Interested in creating a Facebook app but don’t want to worry about hosting plans, marketing your app, or even writing the code?  A new service funded and developed by Sun Microsystems might be a solution for you.

Zembly is a new tool that allows anyone to easily create and host social applications that target the most popular social platforms like Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, iPhone, and Google Gadgets.  By reusing UI and back-end code and encouraging the crowd-sourcing of app components, Zembly markets itself as a sort of free library for social applications — live and editable code that can grow as users decide to contribute. For those who need a really simple solution, Zembly could be well worth the few minutes it takes to look around.

To start, there’s no downloading or learning of a new language – just go to Zembly’s website and you can start creating an app in your browser immediately.  Zembly already shows results from component providers like Amazon, Flickr, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo as well as pieces of code created by other Zembly users.  All you have to do is click to add one of these elements.

If you’re worried that Zembly may not be robust enough for your needs, try out a sample app called Capital Punishment that shows how Zembly apps look when published. Zembly and its hosting services are free for now and invitations for the private Beta can be found here.

As Facebook’s audience continues to grow, more marketing agencies that have traditionally focused on search are beginning to experiment with Facebook. Earlier this week, we spoke with Tim Kendall, Facebook’s Director of Monetization, about the direction Facebook is going with its performance advertising solutions.

Today, we speak with Devin Davis, the Director of Marketing at G5 Search Marketing, a search agency that focuses primarily on the local market in the US. Below, Devin compares his experience on Facebook to SEM and shares examples of campaign tactics that have performed well on Facebook.

Thanks for your time today Devin. Could you give a quick summary of the type of clients G5 works with and the types of campaigns you run?

G5 has been working with Facebook on traditional Facebook ads (which, I realize, is a fairly fluid term) for quite some time now. We have clients in the self storage industry, the medical industry and the salon industry who have all seen fantastic results from their campaigns. Being able to target a specific audience has been key to this success.

How does the ROI your clients see on Facebook compare to search?

The CPC has been virtually the same across all the verticals.   The total amount spent has varied depending on the campaign, of course.  We have some clients in very rural areas so we have typically seen less total spend there when compared to areas with higher population density.  Our cost per conversion has also been similar across verticals.

We have typically seen a CPC of $1.25 or less. This has led to a $10.25 cost per lead. We have also been able to nail down a 10% conversion rate from visits originating from Facebook Ads, which is quite high. We attribute this to the granularity that Facebook provides us in targeting the users we’re reaching.

How do the results you’ve seen on Facebook compare across your storage, medical, and salon industry campaigns?

So far we have seen the best results in the storage industry.  The ability to target students at particular universities was a huge win for us since a huge percentage of customers who use self storage facilities are students storing their stuff during breaks.

The salon industry saw the next best results because we could target women in areas around the salons.  The medical industry saw the lowest return of the three because of their specific practice.  In fact, we started the medical campaign with the intention of using it as much as a branding tool as anything else. In that regard, it has been quite successful.

What targeting and timing strategies have worked well for you so far?

Within the Facebook Ads realm, both targeting and timing have been key. An example: we have a self storage client who has facilities in numerous college towns (such as Berkeley and Flagstaff). Toward the end of the school year last year, we ran a campaign for them that focused on students of specific schools. This took advantage of both timing and targeting. As a direct result of that campaign, that client added more college students to their facilities than ever before.

What do you think Facebook could do to improve its performance advertising offering?

It would be great to have the ability to handle multiple clients under one login.  Right now, we are using the same login for multiple clients and just separating them out into different campaigns.  If we could have a “My Client List” that allows us to have one login and multiple clients, that would be extremely beneficial.

Also, the reporting piece is a bit lacking.  So far you can only download campaign or ad data in very specific time frames. We would like to see more freedom to choose specific date ranges.  Also, we would like the ability to pull reports further back in time than three months.  This does not allow enough time to really run sufficient tests.

More advanced targeting regarding locations where the user is and the ability to target a radius around a city would also be very helpful.  We have clients that are in more remote areas of the country and their city does not show up in the City field for targeting.  Right now we would have to target an entire state to reach our users.  If we had a radius targeting, we then might be able to get a more highly targeted campaign without going after an entire state. This would, obviously, also be markedly more cost effective which, for us, is always the ultimate goal.

Thanks Devin. Any final thoughts?

We have found Facebook ads to be a solid and easily measurable, positive addition to our offering for our clients looking to reach their local customers online. We look forward to their next additions as well.

