The Starwood Hotels and Resorts social network campaign has added another element, as guests of the Sheraton hotel chains are filling the globe on the Better When Shared program page with their stories.

The program allows visitors to the hotels to load pictures and description of their stays in any Sheraton across the globe. Those viewing submitted posts will also see a few local attractions for each location, as well as a link to booking information.

All of the stories are also searchable across 9 different categories, including sports, business, family or weddings, and there’s a keyword search to help further pare down the posts. There are three different ways to submit stories, all of which can be searched individually or together: stories logged directly from Sheraton hotels, community stories, and stories filed through a Facebook Connect integration. Icons appear on the map to denote each story type.

So far, there are zero icons for Facebook submissions displaying on the searchable globe. This may just be a matter of Starwood needing to get the word out a little more; the company has had success integrating with Facebook in the past, as is evident by the SPG Tripshare application. Better When Shared could easily become as popular as SPG Tripshare, but the company will need to do a much better job of promoting it on Facebook to get there. As of today, the official Sheraton Facebook page makes no mention of Better When Shared. Perhaps the hotel should take a cue from the name of this program when considering their marketing.

Earlier this week, Microsoft and Facebook announced a .NET version of Facebook’s Platform Client Library, a collection of functions which allow for easy interactions between an application and Facebook (getting a user’s friend list, for example).

Up to this point, desktop application developers have had to rely on unofficial client libraries which often got outdated quickly, did not contain exhaustive functionality on par with the official Facebook client libraries, nor had official support from Facebook. You can find the actual Microsoft SDK for the library here.

One element still missing from the “desktop” application picture is a client library for Windows Mobile. While Microsoft recently released an official Facebook application for Windows Mobile, currently featured in their Marketplace, there has not been any word on an official client library for the mobile operating system.

This is in contrast to other popular platforms, such as the iPhone which has it’s own official client library. Currently, third party Windows Mobile developers have had to rely again on unofficial C# client libraries or attempt some sort of direct partnership with Facebook. Given the news of the official .NET library, hopefully Windows Mobile developers aren’t too far off.

Joe Hewitt, who came over to Facebook along with Blake Ross when Facebook acquired their company Parakey in 2007, has been the sole developer on Facebook’s iPhone efforts since the beginning. That’s for both the web-based version that came out in 2007 and the the native application that was launched last year. However, today, Hewitt tweeted that he has “handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.”

Why would Hewitt quit work on what has become the most widely used iPhone application ever, and the most popular mobile Facebook client? Issues with the way Apple is running its platform. As Hewitt told TechCrunch,

My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.

The web is still unrestricted and free, and so I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.”

It will be interesting to see how Hewitt’s transition affects Facebook iPhone app, if at all. 8.3 million people used Facebook for iPhone yesterday out of 17.3 million people in the last month, according to AppData.

The upcoming Facebook Ads APIs are the biggest expansions to Facebook’s performance advertising platform that Facebook has made this year. With the new Ads APIs, advertisers will for the first time be able to systematically manage large volumes of bids and campaigns, and a new tools ecosystem supporting agencies and marketers will emerge.

Facebook has opened up the program to several agencies so far for beta testing, but a Facebook spokesperson told us they don’t currently have estimates for when they’ll be opening the program up more broadly.

Features of the Facebook Ads API

Here’s the first look at the full set of API features. The full (beta) documentation is embedded below. As you would expect, the Facebook Ads API allows advertisers to:

• Manage multiple advertising accounts
• Create and manage multiple campaigns
• Create and manage ad groups within campaigns
• Create and manage ads within ad groups
• Set targeting parameters for the following fields: countries, cities, radius, regions, genders, college networks, work networks, minimum age, maximum age, education statuses, college years, college majors, political views, relationship statuses, keywords, and interests
• Manage start and stop times
• Get stats on results (impressions, clicks, dollars spent) at the campaign, ad group, or ad level
• Pay on a CPM or CPC basis, set daily spend limits, and choose from 15 currencies

Why Facebook’s Ads API Matters

Until now, direct response advertisers using Facebook Ads have had no way to build tools to manage large volumes of ads and targeting combinations. With other major performance advertising platforms, like Google AdWords, large ecosystems of ad tools have been built to help advertisers spend more money more efficiently.

Because those tools have never existed for Facebook Ads, performance advertisers have had to either manage their Facebook Ads campaigns manually, or hack their own tools. Now, Facebook is creating simple yet powerful APIs that allow agencies and advertisers to create thousands of ads with different creative and targeting permutations and optimize bids in real time.

