By now, most people are aware that Facebook advertisements can be quite targeted in nature, whether by age, gender, or location. Most people also are aware of the level of spending by politicians and government for Facebook ads to get their messages out to their targeted audience. But just how targeted can Facebook ads be in the service of politicians? Well, for that we turn to the story of Lisa Murkowski, Senator from Alaska, and her attempt to get a road built between two towns in her state.

Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski has been trying for years to convince the Interior Department to allow Alaska to build a 11-mile road through a wildlife refuge to make two remote towns in the state more easily accessible. But the Interior Department has balked, citing environmental concerns; the area is a habitat for migratory birds. In order to convince Department officials to change their minds, Murkowski recently targeted them—and only them—with a video ad on Facebook.

How did she do this? Well, she produced a video advertisement and bought ads on Facebook that were set to run specifically during lunchtime hours and geo-targeted 1849 C Street, N.W. in Washington D.C.. That address is the building for the Interior Department. That's fairly precise targeting, I think, which is why it's actually quite impressive that the advertisement appeared in the newsfeeds seven-thousand times as it ran and the video had been clicked on well over two-thousand times. But exactly how precise was the geo-location portion of this advertisement?

Well, it depends on how big the building is. A spokesperson from Facebook directed me to a help page explaining how to target people in a specific location (which it can determine from GPS coordinates off their smartphone or, less reliably, from the IP address of their computer). The most granular option is targeting a location with a radius of one kilometer, or a little over half a mile.

So if you were targeting a workplace with a one-mile long campus, like Facebook itself, you could be guaranteed to show an ad only to people in its buildings. But the Department of Interior takes up just one city block. So when Murkowski targeted the Interior Department’s address, she was actually targeting not just that building, but all the people and buildings in a half-mile radius.

Which probably led to some very confused people in nearby buildings wondering what the hell this video about a road in Alaska was doing in their newsfeed. This does come off as perhaps a tad unseemly, but I view this kind of targeted advertising less negatively than I do traditional lobbying efforts. And it's not exactly clear whether all of those views had any real effect on the policy-makers, as the Interior Department still opposes the building of the road as of the date of this writing.

Still, it's a brave new world out there for anyone looking to influence policy-makers.

Eric Goldman alerts us to the interesting bit of news that Google has sued the US government -- specifically the Department of the Interior, for not seriously considering Google Apps when it put out a Request for Quotation (RFQ) to handle its messaging needs. Specifically, the DOI stated upfront in the RFQ that the solution had to be part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. Google is making the argument that this is "unduly restrictive of competition," and it seems like they've got a decent argument there.

Most of the lawsuit details the history of meetings and conversations between Google and the DOI, where Google sought to convince the DOI that its solution was acceptable. The DOI justified limiting its offerings to Microsoft, by saying that Microsoft had two things that other solution providers did not: unified/consolidated email and "enhanced security." Google disputes this (not surprisingly) and notes various problems with Microsoft solutions -- including well reported downtime issues. Google protested the RFQ when it was released, but the GAO dismissed Google's protest saying that since Google does not have a GSA schedule contract (i.e., what you need to sell to the gov't), it was "not an interested party." Anyway, should make for an interesting lawsuit if it goes anywhere...