The Financial Times reported this week that its sister publication, The Economist, is going to make a major social media push in the first part of 2010. This will include Facebook Connect integration on Economist.com, and trying to reach 500,000 Facebook fans along with 750,000 Twitter followers.

The Economist’s Facebook Page currently has 182,423 fans, so shooting for 500,000 shouldn’t be that tall of an order for a world famous publication, especially if they follow through with their quoted intention of spending “tens of thousands of (British) pounds”.

The Economist’s Facebook Page seems geared to drive comments and discussion about articles, both on the Page and by directing fans to Economist.com. The Financial Times quotes Economist.com publisher Ben Edwards, saying that he, “hopes that Facebook will help his site acquire new readers and develop a “deeper level of engagement” with existing ones,” which is a natural use for Facebook Connect. It will be interesting to see how deep Economist.com integrates Connect, as currently they only show a “share on Facebook” button to the right of articles, which isn’t that prominent.

Also, current comments on Economist.com do not feature profile pictures, which is a widely used feature when integrating Facebook Connect. The Financial Times piece mentions that The Economist plans to have an updated site in three to four months.

As far as the Economist’s goal of half a million fans on Facebook goes, as we mentioned, this seems reasonable. Ad spend alone could probably get them the 317,000 fans they need to reach that number, especially if they combine that with some form of offer, perhaps trial subscriptions of the print magazine, for example. In fact, the 500,000 number for their Facebook Page seems much more doable than the 750,000 followers they are hoping to get on Twitter where they currently have under 94,000 followers. Focusing more on Facebook may be a strong news move as well, as Facebook Pages are increasingly becoming a major battleground for breaking and debating news, as we recently saw with one of The Economist’s competitors, Newsweek.

Of course, The Economist reaching either of these numbers will be moot unless they receive a correlating increase in traffic and overall engagement on Facebook, Twitter and on Economist.com. However, as we’ve seen happen with other major news providers, social media can show very tangible results (especially around major news stories such as this year’s US presidential inauguration), and this should be a step in the right direction for the publication.

Sheryl Sandberg, who joined Facebook nearly two years ago as chief operating officer, has been nominated by Walt Disney Company’s board of directors to join as an independent director. She’ll start pending her election at Disney’s next annual meeting.

There are a few interesting angles here. Clearly, Facebook is becoming an increasingly important way for media companies to reach online users. Disney has invested in a variety of Facebook Pages for its movies, theme parks, and other properties, and it has succeeded in gaining millions of fans. A former Google executive and top U.S. Treasury Department staffer, she’ll provide Disney with her perspective on running large organizations and growing a business on the web.

Disney also has a long history of pushing forward with technology, as was highlighted by its $7.4 billion purchase of Pixar Animation Studios earlier this decade. Pixar has had a steady line of digital feature film hits, providing a boost to Disney’s portfolio. That purchase also made Pixar’s biggest shareholder, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, the number one shareholder in Disney; the addition of Sandberg, in some sense, is another example of Apple and Facebook rubbing elbows.

Sandberg also already serves on a variety of other boards, including Starbucks, and nonprofits including The Brookings Institution, The AdCouncil, Women for Women International and V-Day. Fortune ranked her as one of the most 10 most powerful women in business, earlier this year; she has also taken a prominent role in helping professional women balance the challenges of work with raising families.

Facebook left its disjointed cluster of offices in downtown Palo Alto, earlier this year, and moved across town, consolidating into a big old former Hewlett-Packard manufacturing building next to Stanford University. While it has made the 150,000 square-foot monstrosity into an elegant location for its headquarters, the space is still not enough.

“Facebook recently leased 265,000 square feet of office space nearby on Page Mill Road, formerly occupied by Beckman Coulter, a medical diagnostics company,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. That’s a substantial increase in square footage. Why?

The new building is already nearly full. Facebook had nearly 900 employees when it moved earlier this year. Now, it has more than 1,000, according to the report, and plans to increase its head count by 50% in 2010.

Some operations will begin shifting to the new facility in the first part of the coming year.

For Silicon Valley historians, the expansion will be rich in symbolism. Hewlett-Packard was one of the first big technology companies to emerge in the region, and has helped define the valley as the world center of tech innovation.