For example, say you wanted to test which combinations of geographic targeting, demographic targeting, and keyword targeting yielded the most conversions to your social game. That could easily mean 10,000 different ads. Finding which ones perform best is now a lot easier.

In the end, this will make Facebook Ads more accessible to a broader number of advertisers and agencies, and will lead to more money flowing through the Facebook Ads platform (and more efficient pricing across different segments of the social graph). In other words, Facebook’s performance advertising revenues, which are already a major component of Facebook’s estimated $550 million in total revenues for 2009, should start to grow more quickly.

Update: The full, current API documentation is also available online here. According to Facebook, “This functionality is part of a limited beta program. If you’re interested in participating in the beta test, please contact your Facebook Advertising Account Manager. If you don’t yet have a Facebook Advertising Account Manager, you can request support [here].”

To dive deeper on Facebook marketing tools and best practices, check out our industry leading Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook.

The Clorox Clean-Up Fan Page (not the main Clorox Fan Page), is running a contest for fans to nominate a local non-profit kids’ programs for one of five $10,000 grants. Through an app inside the page called Bright Future, fans can nominate their favorite local 501(c)(3) non-profit up until November 29th. A panel of judges will then narrow down the nominations to 50 finalists and then from December 7 until January 17, 2010 users of the app will be able to vote, with the top five vote getters each receiving $10,000 grants as well as being featured in a People Magazine ad.

We received some stats from the StepChange Group, a company that’s helping Clorox with the campaign. In the first four days, over 2,000 non-profits were nominated, the app had 1,000 active users, and it helped to generate close to 20,000 new fans for Clorox Clean-Up. Since then, however, growth has apparently slowed a bit, as the page five days later has 23,017 fans and 2,200 non-profits nominated (but 44,081 active users for the app, so perhaps growth is trending that way).

As we mentioned last Friday, Facebook has tightened their rules for promotions, so whereas perhaps in the past a Clorox Clean-Up could have required people to become a Fan before nominating a non-profit, that is no longer allowed.

$50,000 in grants is no small number, and we applaud this kind of cause marketing on Facebook, especially in these tough economic times.

Security firm Trend Micro has just published details on a new variant of the Koobface worm that spread on Facebook earlier this year, this time more specifically designed to imitate the behavior of Facebook users. It’s a slightly more sophisticated approach than some of the previous attacks we’ve seen. According to the report, the new Koobface component automates the following actions:

• Registering a Facebook account
• Confirming an email address in Gmail to activate the registered Facebook account
• Joining random Facebook groups
• Adding Facebook friends
• Posting messages to Facebook friends’ walls

The messages posted to Facebook walls contain the usual link that goes to fake Facebook or YouTube pages where the worm spreads. Trend Micro doesn’t have details on how widespread this new component is, but we expect it’s pretty small. Users can avoid the problem by not clicking on suspicious looking links from unknown people on Facebook.

Facebook’s site integrity teams are constantly battling security threats like these from phishing sites to Koobface worms with automated detection systems that remove the fake accounts and delete the malicious links. We don’t know the specific number of Facebook accounts affected by these kinds of security issues, but Facebook has told us before that the number is under 1%. The company has also been fighting phishers in court, and recently won a $711 million judgment against “Spam King” Sanford Wallace.

Given that over 325 million people use Facebook every month, growing to an estimated 375 million by year’s end, it’s no surprise that spammers are attracted to the site. Facebook must continue to both enhance its automated systems and educate users about the tactics spammers employ, as preserving user trust is absolutely vital to its future.

All marketers should be aware of the 10 ways performance advertisers can target Facebook Ads. And today, make that 11: Facebook has just launched a new way to draw more people to your Facebook Page or application, called “Friends of connections” targeting.

Here’s how it works: before today, advertisers could already target any of their “connections,” where connections are defined as:

1. Fans of any of your Pages
2. Users of any of your Applications
3. Members of any of your Groups
4. Attendees of any of your Events

Now, advertisers can target ads specifically to friends of any of these connections as well. When this option is selected, friends of connections who see the ad will also see a message about which of their friends is connected to the advertiser. For example, if John is a fan of Chick-fil-A’s Page, and Chick-fil-A is running Facebook Ads with “friends of connections” targeting, John’s friend Debbie would see the text “John is a fan of Chick-fil-A” below the ad.

This feature should lead to increased conversion on Facebook Ads, because users will find the social context and implied endorsement more interesting. Facebook has previously allowed advertisers to enable this kind of context via “Social Ads” before, but this is the first time it has allowed advertisers to specifically target just friends of connections if they want to. Facebook has also been including social actions on home page engagement ads in recent months.

