Facebook Advertising Ineffective

I've been meaning to post this for a while.

I have become somewhat skeptical of Facebook and social media advertising.

Initially I found it was cheaper than Google Adwords and provided more profiling power. At least initially it appeared effective.

However despite dozens of clicks delivered in a very short space of time, after tracking conversions I have found that it has been about 1/10 as effective in conversion than standard banner ads and Google Adwords.

So the overall value of Facebook advertising, at least that I've found, is minimal.

This is a shame as it seemed like the platform had plenty of promise. Perhaps this is due to the type of advertising and the frame of mind of consumers using social media.

I have, however had success with Facebook Business Pages where your customers can become fans of your business. This has worked well. Perhaps the two could work better in conjunction than a standard Facebook ad. All the same though, I've been slightly burnt by my Facebook advertising experience.

There was a problem with the Windows Live Hotmail service - Gmail is better

Just about every time I try to search my Hotmail email I get this message:

There was a problem with the Windows Live Hotmail service (a temporary network connectivity issue that has nothing to do with your computer). Please try again.

Trying again is just a waste of time. It doesn't fix the issue.

I'd move from Hotmail for good, but unforunately I was an early adopter (It was a good webmail system once) and I rely on it and can't forward the email to Gmail.

Gmail is 1000 times better and more reliable than Hotmail and I can think of at least 100 reasons to switch permanently.

Google Ads with sound ! Offensive and inappropriate but difficult to disable

Google should be ashamed of creeping in Flash Video ads with sound on its Adsense Network.

I was alerted to by members of my thriving online community that everytime they visited my site, a loud spinning wheel sound would start. It was driving users away in their dozens. Noone could work out why my site became offensive all of a sudden.

The culprit - a Google image ad in the footer of my website was displaying online gambling content. Appalled, I went into my Adsense settings to disable the audio, but couldn't find a setting for it and in any case, I would have to recreate the Adsense code, reupload and change the page code on my site.

I searched the Internet to find out what I could do about it, but came up with nothing.

However I decided to contact Google directly to report the offensive ad, after searching extensively I found this link for "Feedback on a Google ad in the content network":
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=adfeedback

I am yet to receive any response from Google over this.

Apparently offensive ads sometimes slip through the cracks. But when it does, as a publisher, it can do some really bad damage to your sites reputation. To date I was impressed with the performance and relevance of image ads. However as a result of this experience, if Google don't change their policy on Flash ads, I'm considering moving back to text ads or moving away from Adsense altogether to a more discrete context advertising providers (as there are now plenty of Adsense alternatives out there).