying to grow a presence on Instagram, not just extract value from the ads manager. In that case, you might want to expand the types of people who are following you.

If you want to take the posts that you already have, and make them more popular, you should be doing it this way.

The second is that if you’re trying to drive traffic through a funnel (and already have something like dynamic advertising set up) you might find that this approach allows you to better identify traffic from any one given audience source.

Before we get started, it’s important to make sure a few things are true.

1. you need to be using an instagram business account on your phone.
2. that insta business account needs to be connected to a business facebook page.
3. that business facebook page needs to be connected to an advertising account that has been used at least once with the instagram account placement.

First, you’ll need to create a post object by creating a post. While you can do this programmatically or via the Ads Manager interface, I think it’s best to do it natively on the platform. You’re probably pretty familiar with that, but if not, just grab your phone, open the app, hit new post, find a photo or take a picture and post to instagram!

For the purposes of this answer, I’m using a photo I have from a walk I took this morning. It’s not great but it’ll get the job done!

Next, we’ll do something many serious instagram marketers cringe at, we’re going to promote this photo — directly from our profile! To do that, you’ll need to navigate back to your profile where you should see the picture we just uploaded. (If not, pull down to refresh the page, you’ll see it right away!)

Select your photo to expand it, and tap the blue “Promote” button.

You’ll be taken to a page where you are presented with three options you can select from to promote your post.

Here you can select your outcome. If you’re used to advertising on Facebook, I think these three campaign types are pretty similar to “Likes” “Clicks” and “Reach” campaigns from Facebook. They aren’t exactly the same, and we’re going to make some changes later on, but it’s a reasonable way of approaching them.

I almost always select profile views.

I do this because content people like to engage with is more likely to generate engagement from people who interact with the people who are like the ones I am targeting.

This is important!

It’s not a “given” that the people who you can reach with your advertising are the people who are going to buy your product. The people who are active on these platforms spread the information they collect to people who are less active. I like to think of this as being very similar to the way that we often get recommendations for books and movies and the like from the people who we are around. You can spend a lot of time exploring this idea, and a few people have. It’s worth getting into if you’re interested but more than I can post about here.

Whatever your objective, make sure you’ve taken the time to understand how it will contribute to the business objective you are trying to accomplish by advertising in the first place!

When you’ve selected your campaign, you’ll be asked to choose your target.

I guess I can understand why the default might be to target people like your followers, it really does make sense if you’ve spent a lot of time building out a good sample of people for the platform to model a lookalike audience from.

I think the trouble is, a lot of people just don’t have followers like that. I know that my first 100 followers or so on my business account were all friends and acquaintances of mine from different stages of my life up until the point I had started my new venture. While it was nice that many of those people were supportive, they weren’t really representative of who my customers might be and who I was trying to help!

In some cases, “Local” might work out OK for you! Facebook has a ton of great location data to work with, so you can feel reasonably confident in the people it will target. If you just need to reach people in the area, this is a handy enough feature. It’s a good way to start to experiment with the tool.

However, to really get the most out of your campaign, it’s best to build your own target and then, once it’s approved, edit it in the business manager.

Let’s do that now!

I’ve noticed this tool is a little unstable.

You can pick about three locations. You can edit in a lot more than that later.

You can pick about four interests. You can edit pretty much everything else about that later.

If you’re working with a brand or a business, you’ll likely have an age, demographic and location target in mind already.

If you’re experimenting or trying to learn more, you’ll want to find places to advertise where you don’t break your budget. Facebook prices media differently in different places, so you may be able to find some savings as you explore the globe.

In different parts of the world, people use the internet in slightly different ways. You should expect to encounter all sorts of things. But, I suppose that’s true of many ad campaigns.

Once you’ve made your initial selections, tap to move to the budget screen.

Once you’ve made your selection, you tap forward once more to view the confirm payment screen.

Now, close instagram and wait for awhile.

Before too long, you’ll get a notification that your ad was approved. That’s great, now you’re ready to switch to facebook!

Navigate to Facebook Business Manager (business.facebook.com) and look for the ad account linked to your instagram account.

Once you find it, click and open it in a new window.

you won’t be able to edit everything about this post from business manager. If you edit too much, it seems to get unhappy. However, I’ve noticed that it really doesn’t mind subtle changes to placements and that sort of thing. My hunch is that since you’re using saved audiences inside of the Instagram promotion tool, it doesn’t mind it if the audience definition updates, it just quietly updates right alongside it.

Here’s the edit view from one of my recent posts. That’s an OK sized audience, but I bet we can get more out of it. Let’s start by editing some of the countries we targeted.

You can’t actually exclude instagram followers from business manager, but you can exclude people who are connected to your facebook page, which might be the same thing. To do that, scroll down and take a look at the connections section.

Once you’ve made your changes, select update to save.

Facebook should tell you that your changes have been made and that the updated audience will be applied to your adset.

Now, I’m going to fiddle with a few more things.

First, I’m creating an ad for a post I’ve already advertised, so I’ll need to update the budget and date setting.