[Map via the San Jose Mercury News; Facebook office image via ArchDaily.]

Dante’s Inferno, Battle of the Damned is a new role-playing game that has been growing fast on Facebook. Up to nearly 1 million monthly active users in less than a week after launching, it lets you “fight through the 9 circles of hell” to rescue your murdered and damned wife.

But the story line here is not about Dante Alighieri’s formative work of Italian literature being turned into a Facebook RPG — at least not directly. Rather, Electronic Arts has turned its Dante’s Inferno console video game series into a Facebook RPG with the help of developer Lolapps. The purpose is to promote the release of Dante’s Inferno, the console game’s latest installment, due out in early February.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games

Christmas apps are rising in what is probably their last big week, according to Appdata, on this week’s list of the 20 apps that gained the most daily active users in the past 7 days.

Incontra gente came in at number one this week, its first appearance on the list. The app lets Italian speakers meet up with other Italian speakers and it has seen an impressive 60 percent gain to reach 1.61 million daily actives in the last week. Incontra Gente was just released this month and is clearly filling a need on the Facebook community so we’ll see if it continues to improve.

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Incontra gente	1,611,660	+950,133	+58.95
2.	Happy Island	994,175	+910,742	+91.61
3.	Christmas Greetings	722,269	+622,293	+86.16
4.	Christmas Cards!	1,376,477	+466,604	+33.90
5.	Pillow Fight	496,599	+367,030	+73.91
6.	Facebook for iPhone	9,564,257	+328,934	+3.44
7.	Causes	1,219,554	+324,095	+26.57
8.	PetVille	3,830,036	+306,540	+8.00
9.	Quiz Creator	218,412	+205,087	+93.90
10.	Mobile	5,507,572	+191,482	+3.48
11.	MindJolt Games	2,219,051	+170,833	+7.70
12.	Christmas Animations	179,548	+165,180	+92.00
13.	Fun Cards – Christmas & More!	322,449	+163,594	+50.73
14.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	6,858,365	+134,428	+1.96
15.	Tarjetitas	261,122	+133,468	+51.11
16.	快打之王	120,128	+111,991	+93.23
17.	Country Life	1,513,266	+98,587	+6.51
18.	Birthday Calendar	432,168	+97,078	+22.46
19.	Jungle Jewels	317,610	+90,522	+28.50
20.	Quiz Planet!	531,596	+82,274	+15.48

In second place, Happy Island makes its first appearance on the list. The title is the newest entry in CrowdStar’s “Happy” series and was just released on Dec.14. The title grew by 91 percent and now has 994,000 players daily.

This week’s list has Christmas titles taking third and fourth. Christmas Greetings, third, appears for the first time. It rose 86 percent in DAU this week and has a strong following of monthly active users as well. Christmas Cards! lands at fourth and is one of the older Christmas apps on Facebook, being released in December of last year. Rising 34 percent, or 467,000 DAU, the title is the most successful of any Christmas app or game on Facebook this year with 1.4 million DAU.

Rounding out fifth, Pillow Fight is app that is very similar to hot potato, in that you try to hit as many people’s wall as you can. The simple poking-style game rose 74 percent,  or 367,000 players, most likely due to its time sensitive use of declaring a winner if the person does not relay a hit back after two days.

PetVille dropped significantly this week over last, from first to eighth. The title is up 8 percent or 307,000 players, but last week, the game added 2.59 million. The honey-moon period may be over, but the title still has the most established DAU of any game on the list – 3.83 million.

Finally, other foreign language apps are also growing. Tarjetitas, 15th, rose by 51 percent or 133,000 DAU. The game let Spanish speakers send cards to their friends. Meanwhile, Chinese RPG, 快打之王, (Google-translated to “King of Kombat”) rose the most in relation to its size, 93 percent.

Next week should have the final numbers for Christmas apps and games before the inevitable crash.

Last week, several new policy changes went into effect on the Facebook Platform. This week, another important new policy regarding the way developers can use Facebook’s News Feed “feed forms” has gone live: now, feed forms cannot be popped up without “explicit user intent.”

This means that developers can no longer show popup boxes prompting users to publish content to their profile (and thus their friends’ News Feeds) without users explicitly choosing to do so. Until now, many of the largest apps have grown by frequently and aggressively prompting users to publish content into the stream.

