The internet conference scene is changing. Last year at the thinktank, it was a common discussion topic that here we were right as the stock market was crashing, living it up, with the best of everything together celebrating our successes, while planning our next ones.

Some conferences I have been to in the past year, have had some lower attendence.

Oddly enough, the most expensive, high end events are selling out.

Last year the thinktank sold out quickly. Jeremy’s (Shoemoney) Elite Retreat at $5k per person sold out within a week or two of its announcement. Marcus Tandlers Oktoberfest at $5k to get in also sold out within a few weeks.

With this years thinktank, I still have not sent out the first official set of invites and just with last years attendees and a few EliteRetreaters I have invited we have allready come close to selling out. Even before sending out the first real set of invites!

What the expert Internet Conference attendee’s want is clearly not a huge conference hall with expert speakers talking about subjects that may have little or no interest to them.

What the experienced, expert, attendees want is another expert who knows a specific subject better than they do sitting in front of them, in a safe, comfortable environment that allows everyone to open up and share their secrets.

Each one of these attendees is an absolute master at something, and is willing to share it with others.

In a conversation I had at the Elite Retreat with a few of the attendees, they encouraged me to up the price of this years thinktank in order to maintain a very high caliber of attendee. The reason for this is obvious. If you can afford $3,000 for the thinktank, or $5,000 for the EliteRetreat, then either you have rich parents, or you have done SOMETHING that was able to create a little money. This means that the other attendees have figured out some way to make money, and most probably it will be a different way than you have.

It shocks me in fact when this group gets together how often you hear someone describing something they are doing, and the little crowd who forms around them, who are shocked and amazed because that idea is so brand new to them. The diversity of ways to make money online now is just staggering.

As a collective group, helping each other, this gives us a massive leg up on the rest of the competition. Without being a core member of a group like this, it is almost impossible to make it big online.

What else that amazes me so far about this years event is that people want to come, even before they know exactly what we have in store for them this year

I think the fact that Kate, my buddy from the poker tournament, showed up as the girl in front of the police car in Hangover didn’t hurt our marketing either.

The actual invites for thinktank will be going out soon, maybe in the next week?

So if you are not positive you are on my invite list, and you want to be, let me know now before the invites go out.

Based on what has happened so far I am expecting a very fast sell out of the seats to be released.

You can keep up on the thinktank by following her on twitter.

Change your twitter time and city to Tehran to protect the identity of Iranians protesting their government.

The short story is that last week in Iran there was a presidential election that was apparently very close.

There is now apparently a large amount of censorship going on in Iran of phones and internet.

Twitter in Iran is one of the few ways of getting info out.

The twittersphere is saying, that if you change your city to Tehran, and your timezone to Tehran, then you can help mask the identity of those twittering out their reports of what is going on.

If you want to follow along, watch this page for a while. #IranElection

The old government who has been in power is what you would expect from Iran recently.

The new presidential candidate, that these protestors support, is in favor of things like freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

If you want to help, change your twitter city to tehran, and your twitter location to tehran. If you want to help even more, then tweet about this.

Iran is very possibly the most powerful country in the middle east. The direction that things go there over the next week may have a very powerful effect on our daily lives in terms of our own personal and national security in the rest of the world.

Time to be a citizen of the world my friends!

Signing off, dk the jew, who is persian for the week.

I have had facebook.com/purposeinc myself for a while for my facebook page, but had not announced it till now. If you are a fan of Purpose Inc., go fan me there, http://www.facebook.com/purposeinc

If you are too lazy to actually go there, here is a screen shot.

I just got an e-mail from Barbara Boser asking me if I could help make sure she and Greg got their name. I was like hugh? as I had not heard anything about this yet. I checked and sure enough facebook announced facebook usernames on their blog. Matt Mullenweg has spoiled me with pretty urls on wordpress, so I have always hoped that facebook could get better urls. This is awesome.

The blog says “Your username must be at least five characters in length and only include alphanumeric characters ….or a period” so we will not be seeing facebook.com/dk

You can only do this for facebook accounts that existed before May 31 of this year.

If you poke around you will see that some companies like Microsoft have already grabbed one, and some like apple/mac have not.

UPDATE - When the time comes, hit this page to do it.

The rest of the entries will go on sale soon. You may want to add my e-mail address so you get the invite before it sells out.

Huge thanks to Shoe and Neil for agreeing to sign up first. I know they are both a big draw. Shoe launched his learn how to make money online free course and has close to 100,000 people signed up. He is truly turning into a brand like nobody else.

I love how some people will try to dismiss him, or minimize what he can pull off, and then you turn around and whoh!

I need to get a few things organized, and then I will send out the rest of the invites. If you want to come, make sure to sign up as soon as you get the invite. I have no idea how quick, but I predict a fast sell out.

It is such a lovely warm compliment that people want to come to the thinktank. I will do my best to live up the expectations.

Here is a little graphic I made. Any of you are welcome to use it on your site. You can re-size it any size as long as you don’t cut it up.

