Facebook first introduced the Marketplace application in mid 2007 as a way for people to post classified listings on the site. Now Facebook has launched its new, updated Marketplace. This time the Marketplace is powered by a company with a funny name, Oodle. Despite the name they are a big online classifieds company founded by former Excite and eBay executives. Oodle has built a completely new version of the Marketplace focused on giving people a place to buy, sell or give things away to the people they know.



This Facebook Marketplace Guide is a practical Step-By-Step Guide for all of you who want to learn how to sell your items effectively on the new Facebook Marketplace.

Using the Facebook Marketplace you can sell, give away, buy, ask or search for anything you want. You can also use the Marketplace to support your favourite charities by selling your unwanted goods for a good cause. Additionally, you can see what your friends are buying and/or selling. Facebook users can post their Marketplace listings free of charge. Your listings will be viewable to millions of Facebook Marketplace users worldwide. If you have previously used the old Facebook Marketplace, you should see it bookmarked in the lower left hand corner of your monitor. And, if you had active listings in the old Marketplace, you should be given the option to transfer them to the new Facebook Marketplace. If you have not used the Facebook Marketplace application before, you can find it here: facebook.com/marketplace.

Ok, let’s get down to business. As I mentioned, this is a

Step-By-Step Guide how to sell in the Facebook Marketplace effectively

So, here we go:

Step 1 – Take a Photo

Grab your digital camera and take a nice close-up picture of the item that you wish to sell. It is best to shoot against a light, solid background. Transfer your photo to your computer as a JPG-file. If your item is something that can’t be presented with a photo, don’t worry, you can still get it listed.

Step 2 – Log On

Log on to your Facebook account and fire up the Marketplace application. Just click the Applications menu in the lower left hand corner of your screen and choose Marketplace. You are greeted with the Marketplace welcome screen.

You have four main options at your disposal:

Sell It Sell for a Cause

Give It Away and

Ask for It



In this guide we are concentrating on the Selling-for-Money side of things, so you may leave the screen as it is and write a short description of your item in the box where it says “Sell something to make extra cash.” When you click the box it will change into “Yourname” is selling..?. Write your main headline for the listing here. After writing your headline description, click the blue Post-button.

Step 3 – Write Your Advertisement

After you have written your headline for the listing you are presented with a new screen with more options related to your listing. Write a punch line type of a description in the box “Why are you selling it”?. You could write “I need money to buy more stuff.” but, even though it might be the case, I don’t think it would get your listing noticed. Consider this space as your sub headline for the ad. Write this description like you were working in an advertising company. Or, if you feel more conservative, just describe your item as funky as possible. You have two lines to hit the point.

Next, state your asking price in the Price-box. You know what its worth.

Write your location. This is a must. Just write in your city.

Choose a category for your item. At the time of writing this book, there are only the following 13 categories available:

Baby & Kid Stuff

Books & Magazines

Cars & Vehicles

Clothes & Accessories

Collectibles

Computers & Accessories

Electronics

Furniture

Home and Garden

Musical Instruments

Sporting Goods, Bicycles & Equipment

Tickets

Everything Else



If you can’t find a suitable category for your item, you can always choose Everything Else, however it is not a very good category to be listed under.

In the next box you can provide a wider description of your item. Here you have more room than just two lines. Describe your item with as much detail as you can. You know, size, colour, condition,.. those sort of things. But, don’t stress yourself too much with this; you can always change it later. Once you have created the best advertising text ever, hit the Browse-button to locate your photo from your computer, USB stick or where ever you think you saved it in Step 1. Yes, I know, … I can never find my images either. Don’t panic though, you have time to locate it; the screen isn’t going anywhere.

You found it? Good! Actually, you can upload two photos if you wish. For instance if you are selling a book, it is a good idea to upload both front and back covers. You can upload even more images later on, but for the sake of this exercise, one is enough.

Tick the Terms of Use-box and click the Submit-button.

Step 4 – Rather Unnecessary Step

The next screen has your details on it and your only option is to click the Continue-button. I really don’t know why this screen exists, but since it does all we can do is click the button.

