Recently I read a book by authors Chip and Dan Heath called Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. The book examines why some ideas die out as quickly as they come into being, while other “stick”, and seem to stay in the public’s minds for long spans of time. This is the kind of knowledge that can really make a difference when planning your next marketing campaign, since the longer your material stays on the minds of your target audience, the more you get from each dollar spent getting that message out to them.

The book breaks down the creation of sticky ideas into a formula made up of six element; simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. Using examples from the real world including sticky ideas ranging anywhere from real world ad campaigns to urban legends that everyone has heard of and no one can forget, the brothers do an excellent job of clearly demonstrating the application of the principals that they write about.

Over the next few weeks we’ll do an series of six posts, an element by element review of the theories put forth in Made to Stick, analyzing the ideas set forth in each section and seeing if the ideas the brothers are presenting are in themselves sticky! Make sure to check back often, so as not to miss any of the six parts!

Most owners of businesses that do online sales or at the very least have an online presence have at one time or another experimented with different types of online advertising systems. Whether it be buying ad spots on particular websites, using contextual ad services like Google Adwords or buying text links with services like . One advertising medium that it is very easy to overlook though is the advertising program run by Facebook. Advertising on Facebook gives companies the ability to target their advertising efforts with laser accuracy while staying within almost any budget.

While Facebook does offer larger, more expensive campaigns for companies willing to shell out the kind of big bucks necessary for a large campaign with such a popular site, in this article we’ll focus on the benefits of using Facebook’s user ad publishing system, which any Facebook user can utilize.

The types of ads produced by Facebook’s user ad manager are the ones you’ll see on the far right hand side of the page while you’re surfing Facebook profiles. They are simple box ads with a title/link, a short description and an optional image.

Targeting:

The real attraction with Facebook ads is the ability for the user to target their ads with exceptional precision. Facebook ads can be targeted using the following parameters.

Geographic: When creating a Facebook ad, you begin by targeting geographically by country, state/province or city, depending on how narrow you want your geographical focus to be.

Age and Sex: You can specify your audience to be male, female or both, within any Continue Reading