Just love you guys. Thank you so much for the love, each and every one of you.

The early sign up uber discounts for previous thinktankers are getting close to being sold out, so they may not last till the Saturday night sign up.

I got a few e-mails from people who wondered if they did not get an invite on purpose.

If you were there last year, and did not just get an e-mail from me, let me know immediately.

Just for the record I intentionally never ask for special favors on my ads. I just send them in and watch them get approved or disproved. In fact on one of my accounts I recently got a little e-mail explaining how a few of my ads were bending the envelope a little too far and were not being approved. Oops! They are really great people, and if you do mess up, you simply get an e-mail explaining what part of the T.O.S. you violated.

As users, the more your ads are quality and get approved the easier you make it for them, and believe me they apreciate it!

The ad approval process is not hard science yet on either side, and requires understanding while the process evolves. Facebook is very, very open to user input on what is working and not working, both for advertisers and for users.

Feel free to comment here with any questions or feedback for the ad approval team, or contact me if you are running into any big issues with this.

Bottom line facebook wants a wide variety of quality ads that improve the experience of their users.

Here is a series of questions submitted to me by my readers, and some written myself, answered by the person in charge of the ad approval area at facebook. Their identity kept private.

1. First can you give my readers the overall philosophy of what Facebook is looking for in ads?
The core of the Facebook brand is our user experience, and this experience is continually reinforced by our product’s distinct look and feel, functionality, and utility. Everything that exists within the site contributes to the overall Facebook user experience, including advertising. Facebook is committed to preserving our user experience by keeping the site clean, uncluttered, and free from intrusive messages. That is why Facebook Ads are a little different from other online advertising units. The look and feel of the ads is more like Facebook content and therefore becomes a part of our users’ experience rather than interrupting it. In addition, data in the ads is based on how a user’s friend interacted and affiliated with your business. Therefore, they behave more like the Facebook content users are used to engaging with on the site.
Facebook Ads allow advertisers to communicate effectively with their desired audience and are therefore more relevant to users.
Facebook Ads enables any marketer to easily and precisely reach the right people at the right time. With over 200 million active users sharing authentic information, advertisers reach their exact audience before they start searching. Advertisers can quickly create ads and target them to very specific audiences. It’s easy for advertisers to track their progress and gain insight into their ads with real time reporting.

2. In general, what don’t you want to see in ads?
Misleading ads are very frustrating for the user. For example, the text and the image of the ad should accurately represent the product being advertised. When this is not the case, not only does the user feel deceived and loses trust in the ad, but in the long run, the ad’s performance is affected too. If a user has a bad experience with an ad, they are much less likely to click on that ad or a similar ad again. This hurts both the user and the advertiser.
Deceptive and hurtful language are also detrimental to users’ experience and advertisers’ performance. For example, asking users ‘Are you fat?’, ‘Are you lonely?’, ‘Have bad acne?’.  Users often see ads like these as personal attacks and certainly don’t respond well to them.
Ad image has a rather significant impact on performance. Inappropriate or irrelevant images should not be used.  Advertisers don’t want to pay for clicks that don’t convert and users don’t like to be confused when clicking through an ad. When thinking about creating a high quality ad, be as transparent and relevant as possible.

3. What effect does the landing page have on approval?
Landing pages are reviewed through the approval process along with the ad creative itself. Even if the ad complies with all of our policies but the landing page doesn’t, we will reject the ad. For example, if an acceptable dating ad is submitted but the destination page has graphic images, we would not approve the ad. For more details on landing page requirements, please view section 2 of our Ad Guidelines (http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php).

4. Can you explain the time it takes for ad approval. If someone is trying to tweak different specifics of the ads, it can take up to 12 hours to get them approved.

Do you guys work on approvals 24 hours per day?
Our online sales operations team reviews ads as soon as possible and in the order that they are received. This can take up to 12 hours but is usually much quicker during normal PST business hours. Turn around times on the weekend are slightly longer than during the week.
If your advertisers use the ‘Create a Similar Ad’ option to make minor adjustments to their ad text (title or body), the ad is generally reviewed much more quickly.
5. What is allowed in capitalization?
Ads may capitalize entire words for emphasis, or capitalize the first letters of words in the ad text, but may not capitalize entire sentences or the entire text.
INCORRECT:
WINTER SPECIAL 50% OFF
WINTER is the BEST TIME to REJUVENATE SKIN and PERMANENTLY REDUCE HAIR!
ACCEPTABLE:
Winter Special 50% OFF
Winter is the BEST TIME to rejuvenate skin and PERMANENTLY REDUCE hair!

6. I noticed that if I submit 20 ads in a campaign it looks like it takes longer to approve, than if I just submit one new ad.
Ads are reviewed as soon as possible and in the order they are received.  There’s no relationship between larger ad groups getting reviewed slower or faster.