Easy enough, ooo, let’s check out this Instagram story placement!

Alright, now we just hit publish and…

Oh no!

Maybe it’s the instagram story placement. Turn that off, and….

You’ll be in business.

—

Over the course of how ever long you set this thing up to run for, it’ll do what you asked with the updated audience. You can also recycle that updated audience in the future from the phone directly with new posts.

I’ve been doing it this way, since December or so…so I figured that was as good a sign as any it was time to share.

As I’ve experimented, I’ve noticed that’s really helpful if you post a lot of one type of content. (In my case, it was flower photos :| ) as you build a relationship with that particular audience segment, you’ll find that you can get better results with each passing attempt.

I suspect that because this really only lets you edit the date and the audience, it’s not really something you can go too wild with, but it does make instagram ads a lot more powerful because it makes it easy to promote a post while preserving its social proof, and for some teams, that can be a big deal.

They say that every major industry has a player who works for more than the good of their bottom line. Large players that have achieved scale, the saying goes, have a responsibility to grow by nurturing the industry backdrop against which they have come to prominence.

As we had a few hours of intermittent Facebook outages this morning, I’ve had a bit of time to step back and reflect on what something like this standard might look like in a morally ambiguous space like Marketing.

I thought a little about the growing outrage over Dove’s most recent misstep in its otherwise widely heralded “Real Beauty” campaign.

I am a firm believer in Dove: but I have always hated this campaign.

I’ll spare the diatribe, but my reasoning goes something like this. If a brand wants to make a claim that it’s working to change the discrepancies in the way its target audience views itself, then it ought to follow through on the hype with a little bit of product re-positioning.

If you’ve ever walked through a hygiene products aisle, you may have a sense for what I’m talking about. There you’ll find more permutations of a virtually identical offering from Unilever than one can reasonably inventory. (I happen to visit my grocery store during the nightly restocking, so I’ve measured this, too.)

The trouble is, that a brand this size gets heralded as being “part of the solution,” while it gets to continue the problematic behavior that created the status quo in the first place.

This isn’t kind of doublespeak doesn’t just happen in this one case. We’ve redefined terms like “authenticity” or “genuine” to refer to a set of behaviors that are readily manufactured. We’ve gotten caught up in conflating “real” moments with our best moments.

And those actions have effects on users writ-large. Scores of voices caution against taking the content you find on a friend’s Instagram seriously. That’s the trouble, we’re the trouble.

I don’t know what the answer to this is, and the truth is that I don’t know that there is one: but I do have a bit of advice.

I try to take a moment before I push anything to more than 1,000 people (which…is well below the floor I usually set for any target,) to reflect on what it is I’m saying and what expectations it is I’m playing with.

It’s only ever a few minutes, and it won’t change the world, but at least for that brief span of time, somebody is thinking about the outcome.

If we all did a little more of that, I think the world would be a much brighter place.

I never quite had the sort of undergraduate experience of which great stories of studious behavior might be told. In fact, of all the metrics one might use to evaluate the success of failure of a course of study, there is really only one that I found worth remembering. It was the measure of the number of credit hours attempted.

My efforts began earnestly enough. I had finished High School a year early, and having learned that time spent studying was more a measure of boxes checked, I was motivated to continue that effort forward. I knew that the requirements were graduation were finite. 120 semester hours across a number of predefined categories. A bit of learning here, a bit of focus there. While each path wasn’t precisely certain, there was enough commonality amidst the requirements to know that I could begin “checking boxes” as I looked to better define what it was I was interested in doing. I didn’t wait for the formal beginning of what was to be my first fall semester. Instead, I set about fulfilling the requisite coursework in formal reasoning. I sat out to prepare myself for what I had anticipated would become a rigid course load by beginning to rectify the short comings in my own education in Mathematics. My days that summer came to have a comfortable cadence to them. Each morning I would wake up and begin, almost immediately, to update myself on any new movements in the world of music. I would look for bands releasing new albums. I would look for new work by writers I knew about. After spending an hour or two so engaged, I would devote a block of four hours to my coursework. When in the course of that work, I stumbled into something worth considering, I would re-balance my efforts so that I could devote as large a portion of time to wrestling with ideas that were new and overwhelming as long at it took to ensure that they weren’t. When I found what felt like “a point” or something that I knew would be of use in subsequent seasons of my life, I lost interest in the effort. I would then balance again, as I could feel I was working against a deficit. The pace was grueling, but I didn’t once stop to reflect that the level of engagement I was demonstrating was to run cross-purpose with the performance that is expected of rising learners engaged in formal study. I didn’t bother to think about how such a frenzied effort to pursue a path of devotion to reasoning out in one’s mind could so easily become the sort of fixation that obfuscates one’s ability to engage with many of the other enjoyable things that make up a richly lived (and fittingly examined) life.