As a result, apps that heavily relied on the News Feed for distribution and reengagement could see significant traffic decreases over the coming weeks- some have already been pulling back on this lately. Already, many social games are off their December traffic highs, but it’s too early to tell if this is due to policy changes or the seasonality of the holidays. We’ll be keeping close watch on AppData.

For now, here’s the current state of the Developer Roadmap – however, at this point, it’s looking like either the next week is going to be a very busy one, or perhaps more likely that some of the items slated for “December 2009″ are going to slip into 2010.

Already Launched

1. Simplified policies posted, verification program ended, and “extending verification standards to all applications”
2. Platform Live Status tool launching, which will show “updates on platform stability and load”
3. Stream story formatting changes (1 image shown by default, few lines of text, 1 action link)
4. New “add bookmark” button
5. All stream publishing APIs beside Stream.publish, Facebook.streamPublish, and FB.Connect.streamPublish will no longer be supported (going into effect December 20)
6. Feed forms cannot be popped open without “explicit user intent” (note: this is a new Facebook policy) (going into effect December 20)

Coming December 2009

7. New email permission API (developers can ask users to share their email address)
8. Access point to invites will be moved “to either a filter in Inbox or surfaced in the Application and Games Dashboards”
9. User-to-user Inbox APIs will be launched
10. Application bookmarks moving from the bottom menu bar to the left side of the home page
11. Counter API launching (counts can appear on home page application bookmarks)
12. Applications and Games dashboards launching
13. New application branding on canvas pages launching
14. Revamped developer site launching

Late December 2009 / Early January 2010

15. Notifications API (both app-to-user and user-to-user) will be removed (note: Facebook says this will happen “30 days after email permission is available”) (this was originally scheduled for “December 2009″)

Late 2009 / Early 2010

16. Requests API will be removed (note: Facebook says this will happen “30 days after launching new Inbox sharing”)
17. Profile boxes will be removed (application tabs will be the only way to integrate into the profile page at that point)
18. Improved analytics and APIs launching

Early 2010

19. Open Graph API launching

A Facebook Page created earlier this month to protest the “monotony” of the United Kingdom’s pop music hold over the country’s Christmas Number One single succeeded this week, beating its top competitor by more than 50,000 downloads, according to the BBC.

Because of the Facebook campaign, Rage Against The Machine’s 17 year-old 1992 hit “Killing in The Name” took the top spot in the annual contest with more than 500,000 downloads, besting the recent winner of “The X-Factor” television show, Joe McElderry, and his single “The Climb.”

The price of each download ranged from £1 to £.29 (about $1.60 to 47¢, USD), according to the group’s Facebook page.

The week-long Facebook campaign began as a way for English couple Jon and Tracy Morter to organize a rebellion against what they declared on December 6 to be “a protest for the X-Factor monotony,” given the last four Christmas hits were all by “X-Factor” winners.

While the success is by all accounts a cultural phenomenon, not an intentional marketing move, perhaps there’s a lesson in here for musicians and labels trying to make a living online through digital sales? That lesson, maybe, is to make music you believe in, not what you think will take you to the top of the charts.

Officially the Facebook campaign kicked off on December 13 and the page, “Rage Against The Machine for Christmas No. 1” grew to more than 500,000 fans.

The Facebook push ended Saturday, but not before raising more than £60,000, or about $96,000 USD for Shelter, a national campaigning charity that works to address homelessness in England.

For their part, Rage Against The Machine was generally supportive of the campaign and said they would donate the royalties to Shelter. On Saturday, guitarist Tom Morello announced on band’s official web site that they would play a free concert to “celebrate the victory of this historic people’s campaign” in 2010 and invite “X-Factor” producer Simon Cowell to be the emcee.

Cowell had previously called the Facebook push “stupid” and “cynical,” but later called the couple to congratulate them on their win.

More than 10% of law firms in the country are on Facebook and more than 40% of attorneys, according to a survey conducted by the American Bar Association earlier this year. 12% of respondents reported working at firms with an online presence in a social network such as Facebook, up 4% from the 2008 survey, marking a three-fold increase, and 43% of reported maintaining a personal account.

