Blab flips the traditional ad format on its head and leads with what people are talking about. Blab predicts trending conversations by target audience across Twitter, Facebook, blogs and forums; auto generates and targets relevant ads before the trend peaks.

Blab is launching an automated ad creation and targeting platform to level the playing field for small medium businesses – giving them a cost-efficient way to run effective advertising on Facebook. Blab delivers 3X leads with custom-built contextual advertising and media placement requiring zero time investment from the small medium business.

Blab announced today that it has become a part of the Facebook Marketing API Program. Access to the Ads API is a significant pivot point as it allows Blab to further drive the power of relevancy as Facebook innovates advertising solutions.

“We have seen a dramatic shift in the power of data moving from key word search to natural language intelligence allowing us to unearth what the influencers in a category are talking about,” says Randy Browning, Cofounder and CEO, Blab. “Now it’s all about predicting tomorrow’s conversation and tailoring advertising in real-time to drive a whole new level of engagement.”

Browning says that Blab’s key difference is to think in passion categories and influencers. “Our hardest job was to build a self-learning engine that evolves the knowledge base on an hourly basis while being driven from the category perspective and not ours or our client’s.”

“If you haven’t thought of using Facebook as a customer acquisition channel, Blab makes it easier for you to start and will drive more leads than you’re currently getting in any other channel” says Malcolm MacGregor, Cofounder and CCO, Blab. “Blab’s relevancy ad solution helps businesses across the entire ad spectrum, from driving qualified awareness at a CPM of tens of cents to converting engagement at a rate of 20-40 percent.”

“Blab is just getting started”, MacGregor says, “we are currently working with 20 beta clients ranging from CPG companies like Johnsonville to car dealerships like Park Place Motors to sports companies like Lib Tech and GNU snowboards.”

Check Blab out at www.blabbings.com

Consumers engage with your brand every day without any direct interaction. When a fan Tweets about a celebrity and their followers re-Tweet the same message, they are having a customer experience with your brand even if there is no direct interaction. Ratings and reviews take place more and more on websites like Amazon and Yelp. People “Like” products or brands on a 3rd party pages or websites. And word of mouth is between consumers and communities, whether it’s happening across the back fence, on a social network or via an eCommerce site.

The sum total of all customer experiences with a brand defines co-experience. Companies and brands have to understand all permutations of consumer relationships across media and channels, how they relate and interact with each other and ultimately how a company can participate in the co-experiences with relevant, contextual content and engagement that produce the most engaging and relevant customer experiences.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, kicked things off with an interview in USA Today. The campaign centers on the idea that many small businesses don’t already have a website and that setting one up is too much work, whereas setting up a Facebook page can be done in minutes.

While her premise is true, I believe the most receptive target will be those businesses who already have a web presence, but have not been able to use it to generate leads and new business. This is where Facebook advertising can play a big part. When used by an experienced marketer, Facebook advertising can be an efficient and effective tool for the small business.

However, for anyone who has used the Facebook self-service ad builder, the actual user experience does not live up to the definition of easy and intuitive. There are a lot of apparent black box processes that determine how often the ad will be presented (impressions), how frequently it will be shown and how the auction style bidding actual works.

The only way to learn is by doing and so my recommendation is that any small business who wants to get going in Facebook advertising will be well served by starting out working with a specialist who has learned what works from a technical side and combines that with a strong sense of what sort of ad will work for each type of business.

Labor Day at Paradise

My point is not to rave about a great family outing I had, although it was fantastic. On the drive home, I started thinking about what made the day a great experience. We got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic driving up the winding mountain road. The brand new multi-million dollar visitor center had fewer exhibits than a grade school science fair and we had to walk single file up the first trail because there were so many people. When I look at the day from a series of controllable human interactions, it sounded more like a bust than a memorable moment.

From a UX perspective, they could have designed better traffic flow on the roads. The visitor center might have been adaptable to my persona’s needs and of course they could have simply built more trails, scaling for the demand. But in the end, they wouldn’t have made much difference, because ultimately it wasn’t about navigational or operational issues, it was about pure experience.

My pure experience was blue sky, bright sun, views that dwarfed me and a time/place/people combination that wowed me. In other words, it was the content that made the experience. So much of the content we create today is mass produced, aimed at the lowest common denominator and tries to shock or titillate to such a degree as it simply becomes part of the noise and noise which is getting louder every day.

Looking beyond Paradise

The answer is not easy and there isn’t a simple solution, but if try to adhere to one simple principle we may be able to come closer to the mark. Every time we pitch, design, develop, or evaluate an idea, a campaign, or a business model, we should ask ourselves if it can rise to the monumental or at least taste like a lick of a blue glacier on the last day of summer.

Historically, in marketing, trend identification was the prevue of market research companies and typically involved a combination of quantitative (surveys, data mining and modeling) and qualitative research (focus groups and observation). The trends that were identified tended to be macro in nature and were described as the shift in ideas and conduct over time, most commonly measured in years.

The output of these processes were delivered to creative groups and agencies and used to create the “big idea” upon which a marketing campaign was created. They were designed to trigger emotional engagement, leaving a consumer with positive brand association. Validation came in the form of public acceptance, measured again through quantitative and qualitative metrics. Impact was independently measured, typically as a product of reach (the number of people exposed to the “big idea”) and frequency (the number of times an individual was exposed to the “big idea”.)

This methodology has been pervasive over the last half century and continues to be used by most consumer brands in conjunction with the creation and distribution of marketing messages across traditional marketing channels (Broadcast, Cable, Print, Out-of-home…).

