Dole Food Company is using its Facebook page to promote a game, giveaway and sweepstakes related to its new line of prepackaged salads and accompanying Dole Salad Guide campaign.

The campaign’s aim is to promote better health by eating Dole’s prepackaged salad blends. Those come in a variety of tastes (mild to bold) and textures (tender to crunchy), each measured on a scale of 1 to 5 per Dole’s salad guide on each bag.

After clicking on the Super Salad Slider! tab of Dole’s Facebook page, the user is taken to Dole’s web site to enter their name and address and then play the game. Dole’s 1-5 scale serves the role of slot machine in Super Salad Slider Game. Instead of pulling a lever to start the game a user clicks on “Go,” and to end the game they click on “Stop.” Awards are mixed in with results describing different kinds of salads.

This guide is central to Dole’s Salad Guide campaign. Featuring a man claiming to be the foremost expert on salads as spokesman, the game determines winners in the giveaway – which runs form January 1 to February 28 – and a sweepstakes that includes a grand prize trip for two to the California Health and Longevity Institute.

Overall the Dole Salad Guide campaign hints at promoting better health through people eating their salads, as reflected by messaging on both the company site and the Facebook page. Under the Season’s Eatings tab on Facebook there are healthy eating tips and the page’s status updates are frequently used to promote health by eating salads, like the recipes available on Dole’s primary site.

Dole seems to be targeting women with this campaign, not only because the sweepstakes includes a spa treatment, but also because the content of the Facebook page includes recipes, suggestions specific to female health and tips to help mothers get children eat more veggies.

One recent status update, “Salad can also equal better bone health!” is an allusion to osteoporosis, a degenerative bone disease that often afflicts older women, while “Serve salad before the rest of your meal to encourage everybody – including kids – to eat it first,” is a suggestion that mothers with young children might implement.

Consequently, the more than 13,600 fans are overwhelmingly women, who share their own salad recipes and suggestions on the page’s wall, and engage in discussions over how to best prepare them.

Playing Dole’s Super Salad Slider Game automatically enters users into the grand prize drawing, although one may also enter via snail mail, and a total of 959 other prizes are set to be awarded, including 59 first prizes of the Dole Nutrition Guide Book and 900 coupons redeemable for Dole salads up to $5 for eligible legal U.S. residents 18 or older.

While the “Share” action item in Facebook’s feed stories has never gotten that much attention, Facebook just increased the incentive for Pages and Apps to encourage their users to “reshare” feed content on their profiles with the release of the new “via” attribution feature.

Whereas before reshared content was not attributed, now reshared content includes a prominent link to the original publisher of the item – increasing the reward for people and Pages who post content that others like and reshare with increased links and traffic back to their Facebook Page.

This should encourage Page administrators to post links to content their fans might find interesting, even if the content isn’t owned by the Page itself. By encouraging users to reshare, Pages can ride the coat tails of viral content and get more links to their Page throughout the Facebook ecosystem.

However, note that at this time, Facebook’s “via” attribution feature doesn’t daisy-chain back to the original source: if a fan reshares your content and then one of their friends reshares it from them, your fan will be attributed in the via link, not you.

Nevertheless, even this first degree of attribution should increase the amount of content being resyndicated through Facebook via the “Share” functionality.

Facebook tweaked the “Share” button for shared items over the weekend to make the feature more social.

When you click to “Share” a video, link, or any other content from one of your friends or Pages you’re a fan of, you’ll now see a line of text that says “via [your friend's/the Page's name].” If you choose to reshare the item, it will appear on your stream, and in your friends’ News Feeds. The reshared item includes a mention and link to the profile of the person you shared the item from, although you can remove their name in the reshare window if you want.

This feature is conceptually similar to how Twitter users retweet shared stories, in that the company is trying to make it easier for users to share more of each other’s content. However, while retweeting is a big part of Twitter user behavior, it hasn’t gotten so big on Facebook.

Facebook has already been working on a related effort to make, well, publishing more social. Last fall, it introduced a way to tag and link users in a post with the @ feature, like how you can tag friends on Twitter — except when you typed in @ on Facebook, you got a drop-down menu with a choice to choose people’s Facebook names.

While the interface is arguably more elegant than Twitter’s, especially for new users unfamiliar with, the feature hasn’t yet caught on that widely, that we’ve seen. The reshare button iterates on the idea of retweeting, and it also looks cleaner — we’ll see if it catches on, and helps spur adoption of @ tagging on Facebook.

Clothing retailers American Eagle and sister company Aerie have teamed with MediaFORGE to produce an interesting widget that allows Facebook users to browse merchandise directly in news feed updates. The widget also links directly to the AE and Aerie Web sites to make it easy to purchase the items found in the browser windows.

