The like button is totally different becuase people click that to share stuff they “like” with their social circle and you can see how that could lead to sales.

Interesting times and very early days in this battle but shaping up nicely

Nobody knows your biz like yourself. Far be it from me to be a pundit, not my intent nor my poise to anything.

To close, and this has been instructive, I’ll agree with your statement that :

“If a channel fails one day, you won’t lose what you have already acquired through it. You will just need to find a new channel.”

is only true it seems if you can take your customers with you. Channels are funnels, customers though don’t always move when the funnel or location does.

Me–arnold@waldstein.com if you want to pursue this so we don’t hijack On’s thread worse than we have.

I enjoy hearing the reduce your dependencies, spread the love, open your eyes to social story, but the real politik of it is that marketers should pound the channels that work for them, keep an eye on the future, but not throw good money after bad just because people outside your business are in love with possibilities.

Ecomm and customer acquisition is not investing. If a channel fails one day, you won’t lose what you have already acquired through it. You will just need to find a new channel.

All I can talk about is what works for me. Right now our strategy is antithetical to diversification because middle of the road companies are increasingly being squeezed out of our space. In a year when there are only 3 brands that matter in our niche and we are one of them, I will change my tune and start preaching diversity.

Focusing your business or any business on any one platform is a bad strategy.

Your URL is your core. Facebook. Twitter and on and on. All good channels. All good ways to take your message to where your audience is. Ecommerce for most companies has a mixed funnel of direct, SEO/SEM and social. Finding the mix is where the magic formula for success lies.

No one formula or platform suits all.

1. The market is missing a counterweight to Adwords.

2. Facebook is serving 30% of US online ads, ergo its volume is too big to ignore.

3. Evolutionarily, this feels like the next step past straight up search.

Just because people want this, does not mean that Facebook is there yet and it does not mean that they will get there. Its possible they will and its possible they won’t. I have no opinion whether they can do it or not. Not everything on the web needs to be a sales platform.

For my business, Facebook is not there yet. The biggest problem we have with Facebook is that it charges targeted search CPC rates for display performance results. FB either needs to either deliver converting traffic better or devalue their CPCs significantly for my business to work. We get the same conversion rates running banners on Bollywood sites as we do on Facebook, but at 1/5th the cost. That is a real issue that FB needs to deal with if it wants to be taken seriously as a sales tool.

I am sure there are plenty of cases where people are killing it on Facebook, but there are plenty of cases where FB does not work for them. A lot of tech people are throwing out an argument that companies who are not doing well on FB are dinosaurs that just don’t get it. About a month ago there was a big argument on webmasterworld.com about this very issue. The fact is that FB is not there yet, and people should treat marketing on FB as an open question. Ultimately it may be that selling on FB is like trying to fit the old square peg in a round hole.

@Arnold – We’ve tried SEO and we’ve tried FB. Neither work as well as SEM. Our organic search rankings are great, but it does not deliver a ton of traffic. This might be peculiar to our niche, but at this point I have stopped worrying about it because we do very well on word of mouth and SEM.

When it comes to FB, I am waking up to the fact that we can use it to augment what we know about our customers and how we can better serve them. Maybe one day it will morph into a great referral platform as well, but that train is not coming anytime soon.

The real data is hidden, kept secret as to artificially pump advertising rates. This is what should be displayed:

Of 204,651 unique impressions there are 1,034 “Likes” and 67,9033 “Don’t likes”

Above conveys meaning and context. Without it, the button wars are insipid dribble.