There’s a privacy angle here too, which is whether some users will be uncomfortable with their Facebook actions being included in Facebook Ads their friends see as “implicit endorsements.” Facebook has an ads privacy setting which allows users to turn this off if they want. We also spoke directly to Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, about this earlier this year. His thoughts:

Using the graph is something we want to do more in 2009, while respecting privacy as well. When your friends click on an ad, we view it as a reasonable inference that that would be valuable and fair to share with your friends. We’ve done pretty well with privacy on this because we stick to what the user provides to us.

In many ways we view Social Ads as less surreptitious than many types of behavioral targeting technologies.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with Facebook Marketing Service Provider Directory, and the rest of our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

Office supply company Staples is one of the first retailers to release a few of its Black Friday deals, doing so with several teaser posts on its Facebook page. And in a testament to just how tough it’s going to be this year to grab shoppers’ dollars, Facebook users are already expressing their disappointment with this year’s deals.

Yesterday, an early post on the Staples Facebook fan page promised a preview of some of the store’s Black Friday deals, making Staples one of the first retailers to verify any leaked deals. Then, over the next few hours, the Staples administrators posted several deals on products, including a flash drive, GPS unit, computer monitor and laptop. Each post received several likes from fans of the page, but each offer was also met with backlash, comparing the deals with lower prices last year, existing better offers or lack of details on the products.

Retailers need this holiday shopping season to pay out to make up for almost two years of depleted consumer spending. We’re already seeing a number of businesses pushing deals early, such as one day offerings from Walmart and Sears and Toys “R” Us releasing its holiday Big Book through Facebook, and several retailers already have Black Friday deals circulating on the internet. This is the first instance of a company leaking its own deals, and there are a few positives to be had from the somewhat negative response.

By using its 57,000-fan page  to tease its Black Friday deals, Staples is able to gauge consumer response and get a vague idea of how much traffic it can expect the day after Thanksgiving. While posts have been skeptical of the offers, the early information gives Staples plenty of time to reevaluate offers and adjust prices or products. The posts are also citing specific deals and prices as comparisons, giving the office supply retailer and exact target when making those adjustments.

[Editor's note: This is a guest post by Gregg Spiridellis, CEO at JibJab Media. JibJab is a ten year-old company that offers customizable digital greeting cards and videos -- and it has been working hard to implement Facebook Connect, with some good results. Below, Spiridellis shares his perspective on his company and Connect.]

As I write the headline, I can hear the yawns in Silicon Valley from all the way down here in Los Angeles. One and a half million users? That number may or may not be big; I will leave that for the reader to decide. Instead, I will use that milestone to (i) compare and contrast content distribution and audience aggregation in a pre- and post- Facebook world and (ii) share some of JibJab’s best practices for building a Facebook audience in ways that create value for both JibJab and our users.

JibJab was founded way back in the digital dark ages – 1999. Huddled around our blueberry iMacs, dialing up on 56k modems, struggling to keep our videos under 300k, my brother and I flew over the bleeding edge of technology Thelma-and-Louise-style because we believed that the combination of falling production costs and opening distribution presented a once in a lifetime opportunity for two guys with no media experience to build a worldwide entertainment brand. Our premise was simple: amazingly talented artists creating great made-for-the-medium entertainment could attract an audience and that audience could be leveraged to attract more audience. Today it’s called viral marketing. In 1999, it was called “and you are going to make money how?”

To achieve our viral ambition in a pre-Facebook world, we had only two tools in our toolbox. First, we used an “Email to a Friend” form on every page. Second, we had a persistent “Sign Up For Our Newsletter” on JibJab.com so that we could notify people when we released new work. It took almost five years to build our list to 130k people but the effort paid off big time when a single email to that list sparked a chain reaction that sent our animated political satire “This Land” (and JibJab brand) from inbox to inbox across the globe. When we saw news clips from South Korea covering the video we knew we had, in a small way, achieved our goal of creating a worldwide brand. When NASA called us for a copy to send to the International Space Station, we joked with glee that we had surpassed our goal and gone galactic!

The lesson of ‘This Land’ validated in the real world what we always knew in theory. Distribution was no longer about pipes; it was about people. Despite a dozen follow-up videos, all of them world-premiering on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and garnering pervasive traditional media coverage, audience aggregation was a slow game in a pre-Facebook world.

It took us 8 years to reach 1.5 million registered users in the era of email. It took us only 5 months to acquire the same number of users on Facebook.

