Selling Umbrellas In A Synagogue | Hacker News Reader

Selling Umbrellas In A Synagogue

danshipper.com

56 pointsdshipper24 comments

Curiously, traditional (Orthodox) Jews cannot use umbrellas on the Sabbath Day. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_orthodox_Jews_allowed_to_use_a...

Or buy things

If you read the whole paragraph, you see that the answer is yes, umbrellas are permitted, when basic qualifications at met.

Yes, but that answer is wrong, because of a quirk about umbrellas themselves - Orthodox Jews don't use umbrellas on the Sabbath because opening an umbrella bears some similarity to constructing one, and constructing things is forbidden for them on the Sabbath. (There are many, many footnotes that would be needed to give a full explanation; in short, Orthodox Jews don't use them, regardless of whether they actually believe they "should" be forbidden from first principles.)

I was raised as an Orthodox Jew, but have gone off the derech (I no longer believes in Judaism and do not practice it anymore) an Orthodox is not supposed to use (and carry) money on the Shabbat, or even supposed to carry umbrellas, even inside an eruv[1] for those who believes in its validity (The Jewish law is not a monolithic concept, it's basically discussed to interpretations which the majority agrees).

It's common to see religious people going to the synagogue in raincoats in the Shabbat in neighbourhoods with a large Jewish community.

Anyway, this is not the point of the article.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruv

EDIT: The guy can sell umbrellas in the religious services in other days which are not holidays or shabbats, there are three religious services each day, the maariv, the shacharit and the mincha.

The guys selling umbrellas on the street are not creating a brand -- they're direct response advertising. As you mentioned, they're anonymous and disappear when you don't need them.

Brand is different. I don't turn on the TV when I'm ready to eat fast food, drink a beer, or buy a car. But McDonald's, Budweiser, and Ford all advertise on TV so that I'll remember them when I do.

Promoted searches and tweets work more like display/brand ads than direct response, where advertisers associate themselves with certain accounts and keywords. I think we'll see more innovation in this space as they figure it out, but I do agree that treating Twitter advertising like Google advertising is going to lead to disappointment.

I haven't used Twitter's ad platform at all (I honestly don't have much to advertise).

But is this pricing universal? $50 for 130 clicks, aka $0.39 per click? That seems like an exorbitant price for a click with unknown and probably low intent.

A CPC of $0.39, a CPM of $32.70!!!

I'm not an online marketing expert - is this realistic?

Pricing largely depends on audience quality and product margin (and a million small things...), so there is no 'right amount' only what's right for your business.

To give you an idea of range, in my marketing life I have sold low margin products in low quality audiences paying as little as $0.01 CPC. But for some high margin products in targeted environments I have paid in excess of $100 per click.

It is worth understanding this environment if any peeps are building something that monitises from advertising.

Great post. And a good point. But there are some exceptions to this.

I'm what you'd call a "super casual" twitter user. That is to say, I don't really use it other than for occasional real-time updates on things (After the NYC-area earthquake last year, Twitter was the first place I went to see what was up. And during the debates this year, I had fun following along with #debate.)

I can't be alone. And in those (rather specific, yes I know) cases, there is some opportunity for advertising, because just like when I use Google, I was searching for something, and to the OPs point, more open to buying that umbrella.

(For example, if a fact-checking group like PoliFact were advertising for me to follow them during my #debate search and "get real-time fact-checking", that's something I'd have totally subscribed to. Meanwhile I found them through sorting through the tweets instead.)

So I suppose it boils down to the same thing as with Google -- I don't really want to see ads when I'm reading Gmail, but I certainly don't mind them when I'm searching. Twitter could focus on promoted tweets / accounts during searches and I don't think they'd have the umbrella-in-a-synagogue problem.

That's a really interesting point. I think Twitter search is one area where the product is grossly lacking. And you're right, targeting ads in the search area would definitely capture intent.

Great post Dan!

Not sure I completely agree, though. If you're talking to people who are socializing, eating lox, and talking about how nice the weather is...coming in trying to sell an umbrella is interruptive at best.

If, however, you find a bunch of people huddled under a bus stop because they dont' have umbrella's, and are all waiting for the rain to stop....then coming in trying to sell an umbrella is genius.