Such a level of activity is finite. There is a limit to the number of 16 hour days one can work. As one can feel the close beyond the narrow window of opportunity enjoyed by many a youth, this truth can take on a more and more tyrannical tone. Still, I struggled on. By the time I had finished my prescribed course of study, I had attempted 240 semester hours — double the requirement for an undergraduate. I came to understand why that number was half as high as what I had tried to achieve — I never wanted to read another thing written by a serious thinking person ever again. To tell you the truth, I didn’t, either — at least not for the space of nearly one solid year. The trouble was, I couldn’t as readily shed the impact that attempt had on my lifestyle. I had a home full of books. Wall to wall shelves in a dining room that, save a table and a simple set of speakers was otherwise entirely empty. I had collected a great cross-section of humanity, and all who entered my home would have to pass through this room to get to anything else. My past interests were so prominently displayed, that I could no more hide it than I might suppress the many plain and precious truths I had gleaned from my examination of lives lived throughout time. I would get questions from friends and visitors that would require me to reflect on what I had learned. Sometimes, they were questions about technical things like how one might measure this or isolate that. Other times, they were questions of detailed and methodical process. Of the history of process. On rare and cherished occasions, they were long conversations about a feeling.

On these and many other topics, I was dutiful participant, offering up what I could to point someone in the direction of something they may find of benefit. On rare occasion, I would note with a tinge of envy the enthusiasm for an idea each person I interacted with seemed to have. I could match that enthusiasm in my mind. I could understand it. I had seen it once, and I had read about others who had seen it before. I could readily explain when one thing happened, what impact it had on a selection of acolytes and how an idea was reacted to by those who were reacting to it. If the topic were one in which I had amassed a bit of breadth, I could even anticipate what a reaction or objection would likely be. By reflecting a bit on the probability of any one reaction, I could predict with a good measure of certainty what input I should make to keep an interaction moving forward. I could understand all sorts of reactions, but I couldn’t feel it.

I knew I couldn’t go on in that way. I knew that the fruits of such an effort would be an empty and a barren life. I knew I didn’t want that. As such, learning to decide to react to a development in my own voice, readily became a chief focus of mine. It became a new focus. I stepped back, and in an effort to determine what had been lost, I asked myself what had changed between the time I last felt as though I were able to accomplish such a thing and now. I remembered that I had spent a tremendous amount of time consuming cultural material in my youth.

As a middle-schooler, I and a few close associates would leave school as quickly as we could and spend six or seven hours an evening practicing guitar. In High School, I had replaced that level of fervor with a study of reading and writing, which had in turn lead me to where I began my undergraduate studies. In the time I wasn’t working on those efforts, I was consuming in earnest catalogs across the world’s great libraries of film and television. Towards the end of those studies, I had turned the same level of attention to identifying the sourcing of each product I consumed in my daily life. Whatever the task, when I would find a thing, I would devour it in earnest. I would look at it in its own rules and try and decide how it worked. When I would find a pattern (whether in a system or in work of the arts,) I would decide how it could best be applied. This reflection was no different. Working along that process, I wondered if there wasn’t something to the sorts of content I had been consuming. When I would engage with a thing simply, because it brought me enjoyment and for no other reason, I would often learn a great number of things. I set out to test this.

I still remember my first book. I began, by reading Garrison Keillor’s Homegrown Democrat. It was simple. It was conversational. It was about a serious thing and written with none of the gravity oh so many ascribe to such topics.

And, when I finished it, I made sure to find a copy of every spoken word bit of story telling he had released. I noted the deceptive simplicity in the structure of weaving a story together from a bunch of disparate threads. When I had finished with it, I again faced my earlier problem. Knowing I needed to keep my efforts, but not knowing where, when and how to go about it.

I found a collection online of Ian Fleming’s early Bond books, and danced my way through the poorly OCR’d words — only ever pausing occasionally to reconstruct a badly garbled sentence. The words were light and the visuals were not overly wrought.

The content was readily digestible.

I should spare you the full accounting, but from here, I dove deeper into the pulp crime and science fiction genres. I read what only few short seasons earlier, I would have decried as trash.

As I worked from bit of pulp to even pulpier pulp, I didn’t stop to worry about deeper messages or ‘problematics.’ In fact, I worked to consciously silence that impulse, as I had found that the voice one uses to critique a thing, all too often reveals what one was coming to that thing with the expectation of finding in the first place. I was interested in what Aaron Copland called “the sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself.”

I have long wondered about what series of events might need to conspire to write a seminal text like “Weather Prediction By Numerical Process.” To collect an array of insights like:

“W. V. Ekman in 1905 pointed out, with reference to the sea when a steadystate has been attained, that the total momentum, produced by a tangential stress onthe surface, is directed at right angles to the stress, and is equal in magnitude to thestress divided by 2w sin(f). Thus the momentum produced by the stress is quiteindependent of the value of the viscosity or of its variation with height. This istrue provided that the quadratic terms in the dynamical equations produce only anegligible disturbance, and that will be so if we take, as our standard of what themomentum would be in the absence of stress, not the wind deduced from the isobaric map, but the actual upper wind.”

and to reassemble them, considered as parts of a functioning whole.