Step 5 – Publishing

Next you will get a screen asking if you want to publish this listing in your own Facebook profile. This is a good idea. You will get a choice for a Full, Short or a One Line description. I would recommend you’d choose the Short-option. You may tick the Always do this for Marketplace-box if you wish to use this same option every time you list something. So, if you wish to publish this listing on your profile, click the Publish-button, but if you only want it to appear in the Facebook Marketplace, choose the No, Thanks-button.

Step 6 – Promotion

This step is your first chance to advertise your new listing. This is also a good idea. You can Recruit Friends to Promote your Listing in their News Feed. You can add up to 5 of your friends by clicking on their pictures. You can also choose them by writing their names in the Find Friends-box. Once you have chosen your friends who might be interested in promoting your listing, click the Send Request-button; or if you don’t want to bother your friends this time, choose Skip.

Step 7 – Personal Marketing Message

You will be presented a confirmation screen with your details. You can add a personal message to this post by clicking the blue Add Personal Message-hotlink. If you don’t want to add your personal message, just click the Send-button. You also can cancel this message altogether by clicking Cancel.

Step 8 – Done!

Congratulations! You have listed your first item on the Facebook Marketplace. Listings take approximately 30 minutes to be included in the search index.

You will be presented with the screen titled “Manage My Listing: Active”. Here you can review your listing and, if you wish to make any changes click the Edit Details-hotlink in the light green bar. You can also delete your listing as well as promote your listing with a Facebook Ad. I will not get into details how to produce Facebook Ads in this book. That topic, among many other good ones, will be fully covered in my Facebook Advertising Guide.

That’s it, you’ve done it! Good work! Thank you for reading so far.

Additional, good to know stuff:

Editing Your Listing

You can easily edit your listings after you have published them. Just click the Edit Details-hotlink on the screen mentioned in the Manag
e My Listing -page, and you will get pretty much the same screen as when you were writing the listing in the first place. You can change every detail of your listing here as well as upload more images if you wish. It is a good idea to show as many images as you can.

After you have made your changes in this panel click the Submit-button to get your listing updated. You will again be presented with a useless confirmation screen as seen. Just ignore it, and click the Continue-button.

Next, you will be asked if you wish to publish this updated listing on your Facebook profile as in Step 6. You may choose to publish again, or you may just click the No, Thanks-button.

Finally, you will see your updated listing on the “Manage My Listing”- screen.

Managing Your Facebook Marketplace Listings

You can easily manage all of your Facebook Marketplace listings in one convenient location. If you click the My Listings-hotlink in the Marketplace menu, you will see your current listings. This is your place to manage all your listings. You can add more listings, edit them and after you have sold your items you can delete them.

As I mentioned earlier, you can also sell your items for a cause or you can give them away for free (don’t know why, but you can). You can also find something you need for yourself. These functions are not covered in this book, but I’m sure you’ll manage them with the principles covered here.

Ok, I hope you enjoyed this Facebook Marketplace Guide. I wish you luck in selling your stuff through Facebook. I sold my first item, an awesome Jimi Hendrix Wah-Wah guitar pedal in just 3 days.

Best regards,

Kris Olin, MscBa, marketing

This Facebook Marketplace Guide is also available as a fully illustrated PDF-version.

You can download it FREE: www.facebook-advertising-marketing.com

Stock Research and Home Depot are in the news again. This is a result of the firing of the CEO, Bob Nardelli, and what a story it is. You have to step back for a moment and think about any company’s history that you are doing stock research on. You must have an understanding of the company’s history. As a professional investor, when I think of a company’s history, I am more concerned about corporate culture than just about anything else. History shows that a great corporate culture will produce great results. The opposite is true as well.

I was involved with Home Depot in the beginning. I watched and almost participated in the original private placement for the company over 25 years ago. That’s another $100 million I am never going to have. What made this company really go, were the two founders, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blanc. They created an entrepreneurial store atmosphere where a lot of what went on rested in the hands of the store manager.

For more than 20 years, the company had a spectacular run. It was one of the greatest stock market performances in modern history. It all came apart during the stock market bubble of 2000. Yes, the stock price was inflated, and the company brought in a new CEO Bob Nardelli, who was in the running to become CEO of General Electric. He was passed over by Jack Welch and the Board, and Jeff Immelt, won the slot to run GE.

