Michael Friedman and Greg Augarten sell New York-style pizza in New Orleans. Their operation, Pizza Delicious, is a takeout window between Piety Street and Desire Street. They’re only open two nights a week. If you’re in the know, you can call them up and order a pie.

Listen to the FULL broadcast from NPR HERE

Business has been good, and they’re about to buy their own place. So for the first time they’re considering paid advertising. They’d been thinking about advertising on Facebook but didn’t know how to proceed.

Meanwhile, we were working on some stories about Facebook and wanted to get inside the Facebook ad campaign and see if it really worked.

So we hooked the Pizza Delicious guys up with Rob Leathern, a social media ad guru.

The key question they tried to answer: Which Facebook users should they target with their ad campaign?

Their first idea was to target the friends of people who already liked Pizza Delicious on Facebook. But that wound up targeting 74 percent of people in New Orleans on Facebook — 224,000 people. They needed something narrower.

The Pizza Delicious guys really wanted to find people jonesing for real New York pizza. So they tried to target people who had other New York likes — the Jets, the Knicks, Notorious B.I.G. Making the New York connection cut the reach of the ad down to 15,000.

Seemed perfect. But 12 hours later, Michael called us. “It was all zeroes across the board,” he said. Facebook doesn’t make money till people click on the ad. If nobody clicks, Facebook turns the ad off. They’d struck out.

So they changed the target to New Orleans fans of Italian food: mozzarella, gnocchi, espresso. This time they were targeting 30,000 people.

Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click-throughs, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice. Pizza Delicious got close to 20 times the number of Facebook fans it usually gets in two days. The guys were stoked.

The campaign cost them $240 — almost $1 for each new Facebook fan they got from the campaign.

“Is that feeling of exhilaration worth $240?” Michael said. “I don’t know — hopefully that translates into new business.”

It didn’t.

After a long night of asking every single customer where he found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.

But while Greg took the garbage out, he checked his phone. And there was a message:

“Just found out about you guys via a sponsored Facebook ad if you can believe it. Super excited about your new place — happy to toss in a few bones over the top.”

That guy kicked in $10 to support the new restaurant.

“And that was cool,” Michael said. “We got some return on our ad.”

That return — $10 on a $240 investment — isn’t much.

Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It’s still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.

Some companies, like Ben and Jerry’s, say they have gotten a big return. Others say they haven’t. On Tuesday, GM said it was pulling its Facebook ads because the ads haven’t done enough to generate new business.

The funding from one of the largest internet companies in the world will be used to help Pinterest improve its service and expand the site’s community globally.

Pinterest and Rakuten’s partnership is set to help the company break into the Japanese market as well as 17 other global markets. Rakuten is owner of ecommerce giant Buy.com here in the US.

Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO of Pinterest says the partnership with Rakuten will help Pinterest move closer towards its business goals.

“Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests,” said Silbermann. “Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal.”

Other investors participating in the funding round include Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Captial and other angel investors.

Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten says the investment in Pinterest compliments Rakuten’s business model for e-commerce.

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining. We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world.”

Get our new Pinterest 101: Cheat Sheet from ColderICE right now at http://goingsocial.colderice.com  
See on www.cbronline.com

The Internet is such a wonderful thing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s brought us together today to talk …

The question isn’t whether social services on the Web influence how we spend money, but rather how they affect your habits. At the end of the day businesses can’t survive without making money, and that’s why we’re seeing a flood of social services that might push you over the ledge to buy that new shiny thing that you probably can’t afford. That’s how they’re going to make money, after all. 

See on thenextweb.com

For the first time ever The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gala was streamed LIVE on Amazon with a hosted event. Amazon merges the live coverage with event inspired merchandise and clothing, plus an organized social campaign to engage the audience in real time over a real live event.

Oh and I try to train Brent to NOT call me “ColderICE” so we will see how well that works out, LOL

And do not forget, we are giving away a brand new BlackBerry Playbook so join in!

By 2020, the majority of U.S. consumers will use smartphones to pay for goods and services, concluded a new study from Pew and Elon University.

The survey is unusual in that Pew queried tech stakeholders and leaders about the subject, as opposed to a random sample of the general population. Executives from such companies as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) were included in the mix, as well as professors and other thought leaders.

Whether that makes the study more or less predictive remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that these industry insiders fully believe that smartphones will be a major form of transmitting payments within eight years. 

See on www.ecommercetimes.com

1. Pictures — Post a good headshot of yourself on all your social media, websites, blogs, and Internet collateral. Let people know who you are and don’t hide yourself. People want to see your face and your eyes so they can see you for themselves and whether or not they should trust you.
2. Write Articles — Writing articles for article marketing sites, newspapers, and other venues will help to establish your credibility by demonstrating your knowledge. If other people are willing to print your information outside of your own websites and blogs then you must know what you’re talking about.
3. Blog About It — Establish your expertise by blogging about what you know. Giving your readers free information can never go wrong in helping to increase your online business credibility. Each blog should be micro focused on very small aspects of the information that you have to share, which can wet your visitor’s appetite for more information.
4. Create an Ezine — Having an established ezine or newsletter can go far in increasing your business credibility if you do it right. Don’t have a sign up for an e-newsletter then never send out a newsletter. Ideally you should have a few preloaded newsletters in your autoresponder before you start asking for sign-ups to your ezine then you can be ahead of the game providing informative and useful newsletters to all your subscribers.
5. Publish an eBook — Creating and publishing an eBook isn’t very difficult today. All you need to do is repurpose the rest of your content into one eBook. You can make a compilation of a year’s worth of blog posts, rearrange the order, add a few bullets, some great formatting, pictures, and turn it into a PDF or even make it into a PUB file and sell it on Kindle.
6. Create Tutorials — If you have knowledge that you want to share with others a great way to do this is to create short informative and useful tutorials. You can use a screen capturing software, or film what you’re doing with a flip cam, video camera, or webcam then post on your blog, on YouTube.com and in other places so that as many of your target market as possible can view it.
7. Get Interviews — There are a lot of Internet radio stations (check out blogtalkradio.com) today as well as other people out there who need content for their websites and blogs. If you can find people who run complementary businesses to yours, and are not your direct competition you can agree to interview each other via video, podcast, or even just print and cross post on each other’s blogs.
8. Participate — If you’re involved with social media, forums, and groups online or off the only way you can truly get something out of it is to participate. Participating will establish your credibility in many ways. If you volunteer for an organization that you enjoy being involved in, you can establish good relationships with people who may refer you to others who are ready to pay for your products and / or services.

Building your brand online is important. You need to be deliberate about. These ways are great ways to go about building a great, solid foundation of a brand online.

Amazon is taking on the high-end clothing business in its typical way: go big and spare no expense.

See on www.nytimes.com