7. What can you tell us about your team?
The Online Sales Operations team works with all advertisers who advertise through the Facebook Ads interface (http://www.facebook.com/ads/create). The goal of this team is to help support, grow and retain these advertisers. The team is focused on compliance, supporting advertisers’ questions or problems via email, soliciting product and system feedback, and improving campaign performance through optimizations.

8. What direction are you guys heading in terms of ad approval in terms of automating it, and/or making more consistent?
We are working hard to improve our advertising products and system to help our advertisers reach users in an effective and meaningful way. We are continuingly revising our ad review process to be more scalable and consistent.
Since we launched the Facebook Ads platform in the Fall of 2007, we have used advertiser and user feedback to inform product improvements and policy changes. As a company, we are always striving to provide a great experience for our users and partners. As advertisers, you have significant impact on this experience. Our advertising policies help safeguard the experience on Facebook for our users while providing you with opportunities to engage with users and promote your business. As we work on automating more of the ad review process, we will look to our users to provide their feedback on the relevance and quality of ads to the advertisers themselves. Ad quality and user feedback have always been important considerations for Facebook Ads, and help determine what ads are actually seen by users.  In general, ads that receive negative user feedback are less likely to be shown to users, and may not even run at all.

9. I read that if your site doesn’t get a good CTR the first 2 hours, then Facebook does not show it very much after that. Is that true? How does your algorithm work to decide which ad to show?
Ads will be shown based on the advertiser’s daily budget, bid and targeting criteria they’ve selected. If an ad doesn’t perform well when it is first running on our site, it is likely that our system will determine that this ad is less likely to perform well in the future, and will display the ad less often as a result.
For any given ad unit, we select the best ad to run based on its bid and historical performance. Therefore, if you are not receiving as many clicks or impressions as you would like, we suggest increasing your maximum CPC or CPM bid. We also suggest making sure your ad is as relevant as possible by targeting your ad to the most appropriate audience. Your ad is more likely to perform better and continue running successfully if it is being displayed to the users who are likely to be the most interested in your ad and click on your ad. You may want to experiment with multiple versions of your ad text and targeting to see which one generates the best results.

10. Where do you guys get the list of available keywords? Where do you get the list of available interests when creating an ad?”
The site is indexed for keywords in profiles and we compile those words as options for our advertisers to target.  When you choose to target an ad to certain keywords, it will be shown to users who have included any of those keywords in the “Personal Info” section of their profile. This includes sections like Interests, Activities, Favorite Music, Favorite Movies, etc. Ads may also be targeted to a user’s groups or the Pages he or she is a member or fan of that are related to the keywords you select.

End of Interview.

If you have any questions not covered, feel free to leave them in the comments, and if I can get them asnwered I will.

Back when I was taking the prep classes to get into chiropractic college, there was a guy named Jaime who worked the reception desk there, and went to the chiropractic college. He claimed for the entire year I knew him, with a dead straight face that he was in the Michael Jackson video Beat It, and you could see him as the first one who broke away from the group at the end. He also wanted to go to the Playboy mansion. This I am sure about.

Each time I would see Jaime, on a Tuesday I believe, he would tell me about his plans the upcoming week, and the progress he had made during the weekend on his master plan. There were low level celebrities involved, hustling bartenders for introductions, and carefully placing himself around hot chicks so that he could appear cool to the right people at the right time. (I learned a lot about marketing from him L.O.L.)

As a kid, and maybe still, I was entranced by the entire playboy story. The mystique of what happens behind the closed doors, still to this day, leaves me wondering.

Last year when I was talking to Michael Sprouse about Azoogles marketing for this coming year, we discussed Azoogle having an event of their own. And boy oh boy are they. Michael used to be an integral part of the Playboy company before coming to Azoogle, so he is in a position to set something up, that no one else could even imagine trying to pull off.

So what do you need to get in? Just sell some of Azoogle’s affiliate offers, (enough to win). Click on any of the bunnies above, and it will take you the page to read all about it.

I am absolutely thrilled to get to go, so keep an eye on this blog just before the thinktank to see the pics! Shoe will be going too. Click on the bunnies above to find out how to join us!

This aint a conference, please don’t even ask about sessions, speakers, or anything like that.

Some probably things on the planning table right now include,
The guys.
Surfing
MMA training, maybe Ju Jitsu this time?
Pretty girls. (That’s you Junise!)
Late night card games.
Beach chairs on the grass watching the waves roll in.
A schedule. HA!
Crepes.
BBQ’s
A country band you wouldn’t believe.
As much of everything as you could possibly want!
Only high end, positive, fun, energetic, and creative people.

I don’t know about you, but I am ALL IN!

Invites will be going out real soon.

There are way, way too many people who want to come, than we can accommodate.

I will send out invites and probably give a one week window that the invite is good, and then I will open up the spot to the next guy.

Just imagine the best moments you ever had on the road, hitting the conference circuit, cut out the sessions, cut out the booths, cut out the sales pitches, and what you have left is THE ThinkTank!

I love you guys, and look forward to seeing you here!

Much Love,
dk