As is the case with all top guys at GE when they are passed over, they leave, sometimes for greener pastures. Nardelli was recruited to run Home Depot, and successfully brought GE’s template for how to grow a business over to Home Depot. That was his first problem, his second was execution. There is no question that Nardelli was successful in creating great numbers for Home Depot. He failed everywhere else.

When he started, the sales were about $46 billion. By the end of 2005, they were approaching $82 billion. During his tenure however, the stock price is overall down about 6% or so, while profits doubled. At the same time, its principal rival Lowe’s Companies has seen its stock more than triple.

If it ain’t BROKE – Don’t FIX IT?

Nardelli was a self-made victim. It’s one thing to come into an ailing company, and turn it around using modern management techniques. It’s another thing to come into one of the best stock market performers in history, and start changing things that don’t need changing. The result is the self-destruction of a seasoned corporate manager – Robert Nardelli. Don’t feel too bad for him, he walked out with a very rich $200 million severance package.

He never got it though. He never figured it out. He’s sitting in his home right now sipping a martini, licking his chops, and living in a fantasy world about what went wrong at Home Depot.

Here’s the REAL DEAL

Nardelli went after the wrong issues at Home Depot. Yes, the company may have been a bit “shoot by the hip” in terms of giving those 2000 plus store managers authority to run the show – BUT IT WORKED, and it worked well for decades. The imperial CEO tried to wring them in – GE style, and the new template just wouldn’t work. General Electric is the army of the corporate world, and don’t kid yourself, the army wins the wars.

Home Depot was more along the lines of Special Forces – a lot of authority went to the guy on the floor running the store. After all, these are the guys that deal with the customers on a day to day basis. The customer buying a screwdriver, or the contractor buying drywall never got to see Nardelli. They only saw his procedures in place, and the procedures no longer worked.

Take the handoff for example. For years if you walked into Home Depot and couldn’t find what you were looking for, you could ask any employee. Whoever you asked, would then walk you over to the aisle where the item was located. The employee would then look for the worker in charge of that aisle, and say, this gentleman would like a screwdriver. The second employee would then show you where they were located, even help you select one. The key is that the first employee would hand you off to the second employee personally.

Nardelli destroyed this practice, and with it – that flair that made Home Depot different than everybody else went down the tubes. There’s something about a customer business that’s radically different than General Electric’s business plan which is to engage with other companies (manufacturing) rather than people. Nardelli didn’t get it, and the stock went to hell.

Have you ever noticed that when you walk into a Wal-Mart, you can pick up any item and than find a bar code scanner in the store that will tell you the price of the item? You would think that Nardelli would have installed similar bar code readers in his stores during the five years that he ran the company. Nope, forget about it. Half the items in Home Depot have no price sign attached, or nearby. The customer is completely at a loss to determine what he is paying for an item.

Abusing Shareholders too

Nardelli’s ultimate downfall came after he started to abuse Home Depot’s fabulous shareholder base. On May 28th of this year, Nardelli ran the annual shareholder’s meeting in Wilmington Delaware, absent the Board of Directors. He told them not to show up. He only allowed the meeting to go 30 minutes. There was a digital clock at the meeting to time the questions. You had 60 seconds and then boom, the microphone went dead automatically. They probably put a sadist in charge of the cut off switch.

In the final analysis, this brilliant GE trained executive blew up his own career. He alienated the shareholders, the employees, and Wall Street too. He would appear antagonistic when I would attend the analyst conference calls when he would be quizzed about same store numbers. He couldn’t understand our infatuation with comparables.

Right now, he is probably realizing that we weren’t the ones operating on another planet. Nevertheless, he does have that $200 million severance package to ease his pain. It’s not the end for him however. I understand Congressman Barney Frank is about to launch Congressional hearings, and Nardelli will be brought before the Congress to explain the justification for the CEO pay packages today. Nardelli will have to bring his own lawyer this time, on his dime. There won’t be a single one of the 330,000 Home Depot employees there to support him either.

