I think How Does Facebook Know I'm Jewish? post by David Berkowitz was pretty amusing and interesting – I've meet David at several conferences and events in New York over the last 3 years or so, most recently, last week.

David saw this ad

I'm Jewish too, but I've never seen that ad, and I'm on Facebook, alot. David was intrigued – was this some new targeting capability that Facebook turned on and he didn't know about yet?  He wrote in his blog post:

"…But how? How did it do it? I don't list my religion (or my politics) on my Facebook profile. I don't even have those Israeli flag Facebook apps.

Some plausible theories are that the marketer used some combination of targeting around my city (New York), alma mater (Binghamton) and entertainment interests (The Daily Show, Seinfeld, Everything Is Illuminated).

Some less plausible theories: top secret Jew-havioral targeting algorithms… perhaps that's what'll be unleashed at Facebook's F8 next week.

Or it's just targeting people who look Jewish. I tried calling and emailing Katan Adventures, which ran the ad."

Turns out the answer was less complicated than one would have supposed – but via the power of Social Media – the targeting worked more powerfully than if it had reached David via some other way, I feel.  According to his blog:

"..Here's what Katan wrote back:

Hey David -

I assume you are from NY?  In order to reach Jews who haven't listed their religion on Facebook (which, by the way, is the vast majority) we run ads in metro areas with large Jewish populations and try to grab their attention with ridiculous lines such as "hey jew" but we obviously get a lot of wasted clicks with this strategy as well.   And some angry emails.

Seinfeld fans is a good idea though.  And maybe Zabar's fans, but I'm sure that is a small group.

Thanks for your interest and if you ever want to pass along any online marketing ideas, we'd love to hear them.

 

So … just by using an established way of targeting, along with Social Networks – the result became more powerful and more personal.

That reminds me – I wrote a post about just how powerful Social Media can be in

Nikki Shannon LIVE @ The Cutting Room – Social Media Worked!