So, in an era of growing Facebook and social media use among both regular folks and big businesses, trying to find a place for the legal community online may be a challenge — especially with privacy and safety issues sometimes involved for attorneys. With Facebook’s new customized privacy settings and its continued growth both in the US and worldwide, lawyers and law firms must figure out how to make the most of all that Facebook has to offer.

Facebook has already penetrated the courts, where alibis have been established based on a Facebook status update, ethics committees have ruled on whether judges and lawyers may be friends, or state bar associations have ruled on using them in the course of investigating their cases.

1. Start a Facebook Page and Use It To Find Clients

All you need to sign up for a Facebook account is an email address and a desire to network. Then, you can create a Facebook page in a few easy steps — more here. Decide whether you want to do so from a personal account, or an account you set up specifically to use to market your practice or firm. The fact that people list their physical location on Facebook means you can easily see if someone commenting on a page is a potential client or someone with whom you’d want to connect. Note that Facebook does allow you to send geo-targeted status updates and inbox updates to fans – inbox updates appear in a secondary tab in the Facebook message inbox.

2. Provide Useful Information to Potential Clients

You can share as much or as little information as you deem fit on your Facebook Page, depending on where you want to target online traffic. Such information often includes basics like physical addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, or a profile of you and/or your fellow attorneys. Michael J. Murphy’s firm (seen above) does a good job of this, including the same information available on his main site and prominently displaying office hours and contact information. But before you start sharing status updates, photos, and other media in the stream, make sure you and your firm figure out what your marketing strategy is going to be. It’s very important to think systematically about what you post, as this information is what appears to users in their news feeds and typically generates the most conversation. Are you going to post only major news? Are you going to ask questions of your clients? Are you going to provide tips?

3. Engage Your Clients

The law firm Facebook Pages with the largest number of fans update their statuses on a regular basis, post videos and pose questions, and then respond back via posts or comments. A good example is the Tillman Law Firm (above), which uses status updates daily — sometimes several times daily — with news, tips, holiday wishes and sales pitches and responding to fans’ comments. This creates a conversation and if you don’t attempt to sustain that conversation fans will stop paying attention to you. Using Facebook effectively requires active participation on your page that will be rewarded once you see online traffic for you start to grow, and eventually, through more clients. But remember, while Facebook marketing is powerful, it costs time (and money if you use Facebook advertising to promote your page).

You need to include Facebook into your marketing plan, but it should be part of a broader strategy incorporating all the elements that make social marketing successful. Facebook provides an option that lets you repost any update from your page to Twitter and vice versa, courtesy of the Twitter app for Facebook. If you have a blog, you can use the Networked Blog service or a number of other third party applications to syndicate the RSS feed of your blog into your page.

4. Measure Your Results Based on Your Goals

By using Facebook you’ll have an opportunity to get to know potential clients in a very personal way, allowing you to survey your clientele and the way they use your Facebook page. You have to remember the viral nature of Facebook — what starts out as a simple post can end up with dozens of comments. If you post stories on Facebook that link to your primary web site, such as the Ferrell Law Firm (above), does it drive good traffic? Is your office getting more calls? Paying attention to changes in your business as the result of Facebook marketing will allow you to better hone your marketing strategy on the site.

5. Make Sure to Do Personal Networking

You don’t necessarily need a Page in order for the site to be useful. Simply having a personal profile allows you to find friends, search for people you know professionally but aren’t friends with, and find out valuable information like who you share mutual friends with. And, as evidenced by Klun Law Firm’s posts, networking on the web can become more personal with Facebook. A key feature here is Groups. As opposed to Pages, Groups are designed around letting users create and share information about most any topic that interests them. Search for groups on the site that are relevant to your areas of interest, join the ones that interest you, and use them to find like-minded people who may be able to help you professionally.

6. Optimize Your SEO Traffic

Just because you have a web site doesn’t mean it’s easy to find, or easy to use. Facebook is an excellent tool to increase online traffic to your firm or practice and we can help point out a few key ways in which your page design can affect your search engine optimization. Using the “About” text box, which is the highest place in the CSS structure of the page to add custom text, add keyword-dense prose at the top of your Page. This will contribute to online traffic. The “Info” tab may also be used to this end, especially as overview, mission and other web sites. There are many other ways to make your Facebook page stand out during search engine queries, but these are some of the basics.