New Year’s just passed and it’s likely that a popular resolution in 2009 is, unsurprisingly, to lose weight.  Well, this year, there is a Facebook app that might make keeping your resolution a little easier.

New Facebook application WeightView allows users to upload a picture of themselves and visualize what they might look like at a new weight.  A “digital photo enhancement” process requires a full body photo and a desired weight loss goal of up to fifty pounds.  WeightView returns a customized photo at the goal weight free of charge.  The idea, of course, is that seeing a thinner, healthier you will motivate you to realize your weight loss goals.

By leveraging Facebook’s social graph, WeightView also provides the same support structure that’s available in traditional weight loss programs like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers.  It allows its users to meet other group members, earn points towards valuable prizes, and discuss weight loss-related topics with the WeightView community and health care experts.

With over 120k users since its launch, WeightView has already become the most-used weight loss app on Facebook.  One of the company’s founders, Dr. Doran Katz, attributes WeightView’s success to the visualization feature that isn’t offered by most other similar programs, online or offline.

If you’re an avid Facebook user and you’re interested in losing weight in 2009, or, alternatively, if you’re trying to market a weight loss product by piggy-backing on a successful Facebook app, you should check out WeightView.

Menlo Park, CA-based startup SocialFeet has launched an alpha version of its Facebook Connect-powered widget that allows users to share their web surfing activity with their Facebook friends. It’s the first Facebook Connect widget implementation we’ve seen that bridges Facebook Connect authentication across sites.

Here’s how it works:

1. A user goes to a site with the SocialFeet widget installed, like this one, and logs into SocialFeet.
2. The user can see which of their friends have also visited the site, and share their activity on that site with their Facebook friends via the “Share” button. In addition, their activity on the site is anonymously shared with other SocialFeet users (see screenshot at right).
3. If the user goes to another site with the SocialFeet widget installed, like this one, they are logged in to the SocialFeet widget upon arrival.

Here’s how SocialFeet describes their service:

SocialFeet allows a user to connect to your site and see which of their friends are also surfing the site.  In addition, as they surf, we share their surfing habits with their friends, according to their preferences, across our network of sites.  We believe this will expose users throughout our network to the activity and interesting content on your site, driving new users to your site.  Visitors should also be able to develop a sense of community as they can see which of their friends are visiting the site and where they are visting throughout the SocialFeet network.

Given Facebook’s recently announced fourth party Connect policies (documentation here), some developers have steered away from implementing Facebook Connect-powered widgets that bridge authentication across sites (somewhat reminiscent of MyBlogLog).

Specifically, the part of Facebook’s policy that appears relevant to widgets like SocialFeet is this:

The widget developer can have a relationship with the site owner, but not directly with the user. Any Connect buttons or functionality need to be done in the context of the website that hosts the widget… The user has established a relationship with two parties: Facebook and the website. A widget developer should not create a third connection.

When asked about how this policy applies in this case, Nathaniel McNamara, CEO of SocialFeet parent company Yasnap, told Inside Facebook,

SocialFeet enables “Social browsing,” which will be a great service for users, websites, and Facebook. We welcome a dialogue about the specifics of the Connect policy with Facebook, and feel comfortable that we can remain in their good graces, because our visions are compatible.  Since Facebook can (and does) modify their specific policies on their wiki regularly, SocialFeet has been working toward the common goal of a richer experience for the Facebook community wherever they browse.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company did not have any comment on this at this time. It is scenarios like these that will provide more concrete examples of the way Facebook’s fourth party Connect policies apply to Facebook Connect-powered widgets going forward.

According to a social media study released recently by Rosetta, 59% of 100 leading retailers are now using Facebook Pages to market their companies and products.  Some of the retailers included in the survey were Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, Kohl’s, and Wal-Mart.  Inside Facebook recently took a look at some of these pages to gain insights into the social media marketing strategies of these online and offline stores.

Here’s what we found: despite the fact that retailers’ Facebook Pages are informative, it quickly becomes obvious that there is a lot of room for growth.  For starters, the Pages are rather bland, and it is clear that the retailers usually fail to make full use of Facebook’s social capabilities.  Simply put, most of the retailers’ Facebook Pages ignore the bells and whistles that other Pages take advantage of to draw Facebook users in the first place and keep them engaged over time.

It seems like Rosetta agrees.  According to Adam Cohen, a partner at the marketing firm:

It’s important that retailers don’t just slap up a page because everyone is talking about Facebook. An effective Facebook presence requires that you carefully consider what your customers are looking for, what you would like to communicate, and what role a fan page should play in your overall online strategy. If you take all of these into account, it can be effective in building customer loyalty.

