Would you work for free?

BA asks staff to work for nothing

This story grabbed my eye today.

I don't question that BA's motives are genuine, in really trying to cut costs and survive. But it does raise an important question.

Has BA ever offered its staff bonuses of 1 week to 1 month's salary in the days when they used to make a profit?

It reminds me of the old days of pre-online marketing consultancy, when you'd seem to get approached at least every month by someone with a new product or business idea, who wanted you to help them market it (or in other words do all the sales) in return for a mumbled promise about commissions, incentives or so on. Basically work for free and take all the risk.

Now, marketing consultants probably shouldn't be completely averse to taking on the odd speculative project, but only ever if you have significant downtime you're willing to use up, and you can afford to turn away paying work.

Personally, if I ever get any of this thing called spare time, I've got a very long list of things I'd like to do for myself thanks!

This is what happens when you don’t pay your web designer

Read this strangely absorbing tale of intrigue, duplicity and non payment in the world of big band music at this blog.

Facebook Ads - Not so Bad After All

Sometimes you have to learn when to admit you were wrong. So, sorry Facebook.

I always thought the Facebook advertising program was rubbish - a poorly conceived attempt to monetise your impressive site traffic retrospectively, and no substitute for the mighty Google Adwords.

This impression was reinforced by the focus groups we did amongst social networking users at the back end of last year, for the www.kent.co.uk project. After all when a teenager told me 'why do I want to see adverts for mortgages on Facebook - I'm only 14!', I kind of had to agree with him.

But I now stand corrected. We have just started running a PPC campaign on Facebook for, ironically enough, another social networking site and it really is working. CTR is low, but I'm not too worried because we've plenty of volume of impressions to work with, and our conversion rates are very nice indeed.

I also particularly like the targeting options when you create your campaign - you can target users by their ages, with nicely refined age breaks amongst younger users, and most importantly their town/city, within a chosen radius.

This opens up a whole world of opportunities for regional and local marketing for clients targeting a younger audience, especially as I've always found geo-targeting to be imperfect on Google Adwords. I suspect Facebook geo-targeting is going to be far more accurate, as its based on the data provided by users when they sign up, not on Google's best guess based on IP address.

Now, the advert manager interface isn't perfect. The help guide is sketchy to say the least, and its very much a single user application, without any easy ways to share access with colleagues. But it's still not as bad as Yahoo Search Marketing so I can live with that.

So to conclude, I have now realised that my negative judgment on Facebook ads in the past really wasn't Facebook's fault - it was down to those bozo advertisers using the program poorly and clumsily. Just like the majority of Adwords advertisers who do PPC badly.

Why Wordpress is great for domain holding pages

I've always thought that spare domain names are only worth something if you actually do something with them.

If a domain can get indexed by Google and start to build some domain history it will start to gain real value. Or when you decide to add a proper website to the domain, you wont have to spend frustrating time waiting to get indexed.

But a single holding page (or even worse the dreaded 'under construction' message) does really look a bit naff.

So that's why we've been using the free Wordpress blogging software install (with a few tweaks) to build microsites on domains for a number of clients, and ourselves. Here's one of the most recent: www.mediterraneanconnections.com.

With a few pages of text, some clever use of RSS feeds, a free design template, a few Wordpress plugins, and a bit of time, you can create a holding site that should start to build sonme really useful indexing history.

You an even monetise your holding site with Google Adsense or some relevant affiliate banner ads from a program like Tradedoubler.

But dont forget, if you are oing all this hoping to sell on your domain for big bucks, remember that a second hand domain name is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, which might not always be what you think its worth.