Goodbye and Good Luck

Much has been made of the 2% base rate included in the guidelines for the Obama Administration’s “Making Home Affordable” plan. It’s been well documented that the plan is off to a very slow start with current estimates of approximately 50,000 loan modifications in process. Less talked about, at least so far, is that the 2% headline interest rate of the plan may be unavailable to most homeowners seeking loan modifications that follow the plan’s guidelines.

As the saying goes, “The devil is always in the details” and Making Home Affordable has a detail which goes by the name of the “Net Present Value” test. Many of the mortgages which were originated during the boom in real estate, including those considered to be toxic, were sold to investors on Wall Street, from pension funds, and insurance companies (like AIG). These investors didn’t have the infrastructure or experience to collect payments, prepare statements, etc. so they left the handling of those matters to loan servicers like Saxon Mortgage (now a part of JP Morgan Chase). These servicers interface with the homeowner on all matters, including home loan modifications. For that work, they receive a small percentage off of each of the homeowner’s monthly mortgage checks as their fee.

An unintended consequence of the meltdown in real estate prices and skyrocketing default rates is there is now a conflict of interest between servicers and the investors that employ them. The foundation of that conflict is this; with monthly mortgage payments functioning as the lifeline of the servicers, their priority is to keep those payments going. To that end, granting loan modifications, even with drastic cuts in interest rates, is a much better outcome for the servicer than not receiving payments at all and/or having the home go into foreclosure. Aggressive loan modifications which benefit the servicers often hurt the investors by forcing markdowns on value of loans in their portfolio, hence, the conflict of interest.

Having experienced this conflict prior to the unveiling of Making Home Affordable, investor groups insisted that the net present value test be added to the plan to protect their interests. A net present value (NPV) calculation works this way:

1) Determine the proposed monthly mortgage payment for the life of the modified loan

2) Calculate the total return in dollars over the life of the loan – monthly payment x 12 months x 30 years = total return

3) Estimate the value of what the foreclosed home would sell for at auction

4) The highest number between the total return and the estimated selling price at foreclosure determines what action will be taken.

Motivated to keep properties generating monthly payments and out of foreclosure, servicers will negotiate the highest interest rate possible, within the constraints of the plan and what the homeowner can afford, to generate higher fees and to make sure that the net present value test comes out on the side of loan modification. With higher fees and the net present value test driving the negotiations in a loan modification, granting 2% interest rates becomes a very low priority and in some cases a deal killer for the servicers.  

Congress, hearing the cries from their constituencies, has backed the efforts of the mortgage servicers by passing the “Safe Harbor Law” in May. The law protects servicers from lawsuits filed by investors claiming that the servicers are acting in their own best interests in loan modifications, at the expense of the aggrieved investors. It also gives servicers more autonomy in their structuring their home loan modifications.   

The net present value test can present formidable challenges to the loan modification process due to many factors that are constantly changing. In New York City, for example, overall property values have remained relatively high but income levels have dropped. Limited by Making Home Affordable guidelines, mortgage payments cannot exceed 31% of the homeowner’s monthly income. The cap on payments can result in a net present value outcome that favors foreclosure on a property. Industry watchers have expressed concerns that the relative resilience in real estate values in the city could actually work against homeowners.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are cities such as Las Vegas and Detroit where property values have dropped as a much as 80%. These are areas where the net present value tests favor loan modifications but homeowners are walking away, forcing the properties back to the investors.

The next issue for investors wishing to foreclose is whether they can actually sell properties at auction. In California, approximately 17,000 out of 111,000 foreclosed properties went up for sale at the most recent auctions. Of the 17,000 properties, banks took back 85% of the properties when bids averaged only 59% of the outstanding loan balances. The lack of foreclosure sales across the country has led to a massive backlog of foreclosed properties that are either being kept off the market, put up repeatedly at auction, or for sale to private parties.

With unfavorable outcomes on either side of the net present value test, it’s apparent that investors are deciding not to decide on either action. The advantage of leaving properties in limbo is that they don’t have to be marked to market until action is taken, a necessary concession from Congress granted to investor groups in March. That way they can carry the properties in their portfolios at values that don’t trigger capital requirements. If it all sounds like a house of cards, well, at least it’s house.