It's all about targeting correctly. If a bunch of people are on Twitter complaining about how their new Ford is having alternator problems, and you run a mechanic shop that specializes in fixing them on the cheap, then you're providing value. Right?

I think it just has to do with how advertisers approach this, and how good of a job they do in crafting their copy, and their target demographic. Let's hope for our sake (and theirs), that they spend a real amount of time focused on that problem and don't mess it up.

Completely agree with you. The basic point of the article is that advertisers have to be sensitive to the context shift between selling things on Google and selling things on Twitter.

It's possible to create a successful marketing campaign on Twitter, but it probably looks very different than a successful one on Adwords.

Twitter could work as a way to engage in a conversation. For instance, if I tweet about going shopping for clothing, I wouldn't mind if Old Navy tweeted a coupon at me. That's much more complicated but if they could figure something like that out, the ads would be much more useful.

That's interesting. It's a fine line though. I think I'd get annoyed pretty quickly if after every tweet I was solicited for something.

I've been thinking about a real-world analogue for these types of social communities (e.g. synagogues) that actually makes money. The only one I can come up with is something like a fraternity. You pay dues, and have a local chapter that's also part of a larger national organization.

I'm not a giant fan, but it's very similar to the App.net model. Obviously you don't see massive scale, but you do get money without interfering with the social dynamic. Interestingly, the very fact that it costs money may make it more appealing to join. Curious to see where that goes.

Both fraternities and synagogues are examples of non-profit organizations.

check out http://localresponse.com/ - they do something similar but based on explicit and implicit checkins (disclaimer: I interned with them about 2 yrs ago)

That's what "lead generation" in Mila(http://mila.com) is doing: tweets matching vendor's products/services are presented as potential leads for the salesperson to act upon. When you tweet "looking for a cool new shirt" Old Navy would see your message and could give you a coupon.

"You go to services every Saturday."

Funny that you would use "Goldsteins" as an example. As you probably know there is a Goldsteins Funeral Home in Philly. And your example is dead on to how people in the funeral business operate. They belong and attend. But here's the thing. In order for Goldstein to get the burial business (or service, whatever) they have to continue to attend social functions lest they are forgotten. All the time (similar to your example "every saturday". Otherwise, while they do have a benefit from a memorable name (so someone might be more likely to call when seeing their other advertising) if they are not in front of people regularly (and willing to take the time and effort) they aren't going to get the benefit.

Other ads that are not intent based:

TV commericals

Billboards

Print ads

Ads on the sidelines of sports games

Viral marketing

etc etc etc

Comparing Twitter or Facebook ads to Google ads may not be a clear win, but we've been doing that kind of advertising for much longer. The key is for the advertiser to figure out what kind of ads belong on a service (with the company's help), and for the company to find the best way to track the influence those ads have.

"The upshot of it is that Twitter allows you to build those relationships in a scalable way."

Having the same tweet be pushed to 1000+ people is not building relationships in any meaningful manner though. Sending a personalized tweet to 1000 different people is though, but then that wouldn't be scalable.

tl;dr: most feedback on twitter ads assume it is intent driven (i.e. google adwords), when in most cases it is not.

IMO, it's the root of many social companies struggle to monetize with ads. We've been spoiled the last while because we knew what people were looking for, and could promote directly against that. In some ways, social ads are a step backwards from this.

I agree. In some ways social ads are a step back from that, but only because you establish contact with your customers much before they have needs that you can satisfy. So the time to first sale is a lot longer.

But I think, on the flip side, the relationships you develop with them are a lot stronger and a lot more powerful. The problem is, it's very hard to back that up empirically because it's a lot more complicated than just measuring CTR.

This is why Facebook's new retargeting is pretty exciting (disclaimer, I'm a cofounder of a company in the space, http://perfectaudience.com)

Facebook has/had the same issue: huge audience and targeting that just didn't capture intent. By opening up inventory to folks that have that intent data, retargeting companies, Facebook's able to "sell umbrellas to people in the rain" to use the lingo of OP.

It's going to make a big difference for them in the longrun and we anticipate Twitter doing something similar in the near future.

Fantastic! I enjoyed your article Dan. That's a very helpful way of considering the twitter ecosystem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com