7. Consider Buying Facebook Advertising

One way to drive people to your Page is to buy advertising on Facebook, using its self-serve system. You can very specifically target ads to various demographics, including, country, state and city, gender, age, workplace, and much more. Clicking on the above ad for Greenberg and Rudman, LLP takes you directly to their primary web site, even though they don’t have any fans on their Facebook page. Make sure to experiment with different targeting campaigns, and different styles of ads, in order to see what advertising works the best.

8. Plan Events for Your Fans

Use your page to let clients know about events going on at your practice or firm, such as clinics, workshops, court dates or other public events. Correll Law Firm’s use of the events application allowed the firm to reach out to fans online and bring them into face-to-face contact. Fans or friends of your Facebook page can then see the events and RSVP, allowing you to get a better idea of how many people are going to show up.

9. Don’t Forget Privacy

In this day and age when personal information is easily available online, it’s important to make sure, especially if you have professional concerns about your personal safety, that you keep tight control over who sees what on your page. These concerns may be different if you are operating your firm’s or practice’s page, particularly because insurance companies, opposing counsel and judges are all also on Facebook. We have a privacy guide and a detailed look at Facebook’s newest privacy settings to help you in this process.

Facebook is gaining on most of its competitors, according to another look at social networking around the world. We regularly cover the service’s international traffic in our Global Monitor report; many of the trends, below, will be familiar to our readers.

(Note: Facebook-dominant countries are in light green).

Vincenzo Cosenza, translator of Inside Facebook’s Marketing Bible in Italian (“La Bibbia del Marketing su Facebook”) said on his blog today that this second look was a reaction to the great response his first map in June. That one, like what you see above, was created with data from Alexa & Google Trends for Websites.

In June, the map showed Facebook leading in many parts of the world, with the notable exceptions of QQ in China, Orkut in Brazil and India, Hi5 in Mexico and other countries, Maktoob in the Middle East and VKontakte in Russia.

Our Global Monitor report shows many of the same trends. For example, Facebook’s advertising tool showed 112 million monthly active users in Europe by the end of November, along with 63.5 million monthly actives in Asia. And, as we’ve previously covered, regions like the Middle East are also seeing significant Facebook growth. But we don’t typically compare with Facebook’s self-reported numbers against data on other social networks; here’s more, from the report.

Currently, the service was the leader in 100 of the 127 countries Cosenza analyzed in the map, with the addition of Cuba, Qatar and Reunion. He also deleted Iran from the list, citing a lack of reliable data — the service has been intermittently blocked in the country over the last half year. Here’s more, from his findings:

Facebook’s domination is evident across the globe and has made inroads since June, most notably: taking users from Orkut in India (but no Brazil); from Hi5 in much of Latin America and parts of Asia; from Cyworld in South Korea; from Lidé in the Czech Republic, as well as Skyrock in Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Regional preferences still play a role in use, noted Cosenza, but these are also bending under the weight of Facebook’s influence.

Facebook has taken over Europe, with more than 200 million users, and MySpace — the long-time leader in the US — has lost its spot everywhere but for Guam. Third-party analytics firms have shown a similar change in the US.

QQ continues to lead in China with 300 million active accounts, VKontakte is still strongest in Russia, Orkut has lost ground but continues to thrive in India and Brazil, Hi5 is still a leader in Latin American countries, as well as Portugal, Mongolia and Romania and Maktoob continues to dominate among many Middle Eastern users.

Some 35 million Facebook users update their status every day, or around ten percent of the service’s 350 million monthly active users. Meanwhile, the service has grown by 200 million new people in the past year; the US alone now has nearly 100 million, including many of the parents and grandparents of the service’s original college users.

So, Facebook today released an internal study of the top status update terms of the past year — and it’s worth a closer look, because the data says something about what’s going on in the country (or at least the third of it on the site). If you want to get a better understanding of Facebook’s methodology, read the company’s post, here.

15. From “is” to “I”

“I” just made it on because Facebook changed its status update box terminology in March: It used to show the user’s name, then the word “is” and space to enter a message. An interface change took the “is” out and, as the company shows, “usage of ‘I’ doubled almost overnight.”

