Robert Gorell over at grokdot.com makes the argument that Social Ads leveraging Demographics for targeting is "silly" in that it really doesn't provide you with the precise targeting you require to drive the conversion rates we expected to see in this rich social world of ours.

I was at the Facebook launch of Social Ads last November. Robert reminded me in his post of what Zuckerberg said,

With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in, their location, country, city or town, interests, gender [etcetera, etcetera]

Now, I've been a big proponent of Social Ads and the types of demographics it serves up for targeting. However, its missing a critical element. Attitudinal Segmentation. Yeah, yeah, here goes Steve talking a about segmentation again, when will he stop. I won't :) After all its not really a big deal that I have all these demographics at my finger tips to market to my constituencies. If I can't segment then into groups on a continuum of not only how likely they are to buy from me but also understand what personalized and relevant messaging they need as part of their conversation with me, then I'm flushing money down the marketing drain.

Attitudinal segmentation is the most powerful arrow in the marketing quiver today. So why is it under-leveraged? Because its actually the most scientific of the marketing sciences and its not very "creative" in the way we typically think of marketing. So I think old school marketers tend to shy away from it. In the B2B high tech space companies like Microsoft, Dell, Apple and SAP use attitudinal to find not only the companies most likely to buy from them but also to understand what's critical to say during those conversations.

C'mon, what do you have to lose? Just customers.