Even more noteworthy might be the facts that (i) we did it all via Facebook Connect, with no on-site Facebook experience, (ii) we did it without using any of the prevalently (ab)used “optimization” techniques such as forcing users to invite friends or sending notifications or posting feed stories of questionable value to users to maximize exposure and clicks.

How did we do it? We started with a simple but powerful question: how can we leverage Facebook tools and data to enhance our user experience? Our product and technology team identified four key integration opportunities, some of which are universally relevant to all publishers, some very specific to our offering, and all of which created scale for JibJab by providing value for our users.

Publishing:

Facebook Connect is, hands down, the most powerful way to get your audience to share your content. Not only has it removed the friction of remembering friends’ email addresses, but it has also created a socially acceptable broadcast communication channel for individuals. Remember back in the day when people would email jokes to their entire address book? Stream publishing achieves the same distribution effect, but because it imposes no social obligation on the part of the recipient, it is once again socially acceptable to “blast your whole list”.

The combination of reduced friction and individual broadcasting has been rocket fuel for JibJab’s viral distribution. We used to get 2 to 3 email recipients for every piece of content shared by a user. Today, we are seeing anywhere from 12 to 20 clicks back to JibJab.com for each post into the stream. Because of this, we have completely subordinated email to Facebook stream publishing in our product experience on JibJab.com.

Sign-On:

Face it: your direct registration system brings zero value to your new users and, in fact, burdens them by making them remember another user/password combination. At JibJab, the Facebook Connect registration is now front and center. Why? Because a Facebook Connect user comes with an audience of 130 friends and a directly registered user comes with zero (not to mention the media and data benefits described below). Today, 80% of people creating accounts on JibJab use Facebook Connect and we are actively trying to figure out how to get the other 20% to do the same.

“Heresy!” I can hear the traditional web marketers shouting from the sideline. How can you “give up” your users to Facebook? First of all, Facebook already owns them in a deeper, more meaningful way than you ever will; get over it. Second, since when has ownership of a customer been mutually exclusive? You can own them too. Having Facebook sign on in your direct registration path for new users does not mean you have to abandon owning account registration data. It’s just a question of what point in the customer lifecycle you make a grab for it. When someone purchases something from JibJab, we get their email address and flesh out their profile. Before that, the benefit of minimizing friction to turn the visitor into a customer far outweighs the emotional concern over ownership and serves both our customers’ interests and our business objectives.

Media Access:

JibJab’s most popular product, Starring You, allows users to upload photos and put themselves and friends into fun, personalized videos. Prior to Facebook Connect, users needed to have a photo on their desktop of any and all of the people they wanted to include in their videos. Today, users can access not only their own photos, but also the photos of friends. Less friction to finding the right photo of the right person leads to more “makes” which leads to more “shares” which leads to more traffic and customers. It also makes for an awesome customer experience.

Data:

Facebook Connect offers a treasure trove of user data. The question you need to ask yourself is which data enriches your product experience? At JibJab, the answer was easy: friends’ birthdays. We have one of the largest, highest quality catalogs in the business and the ability to show users which of their friends is having a birthday is an opportunity for us to create user-specific intent which greatly increases the likelihood of driving a desired action – either sending a card or becoming a customer. Birthdays might be a very specific product-enriching piece of data for JibJab but think about the data that could make your product better and there’s a good chance you’ll find it accessible via Connect.

Finally, I want to mention the healthy suspicion with which our management team approached the decision to deeply integrate Facebook Connect into our product experience. Accepting the fact that we were putting Facebook in a position where we were reliant upon them to deliver the awesome experience our users expect from us was not taken lightly. Ultimately, we went in, no holds barred, based on our belief that there are smart people running Facebook who understand that their value as a company will be a direct function of their ability to build a stable, predictable platform on which companies who provide value to consumers in an open and honest way can build big, long-term sustainable businesses.

With the perspective of over ten years in business, it is easy for us to see how Facebook’s social graph (and their packaging of it, via Connect) has forever changed the online content distribution game. Email, the primary discovery and distribution channel for ‘This Land’, was and is a social network, but it was decentralized and non-persistent. Facebook is centralized, persistent and, with Connect, it is becoming ubiquitous. Your friends will be there with you anywhere and everywhere there is a screen and therein lies distribution gold. In other words, if you are in the digital content distribution business and you are not deeply integrating Facebook into your product experience, you should probably be fired.