I had occasion to return to this work this morning, prompted in part by a reminder that it would take more than thirty years for Lewis Richardson’s work to become actionable. The computing power simply wasn’t there to work through the necessary calculations in a time that could produce actionable projections for the people who might find such a thing useful.

Why might someone then set out to create such a thing? A thing that could only ever service the horizon of progress. Such techniques weren’t novel. They had been employed in the past by scores of early meteorologists including Cleveland Abbe, who Wikipedia tells me had come to be known as “Old Probability,” no doubt in large part due to his ability to utilize patterns others found difficult to engage with in sum. It was likely these very calculations that lead to Robert C. Miller’s efforts to organize a warning system for tornadoes — an effort that no doubt was responsible for the saving of an untold number of lives.

I have come to observe that such a problem is commonplace — particularly in our current times of hyper-exposure to information. Some are able to digest these large expanses of knowledge. They are able to discern trends and from those trends derive principles that help them to accomplish things that to many are entirely inaccessible — and in some respects, I am certain, downright magical. The practice, of course, is often anything but. It was that simple truth that lead me to rediscover a fondness for what many would dismiss as “bad” writing. To some, many of what have become my favorite texts wouldn’t even be called “writing” at all. I think that’s something delightful.

From time to time these little complexities, so brilliantly couched in simplicity are discovered only to be quickly forgotten, as the work goes on. Two commonly cited examples of this might be re-reading the Alice series against the backdrop of a critique of the culture of Oxford or recognizing that Izzak Walton’s The Compleat Angler is more than a book on the simple joys of fishing.

These are but a few of the rich opportunities for engagement that surround us. “Back To The Future,” raises questions that are worth asking about time. A cartoon marketing gimmick works to make a deep conversation about the nature of reality far more palatable to an audience of people who should, at the very least, understand that it is occurring.

When we work in ways that are ordered, it is easy to identify what job needs to be accomplished. We spend so much time obsessing about the things that we do not know that one can quickly reduce life to a finite window of time with which one can check a certain number of boxes. We can do what we can make space for, and no more or no less.

There are other things. Some of those things are far more engaging than all but an astute observer (be it one prone to describing in numbers or in words, in tones or against a backdrop of experimentation) might have occasion to react to. It isn’t always simple to know where you’ll find something that makes you feel alive, but what I learned as I came back to “pulp,” was that it was more important to spend the time looking for it. What you find won’t always be immediately useful, but the path you’ll take to get there will help to put your experiences back into the context of all the other sorts of experiences people have had over the span of history. It gives you a language to go back too — and that is near universally accessible.

Originally published at stem2steamatmines.blogspot.com on October 11, 2017.

I’ve loved Facebook’s On This Day tool ever since Jonathan Gheller told us all that it existed.

If you’re having one of those days like I am where you feel the urge to have nostalgia about the techniques facilitating nostalgia, you’re more than welcome to start with the announce here and work your way back. There’s also Jillian D'Onfro ‘s delightful look at the way the widget works. aaand I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention Christine Lariviere for her exquisitely wonky dive on nostalgia.

This morning, as I was taking my first glance through my feed I was reminded of a time I asked Steve Forbes an in-artful question about digital transformation.

Tangent: If you really want to wonk out, I uploaded a rough bootleg at the time.

I vaguely remember being incredibly concerned about the ways in which one could manage the increasing tendencies of platforms to prioritize natively posted content over other methods of hosting. I remember being concerned by the way in which organizations would adapt to a media landscape that was more about who we were reaching and what we were saying to them when we did it.

Everything was newer then. There weren’t as many people talking about the importance of paying attention to the basics like how long users were using your product or how you might use that information to change the way you crafted your product or service’s messaging funnel.

There weren’t as many people talking about the same handful of phrases and expressing the same laments about being overworked, about long hours and platforms that were evolving faster than anyone could really hope to stand up real process around.

It was easier to try new things, because good ideas people hadn’t tried before took time. It’s hard to remember now, but there was an era where you couldn’t just add zip codes into Facebook en masse. Believe it or not, there was a time when you might have been excited to discover the Twitter lead card.

But those times seem to have faded.

I’m not the first to write something like this, but as I look at the landscape today, I see a handful of features that I think are worth taking a moment or two to reflect on. Specifically, I want to talk about three ideas that I used to hear about a lot more frequently than I do now. I think that’s a shame.

The first thing: I remember when assembling a target took work. One might expect to spend weeks working out little measurements using small ads with test budgets and carefully curated lists one spent hours painstakingly managing in Google Sheets.

That ability has proved itself useful in a boundless number of contexts. When you’re working with ad platforms that are still developing their capabilities, it’s a benefit. When you’re working to tease out the volume of real users in an audience, it’s a benefit. When you’re working to develop a user testing program, it can help you to manage your recruitment efforts. When you’re looking to validate a market it can help you to identify perspectives that you hadn’t noticed before.

