Breaking Promos puts small business in spotlight

As part of our increased focus on affordable and innovative advertising vehicles, The Bakersfield Californian has launched Breaking Promos, a Twitterlike tool that connects our audiences directly to small-business advertisers. 

Breaking Promos launched Monday on Bakersfield.com, and we're working to roll the feature out to rest rest of our sites on The Bakersfield.com Network. 

The think Breaking Promos ticker scrolls deals across the bottom of local websites. The concept is simple: Local businesses can log into our self-serve system using their Twitter handle, buy digital tokens that can be redeemed as 140-character promotional posts, or so-called Breaking Promos. Those Breaking Promos go live in the Twitterstream but more importantly appear in a ticker that scrolls at the bottom of our websites.

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Facebook launches surcharges on posts

We heard recently that Facebook was testing the concept of charging business users to post but I didn't expect the real thing to arrive in the States so soon.

Facebook has launched a "Promote Your Page" feature in which it's asking members with business pages to pay extra to have their posts reach more of their fans. As Facebook writes:

"When you promote a post, it will be shown in the news feeds of more of the people who like your Page than you would reach normally. Friends of the people who have interacted with your post will also be more likely to see the story in their news feeds for up to 3 days from when the post was first created."

Pricing for this feature appears to be all over the map, with variations according to the number of fans you have, want to reach, when, where and in what language. 

In our case with The Bakersfield Californian's fan page, on Tuesday night Facebook was asking us to pay $5 for every 1,100 fans we wanted to reach with a "promoted" post. This morning, that fee had changed to $5 for only 500 fans (up to $30 and 3,000 fans, or half of our fan base). On the Bakersfield Mom fan page, which has slightly more than 1,000 fans, Facebook's pricing this morning was $5 for 900 and $10 for 1,500. 

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Good news, bad news about our March Meet e-book

Check out a sample chapter from the Kindle version.I've written previously about The Californian's cool e-book documenting the world-famous March Meet held just north of Bakersfield. 

And here's some good news regarding "March Meet: Bakersfield's Love Affair with Speed, Nitro & Good Times": Amazon and Barnes & Noble are selling versions for $9.99. The Amazon Kindle version is here and the Nook version is here. Buyers of the book will get a link and password to a special web page containing 21 videos and hundreds of photos covering a wide variety of people, events and happenings at the March Meet. 

The bad news: Our enhanced iPad edition of the e-book, featuring hundreds of embedded photos and a dozen videos, remains in queue in the iBookstore. It's been sitting there for more than one month, and Apple has told us several times it's simply backed up reviewing iBookstore submissions. Hmmm, you'd think a company with $100 billion in cash could hire a few extra people to help unclog the pipeline. 

Mad props to BookBrewer, an e-book publishing tool we used to upload the book to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Simple, easy and cost-effective. And less than a two-day turnaround to hit the Kindle and Nook stores.