This is a guest post by Gregg Spiridellis, CEO Guy at JibJab Media Inc. who, along with his brother Evan and their team of artists and technologists, has built JibJab into a leading provider of digital greetings and online entertainment. JibJab is funded by Polaris Ventures Partners. As readers may remember, our past coverage of JibJab includes a look at its holiday e-card feature, ElfYourself (which it is bringing back this year), as well as its popular political satire videos. We’ve recently also been tracking the company’s Connect growth on AppData, as Facebook includes Connect traffic numbers together with apps on its platform.

It’s been just over a week since Facebook announced their roadmap for the Platform for the next few months. Some of the larger developers, while not enthusiastic about the changes, have expressed hope that they will bring about better engagement in the long run. Many have been heads-down working towards the changes, and we’re starting to see some of the results of that experimentation in their applications (such as a growth in the use of “fan boxes”, as well as new feed story experiments from Zynga). But how are the smaller developers reacting to the changes?

One of the best places to measure opinion is one of the more active threads on the Facebook Developer Forum, whose title gives away some developers’ feelings right from the start: “Would Facebook Really Kill All Viral Channels for Developers?” Interestingly, the concerns mainly cover the soon to be implemented roadmap announcements, rather than the arguably more disruptive recent re-introduction of the algorithmic News Feed, which already appears to be affecting some applications’ traffic.

Removing notifications

The loss of both user-to-user notifications and application-to-user notifications are seen as the biggest changes. User-to-user notifications are often used as a way to spread an application virally. These messages are often phrased along the lines of “X did Y to you using the Z application,” and are triggered when users somehow interact with friends within an application. These notifications reinforce the network effects of applications with a large user base, although they can also be used (or sometimes misused) to help spread an application to new users.

There is some confusion as to why notifications are being removed. A longstanding forum member writes, “The biggest blow for apps will be the removal of notifications. Facebook claims they want to reduce spam – but almost all complaints about spam have to do with the news feed, the notifications are unintrusive and they fade over time.” As another says: “It’s so easy to block notifications from an application.”

Keeping users informed

User-to-user notifications will be somewhat replaced by the announced “Counter” system (shown on the right), although as-yet there is no final design for this. Counters will show a user that they have activities to perform within an application, but only for users who have bookmarked an application. The concerns around the Counter mainly center on dormant users and how to get enough users to bookmark the app in the first place.

Keeping dormant users engaged

The other type of notifications, application-to-user, has proven useful in reengaging users of applications that they have not visited lately. Once an application has been authorized by a user, it has the right to send that user one of these notifications per day. It can be used for anything from simple, “Hey, the app’s still here, come and do something,” messages to more intelligent CRM-style promotions aimed at re-engaging dormant users.

However, the common belief is that “most people don’t even know how to bookmark” apps, and so they won’t remember to return to applications they would otherwise enjoy. Whether Facebook’s release of a set of in-app bookmarking tools and a more prominent placement of application bookmarks improves this situation is yet to be seen. It’s regarded as unlikely that these measures will be able to directly replace the traffic that can be kept alive by application-to-user notifications.

Collecting user emails

Facebook’s other announcement that will partially replace application-to-user notifications is the creation of a new API that will allow developers to ask for user email addresses directly. Here the forum members seem to be largely in agreement: most have no wish to manage email communication with their users, and also have little expectation of users either providing their addresses in the first place or paying attention to messages from applications when they receive them. The biggest concern is that, as with many of the viral channels, it will only take a few large-scale cases of abuse to turn users off of the medium altogether: “As soon as some devs start throwing torrents of spam, people will tell each other not to give any email to any app.”

It’s interesting to note that although having a user’s email is often a highly prized piece of information in Internet marketing, as it can be the best way to engage with users over the longer term, small developers in general seem to have less of a desire to have to maintain this communication channel. Facebook itself is possibly expecting that shutting down the applications themselves will be a sufficient penalty if any legal issues arise.

Looking ahead

Many application developers see the need for changes on the platform, even if it’s at the expense of viral growth. There’s also recognition of the fact that the high usage of Facebook’s existing channels by applications has made some of these changes necessary. The main sticking point, however, is whether the new email communication route being proposed is an effective answer. As another long-term forum member notes: “If developers played by the rules already, then we wouldn’t need to have these constant changes in order to combat spammy apps. I certainly don’t expect them to behave by the rules in a channel which is much harder to monitor and police.”

Although it’s rare to see the bigger name developers on the forum, many developers there have applications with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of monthly active users. Their livelihoods are dependent on continued app success. It remains to be seen how Facebook’s roadmap will finally manifest itself in the user interface over the next few months of Platform changes and, more importantly, in terms of application usage patterns, and these are uncertain times for the smaller, low-budget development teams.