It’s possible that an entire generation of emerging marketing leaders won’t ever learn this skill as now the process is far more automated. That’s a real shame.

The second thing I remember quite fondly was the way in which each bit of decision making about what people liked was made by watching what they said and assuming they were smart enough to mean it.

I didn’t notice this one change — but I did notice when it had.

Early on, I remember lots of folks saying things about just how important it was to start off any project by taking the time to work through scores of answer boards, forums and twitter posts to find what people really cared about.

Everyone seemed so excited by the prospect of being able to get closer to true 1:1 messaging. It wasn’t about the efficiency or the cost per engagement, it was about the person and the business and their relationship.

Those things aren’t easily lost once you replace them with perspectives you’ve gathered from sterile reports and user studies about tests you didn’t conduct yourself. They’re the context you’re missing when you read about the latest “bomb” strategy or tactics for getting that extra email sign up or the attention from that contact you’ve been chasing for weeks.

The problem with these one size fits all approaches is that they force your uses to conform to your process. That’s backward, and it ought to work the other way around.

There’s a good chance that you’ll need more than a handful of approaches to accommodate the four or five largest patterns in your data, but I can promise you it will be worth the extra effort.

The third thing I want to mention here that I think we’ve started to lose is the idea that our skillset is accessible to anyone willing to put in the work to figure out a new solution to a problem. It’s the idea that once you’ve done that you have an obligation to turn around and share that insight with the community that you have come to be a part of.

I remember the first time I knew I needed to deploy a campaign across multiple channels, for multiple clients at once. I didn’t know how to do that. I had done the parts of it before, but never all together, and never relying on the processes, tools and techniques I had come to know as “best practices.”

I needed counsel. I turned to the community.

I spent every second I could reading from the successes and failings of those who had gone before me. In so doing, I learned about new disciplines and new possibilities.

I didn’t need to sign up for a course or take a test.

I had to show up and put in the work.

There’s something magical about that simple truth, that the skills we all rely on every day aren’t magic — they’re things that we can learn. They’re there for anyone to adopt, to scrutinize to wrestle with and improve.

With time, I had mastered those skills and now I find myself frequently sharing that wisdom with others.

In so doing, I’ve noticed a growing number of folks who have come to believe that the only way to learn a subject as complex as that of the industry we find springing up about ourselves is to get involved with a course or to go back to school.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those things, and for many, many people they can represent a powerful way of learning — but learning through practice is one of the best experiences you can have in a career, and this is one of the few industries where it’s a realistic possibility.

If you aren’t sure how to grow a social media following, finding an underserved niche and spending two or three hours trying to figure out how to make things work is one of the fastest ways to start developing the skills you’ll need to thrive. When you run into trouble, stop and look around and see if anyone else has had the same trouble before.

When you do, you’ll find something. Even if you truly are out on your own, you’re almost certain to find scores of great pieces about what you can learn and what you should be thinking about.

Commanding those powerful insights enable you to quickly adapt to any change the landscape can throw at you. It works because it makes you a better marketer by making you a more informed professional.

I don’t know that these are the only lessons that are worth learning, but I do know that they’ve always provided me with a great bit of clarity as I’ve worked to find solutions to problems that don’t always have obvious answers. I’ll bet that in the next five years, they’ll help you, too.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading Mark Growth!

Three Things We’re At Risk Of Forgetting About What Drives Growth A Half Decade On was originally published in Marketing And Growth Hacking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I want to show you one of my favorite pieces of local content I saw this week.

I’m not going to be writing yet-another-piece about the issue at hand. There are plenty of other folks better qualified to doing just that. Still, before I get too far into this, I feel like it’s appropriate to point you towards a little bit of context.

If you want to get up to speed on the topic at hand, Kirk Mitchell has been doing a delightful job collecting updates on Twitter (and really has a great piece from November that outlines the basics.) I also want to shout out Danika Worthington’s delightful synthesis of questions about the power dynamic between radio ‘stations’ and ‘stars.’

There’s been a lot of coverage here, driven largely by the work of great local players talking about a story that was bound to have national intrigue. You could tell that a lot of folks hit the ground running, right at 8 on the first day of jury selection.

Tom McGhee on Twitter

Line of people waiting to get into Taylor Swift trial, some have boon here since 4:45 a.m.

I point this out, because the fine folks at 9News just put together what truly is one of my favorite content pieces of the last week, “WHY PEOPLE SAY THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE TAYLOR SWIFT TRIAL (BUT CLICK ON STORIES ABOUT IT ANYWAY)”

The piece makes a few interesting movements.

Allison Sylte on Twitter

Why people say they don't care about the #TaylorSwiftTrial (but it's the top traffic-driver on #9NEWS.com anyway) https://t.co/27kf5amq47

As the tweet suggests, Allison and the fine folks at 9News tracked down Hunted acclaimed author and local personality Max Wachtel to comment on why people would engage with content at the same time they were complaining about it.