Direct marketing provided marketers with access to specific and detailed data relating to who viewed a message and what action they took after consuming the message and outcome. This data driven approach has been applied to email, search, display, web and other digital channels. It has also allowed marketers to improve their ability to identify trends through data mining and modeling techniques, resulting in behavioral analysis leading to predictive analytics, which is intended to give guidance to a company as to when, where and how a consumer will be more receptive to their product/service offering. Like brand marketing, the insights delivered through this type of research are typically delivered to a creative group or agency and used to create a series of campaigns, targeted to like sets of audiences and addressed to identified individuals. Validation is measured by actual response behavior.

More recently, with the advent of social networking and the near ubiquity of Internet access, trend identification and validation has taken on a new meaning. Trends proliferate virally in a matter of minutes and hours rather than months and years. It is possible to spread a message via Twitter or Facebook to 500 people who each forward to another 500 almost instantaneously, reaching 500² or 250,000 people who by their voluntary social association share interests, attitudes and behaviors.

In this context, my company, Blab, has authored a specific and unique methodology and associated algorithms for identifying and validating these volatile and transitory trends in real-time, providing marketers with insight into the pulse of the culture at any given point and the resulting ability to contextualize their content to align with the appropriate topical trends.

Over the next few weeks, I will dig deeper into our ideas around how to identify trends, categorize them and then use that information to inform contextual content creation and publication.

There are multiple areas of marketing in which real-time has a unique definition, it’s own importance and a set of tools, practitioners and process that enable it.

From a transactional point of view, real-time means being able to transact from start to finish with no latency. In ecommerce, this is a given, although it surprises me how many websites still ask the customer to submit a form, or call a rep. to get a quote, complete a transaction or get customer service. The Holy Grail of this type of real-time marketing is the complete integration of multiple channels including online, social and in-store. While some, mostly B2C, retailers have done a good job combining online shopping, order and payment with in-store availability and pick-up, this cross-channel experience has rarely been duplicated in the B2B world where sales are still driven by direct sales forces and represent long and complicated purchase cycles. for example, it’s still virtually impossible for a company’s procurement department to negotiate, transact and fufill an enterprise software licensing agreement online.

From the data perspective, real-time refers to the ability to collect and process data in real-time. Whether transactional or behavioral, it is usually focused on the online advertising, search, web or email experience and increasingly user generated activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There appears to be the most momentum in capturing and analyzing social data, which is created, distributed and reacted to in real-time, however most marketers, agencies and analytics providers are still trying to apply the same methodologies to social as they have used in the past to understand traditional channels like broadcast and print. Needless to say, the importance of frequency and reach is completely different when applied to multi-facted social relationships. it is is this area of campaign management and analytics that appear to be paying the most attention to trying to achieve real-time. It won’t be difficult to generate mountains of data, but the trick is having the resources to understand the data and most importantly use that data in real-time. There appears to be very little progress in brands ability to act in real-time.

And finally, the most important area of real-time, is the one most overllooked; understanding the customer in real-time. We spend a lot of time, technology and resources to understand what consumers did in the past and hope that will help us predict what they are going to do in the future. But we devote very little energy to finding out what’s important to a consumer in the moment and then being able to communicate with them in a manner that is relevant to them in that same moment. This is the real real-time Holy Grail and in an increasingly ADHD afflcited world, this is the key to cutting through the noise and engaging customers on their terms. This is why I’ve started my new company Blab. We’re all about relevancy and relevancy is both listening as well as creating and distirbuting branded content. Check our our website for more details about our approach, http://www.blabbings.com.

This is impressive and surely should be seen as major trend, both for small business and for Facebook. However with Facebook ad click through rates nearly 50% lower than industry average, it begs the question of whether small businesses are getting a good return on their investment.

There was a lot of talk a couple of months ago when Facebook announced it was testing real-time marketing. In their case, the idea was to present ads according what people were posting about. It’s a great idea, but it doesn’t address the need to contextualize the ads themselves. And this is the real problem for small businesses. Larger advertisers like Fortune 500 companies hire agencies to help them write the best headline and design the most visually engaging ads. Small businesses don’t have these resources and can’t afford them in any case.

However even large agencies do not have the ability to deliver Facebook ads that are contextual and certainly not deliver them in real-time. The future of Facebook advertising depends on solving these problems. Oh, and by the way, we at Blab think we have the solution.

At our company, Blab, I’m lucky that our CTO Joseph and I have a strong working partnership. It comes mutual respect (very common at C level), shared goals (common if business focused) and most importantly, because we spend a lot of time together talking through ways to solve problems.

I’ve learned some of the lingo of technology. I have a rudimentary understanding of database schema and at least don’t cringe when I hear the terms php, ruby on rails and lamp stack. I recognize they are development languages. But what is more important is that I understand that they are critical to my being able to effectively and efficient communicate with my customers across multiple channels.

Joseph, on the other hand, has not spent his entire career managing IT infrastructure. He can write code himself, actually thinking its fun and is excited about solving challenging problems. He’s learned something about frequency and reach and the abbreviations, cpc, seo, sem and crm don’t make his eyes glaze either.

But the real key to our mutual success is sitting down together in front of a whiteboard and sometimes over a beer, talking about the big picture issues we both face. Are we keeping up with our customers? Do we understand the problems they have? Are we equipped with the ability to listen to our customers, analyze what they’re saying and acting on the insight before it’s too late.

Joseph’s mind certainly works differently than mine. He often comes up with a completely different perspective on the issue and as often as not, his logical rational mind is as perceptive as the most gifted and creative brain. And then he tells me how he can build whatever it takes to bring the idea to life.