The first and most intuitive way to improve the weaknesses of the Facebook retail pages may be to take advantage of all the built in features Facebook makes available through Pages.  The Wal-Mart Page, for example, already has a fan base of more than 8,000 users, but the only utility these users are provided is a discussion board where there can post Wal-Mart related thoughts and questions.  The page could increase its effectiveness by simply adding rich media like commercials and other Wal-Mart related videos.

However, retailers could go further to provide utility to Facebook users by integrating deeper functionality through applications. For example, in the case of Wal-Mart, adding a price comparison tool so users can make sure that they’re getting the low prices that Wal-Mart famously markets itself for.  Even a tool that allows users to browse Wal-Mart goods and share their purchases with friends might be useful.  The Page could be made more interactive by adding a feature that enables integration with other popular services – like perhaps an iPhone application so that Facebook users at a Wal-Mart store can share the purchase of an especially low-priced sale item with their Facebook friends as soon as they find it.

By implementing some of these changes, these retailers will not only improve the presence of their brands on Facebook, but also make their Pages more relevant. Once retailers update their Pages to provide the best and most relevant content, their next step should be to promote their Pages both inside Facebook and through other channels.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

A week after the Whopper Sacrifice application made waves for its creative (and aggressive) use of Facebook friend removals as a way to spread the application, Facebook has forced it to disable the app’s functionality, according to the developer.

Facebook has clarified that it has not shut the app down – it still exists – but rather it has required the developer to remove its functionality for violating users’ expectations of privacy. Normally, no notification is sent when a user removes a friend on Facebook. However, the Whopper Sacrifice application posted a feed story letting others know the friend was being sacrificed for a Whopper before finalizing the removal.

“We encourage creativity from developers and companies using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications meet users’ expectations. After constructive conversations with Burger King and the developer of the application, they have decided to conclude their campaign rather than continue with the restrictions we placed on their application,” a Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook in an updated statement.

During the last week, the app was used by 82,000 people to delete over 230,000 friendships on Facebook. Users who “sacrificed” at least 10 friends received a coupon for a free Whopper at Burger King.

The app, developed by Refresh Partners and Crispin Porter, quickly became a hit the same day it launched.

Following Facebook’s partnership with CNN during the 2008 presidential debates, the two companies are partnering again for a “live tweet” style event powered by Facebook Connect during Barack Obama’s inauguration speech next week.

The event, which will happen on a special CNN.com page during the inauguration speech, will allow users to watch the speech live, update their Facebook status from the page, and see their friends’ status updates in real time as well. A video for the event shows what the page will look like:

In other words, Facebook is organizing a massive “live tweet” on inauguration day – somewhat reminiscent of Causes’ 1.6 million person status update rally on Facebook on election day.

“We’re going to be testing the bounds and capabilities of our content distribution network partners, but if this has a lot of usage, it has a chance to be one of the most-watched events in Internet history,” CNN.com Senior Vice President and GM K.C. Estenson said.

Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users have already RSVP’d saying they’ll be watching on CNN.com Live. How will Facebook users respond? We’ll be watching!

On January 5th, Virtual Greats launched a new branded marketing program to sell premium virtual goods in RockYou‘s Super Pets app, which allows users on social networks to adopt, train and battle pets of other users.

Virtual Greats has already been working with online communities like Gaia Online, WeeWorld, Whyville, and vSide to sell its licensed virtual goods.  By expanding to Super Pets, Virtual Greats increased its audience by 417k monthly users on Facebook and close to 4.5 million users on MySpace.

According to the Virtual Greats blog:

One of the challenges brands had in being sucessful in Second Life was that while the monthly active population was large (and the time per user, enormous), there was no good way to get in front of all those users.  Well, in Facebook with Superpets we’re now in front of an audience half as large as Second Life, and in Myspace, in front of one 4.5 times bigger than Second Life.

Here’s how it works: Virtual Greats first licenses products from celebrities and luxury brands and then offers these virtual goods for purchase in various virtual worlds and games. In essence they act as middle men for brands who don’t have the resources to create and market their own virtual products (think Elvis Presley) and virtual worlds and games which stand to profit from a cut of the sales inside their online communities.

With the introduction of Virtual Great’s licensed goods, Super Pets users can now purchase branded apparel, accessories, and even catchphrases from their favorite celebrities like Elvis, Justin Timberlake, or Snoop Dogg.  The apparel can allegedly sell for up to $3 per item.

Since the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, FBML tags have always been created and defined by Facebook. However, in an effort to make the Facebook Platform more extensible, today Facebook is announcing that developers can now create custom FBML tags to widgetize their content or functionality for other developers to use.