In the article he is quoted as saying:

““So taking the time to click on the link, to say ‘I don’t care about this, why are you reporting on this?’ is a way of telling the world ‘I don’t really care about this’ even though I do.””

It was surprising to me to hear this answer from the source, because it’s one of those digital marketing truthisms that I’ve long worried we’ve said so often it’s lost gotten so divorced from the context in which it was originally uttered, it may be perilously close to running out of meaning. I myself have said it more times than I’d like to own up to.

It’s one of those lines like:

Because the corrupt system I helped build is no longer in anyone’s control. The manipulators are indistinguishable from the publishers and bloggers — the people we were supposed to be manipulating. (Ryan Holiday from TMIL)

That ends up running through the same treadmill most ideas in digital media are subject to. They start off insightful critiques, and before too long are parroted in the wrong way by well-meaning folks who are just trying to keep up with a media landscape that may be changing faster than one can plan a career around.

There’s probably still some truth to that old dynamic that’s long been a key tool in the kit in the growing body corpus of outrage marketers that are still making waves the world over.

Trouble is, it’s not the only truth out there, and if you focus on it you run the risk of missing important feedback signals like these:

When you’re working in the production of content, the comments section is actually one of the most insightful places to be. It’s like a pulse, really.

At a glance you can tell what’s working and what isn’t working. In part that’s because you can quickly sort out who has actually read the content and who hasn’t. You can follow the people that are tagged by their friends in a post. You can pay attention to the person who said something ridiculously insightful and was ignored for it. It’s one of the fastest ways to develop a meaningful understanding of the impact you’re having as an advertiser or as a publisher.

When you see a stack of reactions to a story, you expect to encounter 2–3 different takes. You should see people who agree with the bent of the content piece, and people who disagree with the direction the story was headed. You might see a similar schism occur in the reaction to the facts included in the piece, or the headline or really anything that reasonable people might disagree about.

That’s certainly happening here for the majority of consumers.

How do I know?

Facebook automatically defaults to ranking comments by popularity.

One would expect these numbers to breakdown on lines similar to any opinion polling conducted on the topic.

It’s hard to put that information back into context sometimes, but it’s not the only information that you have. Most websites track a variety of really basic things — and some of them aren’t actually tracked for advertising purposes. Putting that data back together is a serious challenge, but it can help to make better decisions about how to balance your resources.

I’ll give you a quick example.

You need to know how long it takes to load your website. That’s because the longer it takes to load your website, the less likely anyone is to actually wait around for it to happen. It’s useful in other cases, too. If your website were down, one of the first things you might notice is that it’s taking longer and longer to load.

To measure something like that, you also need to have a pretty good idea of how many people come to your website.

Once you have that information, you may decide to invest in resources that make it possible to understand more about the viewing habits of your visitors.

One you start down this path, there’s a very real temptation that many communications professionals succumb to — especially early on. It’s this idea that you should track everything you can. Even advocates of tracking lots of things like the fine folks at Amplitude caution early teams against doing this.

The reasons are varied, but one of the most important is that when you’re first starting out distributing your work online, you pay attention to everything. You watch comments like I mentioned above, but most of us are hungrier than that. We watch every new hit in the audience tracking, and explore until we can figure out what it might mean. The truth is, there’s a balance. You’ve got to learn how to maintain it.

Most of the time these little blips don’t mean anything, but the longer you work on it, the more you start to notice patterns. Some of those patterns drive change. In identifying them and finding out how to take advantage of them, you discover opportunities for growth that other people are missing.

One easy way to know what advertising/marketing technology a website is using is to take advantage of a browser plugin like the one offered by the fine folks at Ghostery.

If you were to do so, you’d find that the fine folks at 9News are tracking a lot of things.

The trouble is that once you’ve noticed a pattern that helps you to make sense of your data, it’s really hard to take a step back and see if there are other more likely explanations.

It’s easier to believe that “some people engage with content because they secretly like it,” than it is to accept that “the people who click my article aren’t always doing it to read it.”

But we know that happens, too.

One disadvantage of that particular content stack is that while it collects a goodly amount of data, it slows down the site to the point where it is unusable for a growing segment of users.

We know this from the comments like these:

Users who are posting comments like these happen to be of an interesting subset. When one clicks through it’s easy to notice that a growing percentage of people who are experiencing these problems are local to Colorado — 9News’s home viewing market.

That’s a pretty indication that those are the sorts of users who are likely to visit the site frequently. Those people are more likely to engage with a wider variety of content. That’s why it’s also an indicator that traffic results may be skewed by an uptick in traffic from out-of-market viewers.

The extent to which 9News should compete to produce content that resonates nationally versus the amount of resources they should devote to covering local stories isn’t the kind of thing that can just be “decided:” it’s likely a very delicate balance. But the extent to which local viewers and national viewers have different interests in a current event is something you can measure.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing a good job of producing the kind of pieces that get picked up at the next level up the coverage ladder. At the same time, it’s equally important to keep your commitment to serve the people who are your regular, bread and butter customers, with the experience they expect on a regular basis.

