This just in, I am headed to SXSW!

I am so, so beyond excited that excited doesn’t even seem to cover it. For five days straight I will be going to sessions on blogging, social media, design and marketing. The sessions and parties are the most exciting part for me, but for a lot of out of towners just being in Austin is the highlight of their trip. And since I live in Austin, and get to do fun stuff every day, I was hoping that I could help the out of towners with some Austin tips and tricks.

1. I know a lot about queso. Check out my SXSW queso recommendations here! If you are coming in for SXSW and want to meet me for queso, let me know. I’m always down.

2. My friend Rebecca knows all of the good food places. Trust her on this one…

3. The weather in Austin is beautiful, but the Austin Convention Center is literally ten degrees. Anyone who has been to NIWeek knows this. Pack a sweater.

So I thought I had more recommendations than that, but for me Austin is pretty much summed up by queso, food, margaritas and the amazing weather.

Enjoy SXSW and let me know if you want to meet up!

Have you checked out the ads that Facebook has been serving up to you lately?

I don’t know about you, but the ads I have been seeing on my Facebook range from offensive to irrelevant, and they are hardly ever timely or targeted toward me. Which makes little sense because of how highly targeted Facebook advertising is supposed to be. According to the New York Times, “The self-service ad system offers any person or company the opportunity to quickly design an ad and aim it toward finely segmented groups of Facebook’s 400 million members, based on gender, age, location and preferences like favorite movies and activities.”

Of all the advertising options in the world, Facebook should be the one most targeted at me. I give Facebook, for free, all of my personal information, and their advertisers still can’t get it right.

Just take a look at the ads below:

Make a love child? Seriously?

But it makes sense that Facebook ads wouldn’t be appropriate because, ”Facebook does not have employees to review each ad, but relies largely on member feedback to flag inappropriate messages.” But Facebook users, as far as I know, spend little of their time flagging posts that are offensive or just plain terrible.

You just can’t blame advertisers for wanting to use Facebook as a platform, but here are a few things everyone should remember before when using Facebook ads:

1. Be extremely specific in targeting- Facebook allows for very, very specific targeting. Use it! If you sell wedding cakes in Atlanta, and you are targeting newly engaged people in Atlanta then you have done it right. If you sell engagement rings and you are targeting college students, you are doing it wrong.

2. Make it interesting, but not stupid- You obviously want to have a great Facebook ad, but don’t do something shocking just to be shocking. Instead, make your ad super interesting. If it’s interesting I will click on it,  if it’s shocking/offensive I will just be turned off by it.

3. Continue to evaluate your program- Many advertisers think that if they just throw their ad up on Facebook that it will be perfect forever. This is not true! Continue to evaluate your program for how you can make your ad better, and continue to look into other platforms for advertising.

Facebook advertisers continue to miss the mark for me! What do you think advertisers on Facebook can do to make it better?

In case you haven’t already noticed, things are looking a little different around here today! A few months ago I realized that my blog needed a serious update, and now it looks and feel a lot more “me” than before.

Of course I didn’t do any of the design work myself, and I owe a huge, huge thank you to Matt Cheuvront for his great work on my blog. If you need any design work done you should seriously check out his site MattChevy.com and his blog LifeWithoutPants.com and hire him immediately. I know there are hundreds of thousands of web gurus out there, but if you want someone who isn’t pretentious about design and will really listen to what you want then Matt is definitely your guy. Before I started the process of working with him I didn’t even know what I wanted, but he listened to all of the crazy crap that I told him I liked and he somehow came up with the perfect design. Matt was also really nice to me and didn’t tell me I was crazy. And that in and of itself is reason enough for you to hire him.

But seriously, welcome to the new and improved BlakeSunshine.com! If you read my blog in a RSS reader or e-mail, hop on over to the site and check out the new design.

Some things you may find helpful about the new site:
1. The font is 1 million times easier to read.
2. The navigation is now categorized by the most popular things I write about. If you only come to my site to read about public relations than just hop on over to that page.
3. You don’t have to stare at my face on the front page anymore (Apparently some people really liked seeing my face everyday. If you are one of those people, send me an email and I will send you a picture of myself everyday).

If this is your first time visiting my site, please head on over to the About Me page and see what I’m all about. If you are a regular around here, thanks for continuing to come back and read my blog. I appreciate you more than you know. Please take a look around my blog and let me know what you think. All feedback is welcomed!

I will have lots of great posts from SXSW Interactive coming next week, so I hope you will all stick around for a while. Yay for the new BlakeSunshine.com!