With custom tags, any developer can create new FBML tags. These custom tags can be used just in their own applications, or they can be shared with other Facebook developers as “widgets.” For example, developers who have interesting access to content or functionality could now use custom FBML tags to extend their apps’ reach to any Facebook application, increasing their distribution. That could mean new partnerships and revenue opportunities.

Facebook worked with a few app developers to test the new feature. Here are a few examples of early widget implementations built with custom tags:

• iLike – song and playlist widgets
• Visual Bookshelf – popular books widget
  
• Causes – badge widget
  
• Graffiti – drawing widget

The project was led by Facebook engineer Yariv Sadan, who initially started it as a side project when he saw the ways developers could extend FBML to make it more powerful.

“We’ve seen so much great content created by application developers, and many developers want to collaborate with each other,” Josh Elman, Facebook Platform Program Manager told Inside Facebook. “Custom tags enable more sharing between the Facebook developer community.”

Elman said that although Facebook plans to make widgets built with custom tags functional for any websites which have enabled Facebook Connect in the future via XFBML, only applications that run inside Facebook will be able to use custom tags for now. In addition, Elman said that Facebook’s same policies and monetization rules apply.

Finally, Facebook says that another benefit of using custom tags are their potential to improve application performance:

Much like how one FBML tag is a shorthand way to include a lot of markup (think of fb:comments, for example), one custom tag can replace a lot of FBML and HTML content inline. Using custom tags in this way lowers the communication overhead between Facebook and your application’s servers. One custom tag can render a larger amount of content. Instead of sending the full FBML fragment with every request, you can replace it with a custom tag that Facebook will expand when Facebook parses the page.

Developers interested in checking out the custom tags created by other developers can use the custom tags directory on the Developer wiki. Facebook requests that if you’ve created new public tags, “Please let the community know by adding their documentation to this wiki article.”

More information is available on the Developer wiki.

As 2009 moves on, the Christmas applications have faded from the Facebook application charts. Now, it’s on to the NFL playoffs, post-holiday hugging, and connecting with those that share your passions in the new year.

Here’s a look at today’s Top 20 fastest-growing mid-sized applications on Facebook from AppData. These are the top apps in the 100K-1M monthly user range with the highest MAU growth in the last 7 days.

		Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %	Developer
1.		Appear Offline	130,410	+128,404	+6 401.0	Tony Abou Slaiby
2.		Social Chatrooms	115,761	+84,010	+264.6	—
3.		App Broker	164,734	+115,980	+237.9	—
4.		Philadelphia Eagles Fans	139,246	+68,230	+96.1	Watercooler
5.		Team Great Britain Fans	128,111	+53,222	+71.1	Watercooler
6.		MAFFIA NEW	325,148	+122,724	+60.6	—
7.		Toast	132,315	+39,318	+42.3	—
8.		The Ultimate Hitman	141,014	+35,348	+33.5	—
9.		PageRage Super Profile	747,294	+143,400	+23.8	—
10.		Pittsburgh Steelers Fans	111,760	+21,147	+23.3	Watercooler
11.		Circle of Moms	753,067	+134,600	+21.8	Circle of Moms
12.		Always Athletes	164,839	+27,976	+20.4	—
13.		Have Sex!	119,532	+20,068	+20.2	—
14.		Collect luck	173,786	+27,650	+18.9	—
15.		Biotronic	121,541	+19,154	+18.7	—
16.		Chinese Astrology!	206,904	+32,070	+18.3	Pluckysoft Inc.
17.		Hugs	465,347	+68,639	+17.3	—
18.		Do you think…?	552,242	+63,814	+13.1	Thiinkle
19.		Hug Me	545,773	+57,582	+11.8	David Hu
20.		Dr. Phil’s Personality Test	589,651	+60,401	+11.4	—

As you can see, on the top of the chart this week is Appear Offline, an app that allows users to see which of their Facebook friends are online without logging into Facebook chat. At #2 is Social Chatrooms, an app that lets users chat with people from other social networks outside Facebook.

And with 3 of the top 10 apps this week is Watercooler, whose Eagles Fans and Steelers Fans applications are growing quickly as both teams vie for a spot in the Super Bowl (note: I work with Watercooler). Team Great Britain Fans is also growing as Britons are increasingly showing their national pride in 2009.

Other apps connecting Facebook users with shared passions include Circle of Moms and Always Athletes. Social games, communication tools, and Dr. Phil’s Personality Test round out this week’s top 20.