You have to be willing to break your audience up in to parts. No amount of advertising or marketing technology can do that for you. Sure you can integrate your tracking suite. You can use a tool like Segment to curate that data and you can spend hours making calls into a database about it, but none of that is going to tell you what to do when the signals are mixed.

When they are, you’ve got two choices. You can get on the path to developing different messaging experiences for different segments of your audience, or you can keep trying to be everything to everybody. But the truth is you really have to pick: you just can’t do both.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment below.

Thanks for reading!

What The Taylor Swift Trial Taught Me About Local Content: was originally published in Marketing And Growth Hacking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a handful of questions about which metrics are worth paying attention to in the Facebook Ads reports console.

I think there’s a good reason for this: unless you know what you’re looking for, you’re likely to spend quite a bit of time fishing around for something that can help to illuminate the impact your work is having.

It’s easy to get distracted by metrics that have little to do with your objective. It’s also quite possible to drown yourself in more information than you will ever be able to reasonably parse.

it isn’t easy to tease out the actionable information you need from the pre-built views offered in the ads manager.

I think it’s important to be able to quickly identify what content is driving what actions on the platform.

it’s also nice to have some indication of the “lift” you can expect from your efforts.

it’s helpful to separate link clicks from content clicks.

it’s good to be able to check at a glance whether delivery issues are related to problems with negative feedback or the amount spent.

understanding the rate at which a promoted post generates social activity on your page helps you to calculate the increment by which you should increase your ad budget as you scale. it can even provide insights into why your scaling isn’t going the way you expected — before you end up “lighting money on fire.”

I’d like to take the time to explain why these sixty metrics are the ones I pay attention to, but I suspect doing so will drag this post beyond a readable length, so without further ado.

Here’s How I Customize Columns.

There are a number of circumstances where you’ll find including objective-specific metrics more valuable than the generic “website conversion,” option. If for example, you’re tracking the performance of an ad campaign in driving traffic to a custom conversion, you’ll want to pay attention to those metrics. The same holds true for app installs.

There’s one other trick that can prove quite helpful to identifying arrant ads when you’re looking at the way your work has delivered over time.

The day series breakdown is your friend.

(Fair warning: at this point the interface will get quite slow. You’ll likely want to take your data out of Facebook and into Excel to analyze further.)

One of the things I’ve always found particularly curious is just how many communications professionals find the process of keeping up with an evolving network completely overwhelming.

This always struck me as surprising because the larger social networks publish detailed records about everything that they change, when they change it and what they’re hoping to accomplish in the transition.

It’s easy to not pay attention to this content, because it’s largely pitched towards technically minded users — making it difficult for “non-technical” people to consume.

The trouble with this is, of course, that digital marketing is a technical activity. To understand whether or not something you are doing works means taking the time to understand what actually happens when you fire up the Ads Manager and punch in an insertion order.

Without that key insight, you’re left stumbling around waiting for someone who has taken that time to explain it to you.

The trouble with that is that it’s like a game of telephone. You hear you should be doing something, so you give it a shot. It works or it doesn’t and you don’t have the necessary foundation to ask yourself why or to try and figure out how to make things work in the way you want to.

So you do what everyone who doesn’t know what’s going on does: you try a little here, explore a little there, and hope that at some point your work delivers the outcome you’re hoping for.

That’s an expensive way of avoiding a fairly simple problem to solve.

I’d like to humbly propose an alternative that I suspect adds value in nearly every situation. It isn’t flashy, and it isn’t a quick trick. The trade off it works, every time.

Ready?

Here it is:

Take the time to read the manual.

Let me show you what I mean using a recent deck I put together as an example.

That’s a long view, so feel free to come back to it, but I want to highlight a few details.

For the last few weeks, a number of advertisers have complained that their promoted videos have featured ads for other advertisers.

The reason for this isn’t “magic,” and were you reading the platform documentation, you wouldn’t have been surprised by it.

When you sign up for Facebook’s Suggested Placement feature, you actually opted-in to this. It was right there in the terms you didn’t read.

Were you following the updates to the Graph API you would know that in version 2.9 Facebook has moved away from this “automatic” association. You’d know which service you opted in to and how to change it.

You’d be ahead of the curve knowing that “paid” and “organic” views for videos are being depreciated. You’d know just as soon as anyone how to use dynamic product ads to load more than one image for a product without resorting to creating an identical product catalog — a workaround that will be depreciated as the update propagates through the network.

You’d be able to chuckle at the plethora of ‘the sky is falling’ posts that seem to pop up every time a “change” happens.

There’s a wealth of content out there that you can be quite useful when you’re just starting out, when you’re overwhelmed and you’re trying to get acquainted with a new world. That great stuff isn’t a replacement for taking the time to learn: it’s a shortcut to getting started.

Don’t rely on someone else to be the gatekeeper of your knowledge, take the initiative to really, truly become a lifelong learner.

Oh, and if you’d like a deck full of all of the changes you can expect to find on Facebook as they roll out 2.9: you can download a copy HERE.