14. Faith

The last year has seen dramatic increases for “Lord,”"God,” and “Easter” with the last term rising by nearly 30% from 2008 to 2009. The increases, in total, came in around 50% year over year — maybe the country is becoming more religious, although the broader demographics are probably contributing to the increase.

13. The “yard,” sort of like playing FarmVille

A lot of Facebook users spent time in their yards this past spring — significantly more so than in past years. This is likely due to older people with greener thumbs talking about doing yard work on Facebook.

12. “Lady Gaga”

The pop singer got big this past year, especially driven by her performance at the MTV music Awards, as well as a Christopher Walken “performance” of one of her songs, according to the data.

11. This year and next year

New Years, 2009, was a big day for “2009″ and the number “2010″ is looking forward to being an even bigger hit in a couple weeks.

10. Twitter

Facebook redesigned its home page in March to be more like microblogging service Twitter — but by April, from what the company has now revealed, Facebook had seen “mentions of Twitter” fall off “a bit.”

Aside: One has to wonder how this data affected Facebook’s subsequent plans for its product, like the algorithmic news feed it introduced this past fall.

However, the Twitter-based term “RT” (short for “retweet”) has continued to grow, at least on Facebook. It is now, according to Facebok, “a common acronym for any sort of reposting, not just on Twitter, and it has remained high as many Facebook users now use “RT” when they repost something.” We’ll see how the term “RP” does next year.

9. Let’s be friends on FB

Abbreviations are big on Facebook, just like they are on Twitter, instant message services, SMS, and other short-form digital communication services. So it’s fitting that both “FB and “FB Friends” have gotten big, with the former growing by 20 times and the latter growing 100 times since the beginning of 2008.

8. The politics of “Health Care”

Mentions of the term are up by 10 times over the past year, with an especially notable rise as a result of millions of health care reform advocates posting an identical political message as status updates.

7. Sports, and their champions

The Steelers won the Super Bowl last February then the Yankees won the World Series this past October. Unsurprisingly, given that the Super Bowl happens in one evening and the World Series is a multi-day event, the former team saw a briefer, bigger spike and the latter saw a lower, broader increase in status updates.

6. Movies, by which we mean Twilight: New Moon

“The biggest movie of 2009, according to FB status updates, was the critically acclaimed masterpiece New Moon,” as the post describes the move. “It narrowly edged out the summer blockbusters Harry Potterand Transformers. The only real question now, is how many Oscars will New Moon get?” We have nothing further to add on that one.

5. Facebook “family”

Familial relations, including the words “mom,” “dad,” “son,” and “daughter,” all doubled. The word “family” saw big increases around holidays, and the word “kids” increased by 5 times — perhaps more of Facebook’s earliest users are starting families of their own?

4. R.I.P celebrities

Musician Michael Jackson’s death, and subsequent televised funeral, was a huge deal for millions of Facebook users; turns out the passage of television marketer Billy Mays and actor Patrick Swayze also registered with millions, according to the company.

3. H1NI

The strain of virus formerly known as “swine flu” produced “a huge media frenzy at least as big as avian flu a couple of years ago, and mad cow disease before that,” as the post appropriately notes. The friendlier-to-pigs term, “H1N1,” has managed to infect Facebook, occurring as frequently as “swine flu” this past fall.

2. FML

We assume millions of Facebook users have not started to code in Facebook Markup Language, but have rather started using a biological metaphor for how they feel about their lives at the moment they update their statuses. The term became especially big in May, around the time many students take final exams, then decreased over the summer, and became bigger later in the year — with Tuesdays surprisingly outpacing Mondays.

1. FML = FarmVille…. my life

While parents may have enjoyed yard work last spring, people of all ages have become addicted to Zynga’s hit farming game FarmVille since it launched in June. The app is by far the largest game on Facebook, with more than 73 million monthly active users as of today.

Meanwhile: While you many not believe it from recent newspaper headlines, politics — besides “health care” has become something Facebook users update about less frequently about this year. At least electoral politics; this is not too surprising, considering that this is not an election year.

Same with swearing, although some terms, as the example above shows, appear to have gone undercover now that users are friends with mom and grandma.