One of my favorite parts of what I do is getting to answer questions.

I get questions from content creators about infrastructure and getting to the “next level.” I get questions from recruiters looking for help writing role announcements that can attract high-quality technical talent during a time when the landscape is shifting. I get questions from businesses about how to best navigate the complexity of a digital transformation.

But there are some questions, I’ve never quite grown comfortable with enough to “expect.” One such question: “what marketing do you like?”

The trouble with a question like that, is that so many decisions about what work gets to go “live,” happen in a venue that you just don’t have the ability to parse from the outside. Good work gets killed for curious reasons all. the. time.

It’s just hard to make judgments when you don’t have the necessary context.

The question is made even more difficult to answer given the way my role has evolved as we’ve grown. A few years ago, I could spend 100% of my time searching for great work.

I did, too.

The trouble is, as you scale, your attention just has to be drawn towards other directions. One of the easiest ways to “cut through the noise,” is to shift your focus. When you’re competing in a space full of hurried competitors, you want to build your marketing strategy where you know the world is headed.

The digital media landscape is one such battleground.

In part, that’s because clients expect you to demonstrate deep understanding of the space, and aren’t so quick to understand that not every platform you package your business on will be a platform they should present their business on.

This makes a sort of intuitive sense to communications civilians, who I’ve often heard address the phenomena by asking “well, who would buy a workout product from someone who is out of shape!”

Which is precisely why I’ve been so enthralled by the work of Team Ann Lewnes and the wondrous folks at Adobe.

there are worlds of possibility hiding inside of the Adobe product catalog. Breaking into each product line in depth would quickly balloon this post far beyond the “readability” threshold, so I’m going to keep my work “high level.” If you’re curious, however, spend some time exploring the offerings starting here.

The current approach seems to be breaking the offerings up into a handful of different “clouds.”

You’ve got your “Document” cloud including powerful tools for getting deals signed digitally.

That unique selling point lent itself well to becoming a focal point of this delightful spot:

You’ve got the “Experience” cloud, designed to help provide consistent cross-channel interactions, putting an end to troubling customer interactions like this:

(also I’d be remiss if I didn’t include an honorable mention for this delight

)

In a recent Forbes interview, Ann explains that everything is content. For many businesses (particularly those undergoing digital transformations) matching that urgency with a measure of attention devoted to asset management is a struggle.

When you’re trying to change the way your business represents itself online, it’s easy to fall into the trap of applying your “old world” processes to new problems.

That’s understandable enough, but it will not and cannot work for long. It’s asking your team who is already struggling to keep from falling behind to take on a series of tasks they really ought to have been addressed further up the organizational ladder.

If, for example, you’re asking your design team to 10x the platforms they’re designing for, are you making arrangements for 10x the reporting debt? If not, can you really blame the team for the emergent reporting bottleneck?

While I’ve picked a “productivity” example to make this point, the truth is that the same temptation to apply the “old” models to the “new” world can result in leaving opportunity on the table, too.

There’s a lot you can learn about how to do this right by studying the work of Team Ann Lewnes — but I want to highlight the details of just one case.

There’s a lot of great things that can be said about this effort by team Daniël Sytsma and the wonderous folks at mcgarrybowen Amesterdam. So much so, that I’m sure a number of teams would have stopped their execution here — content to have made a well received, light hearted spot perfect for an industry that is often anything but.

But for Team Ann Lewnes, it was here that the magic really started.

A few weeks later, Adobe and the fine folks on the mgb team followed up with a solicitation for quotes from art directors they could record and use in an upcoming collectible.

A project like that does more than simply “extend” the cycle of coverage surrounding your spot.

Ask yourself, who might submit a funny quotable from an art director?

People who work underneath and directly above art directors — that’s who!

With a robust email list of in-industry and aspiring talent in that niche, the team has access to some of the best audience targeting capabilities modern marketing platforms can offer.

What can be done to engage those prospects? What can be done to message to an audience of users like those prospects?

How about a series of no-nonsense tutorials each about one specific use case that we can track and develop a greater understanding of the needs of our customer base?

Something like this, perhaps:

Or this:

How do we activate those engaged prospects and turn them into leads?

What about sponsoring a series of in-depth webinars explaining how we made our work and showing our audience how they can do the same?

Perhaps something like this:

Or this:

How do we identify the leads that are marketing qualified: people who are ready to do more than “talk” about what they’re interested in and are ready to get to work?

What about a contest, like this one?

Submission via social with a hashtag?

That’s a pretty clever way of highlighting the unique social listening features that make Adobe Experience Cloud so powerful. It’s a great way to ensure your activity has some inherently social sharing, too.

I think that one of the things that makes marketing marketing such a challenge is that it can feel a little bit like dancing about architecture.

But really, there just aren’t many better ways to show off what you do than having the courage to do it for yourself.

And that’s why I think Team Ann Lewnes is crushing it.

Team Ann Lewnes Is Crushing It.* was originally published in Notes On Digital Marketing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.