The widget features a “play” button that opens up a larger window where users can scroll through multiple featured products. Clicking on the products sends users directly to the retail Web sites where they can learn more about the items and make purchases.

Both the American Eagle and Aerie widgets are displayed in the companies’ news feeds and are easily shared in Facebook users’ personal updates. The American Eagle and Aerie pages are already popular amongst Facebook fans, with AE holding more than 684,000 fans, one of the highest among clothiers. Aerie currently has a little more than 178,000 fans. Each page has seen a slight increase in activity since the launch of the news feed applications last week.

A few retailers are experimenting with similar applications, such as the one recently implemented by The Limited and produced by Resource Interactive. The Off The Wall widget does not include the ability to browse multiple products, at least not yet, and has to date only featured a single item or offer.

Facebook gave fans of the Golden Globe Awards the opportunity to tune in to the festivities last night through live Ustream coverage that began with red carpet coverage and ran all the way through post-ceremony interviews. Fans were also able to post their comments about the presenters and awards before, during and after the Golden Globes.

The Golden Globes fan page, at www.facebook.com/GoldenGlobes, hosted the live streaming with a Golden Globes Live tab that appeared a few days before the event. Coverage of the awards show started early in the day with interviews, clips of past shows and information on nominees, and continued through the actual presentation with live coverage of winners. In fact, the Golden Globe presentation on Facebook was slightly ahead of the telecast on NBC, so those tuning in to the awards through Facebook were hearing about winners before those tuning in through their televisions.

Hosting live coverage of the awards show gave all fans of the Golden Globes the ability to share their thoughts on the ceremony and its celebrity attendees with just their friends or all Facebook users across the world, but for some it was the only way to catch the show live. Several posts on the wall during the program from international Facebook users expressed their gratitude for the Ustream coverage, as the Golden Globes were not being televised in their countries.

After the awards were over, Facebook users were able to submit questions for the hosts of the coverage to ask winners, and there are currently several clips from throughout the night on the page for those that missed the festivities.

The Golden Globe Awards Show fan page has seen a sharp increase in fan numbers over the last week, as is to be expected as the actual show approached, with total fan numbers currently sitting just shy of 84,000.

Facebook broadcasts of live events have been popular, with everyone from the Jonas Brothers to the NBA and CNN taking advantage of live streaming coverage to reach out to fans and offer them a forum to connect with friends and other users across the world.

The first app on this week’s list of top growers by monthly active users, How original are my parents?, makes us wonder: is it really only kids using this application? With over half the visits to Facebook coming from users over 24, some of this app’s success could be coming from parents taking this quiz to find out whether they’re still hip or not.

This list, below, is taken from AppData, and shows the 20 games that gained the most monthly active users in the past week. We also talk about the data on Inside Social Games, where we ponder this week whether second placer Pillow Fight is a game or not. Here are the rest of the top 20:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	How original are my parents?	13,342,950	+6,247,972	+46.83
2.	Pillow Fight	15,063,982	+2,982,837	+19.80
3.	Quiz Planet!	14,228,794	+1,586,786	+11.15
4.	Happy Island	9,012,780	+1,496,063	+16.60
5.	Entrevista tus Amigos	6,925,288	+1,415,252	+20.44
6.	Birthday Cards	29,700,484	+1,308,207	+4.40
7.	Zoo World	13,335,340	+1,290,837	+9.68
8.	Dante’s Inferno	5,043,127	+1,147,901	+22.76
9.	Tiki Farm	4,732,995	+1,101,304	+23.27
10.	Causes	24,691,506	+1,068,463	+4.33
11.	Facebook for iPhone	24,947,093	+863,660	+3.46
12.	Static FBML	9,650,333	+670,354	+6.95
13.	Texas HoldEm Poker	24,197,747	+616,280	+2.55
14.	FarmChat	1,611,306	+610,235	+37.87
15.	Zoosk	7,131,471	+552,646	+7.75
16.	Country Life	7,229,831	+536,608	+7.42
17.	Wild Ones	1,129,240	+505,543	+44.77
18.	FarmVille Cash	1,378,053	+500,307	+36.31
19.	Music	10,921,455	+496,945	+4.55
20.	Mobile	17,493,750	+496,256	+2.84

Coming in third and fifth with nice growth are Quiz Planet! and Entrevista tus Amigos (ask your friends), two quiz-creation apps that have continued significant week-over-week growth. As apps like these succeed they’ll tend to make their own monopolies, based on their active communities and thousands of user-submitted tests and quizzes.

Birthday Cards and Causes both made it on at fairly high positions, despite low percentage growth in new users; these two apps are long-running and successful, and seem to just be making up a little lost ground from December. That’s more emphatically the case for Static FBML, a profile editor  used by other Facebook applications, whose MAU dipped significantly during the holidays. It’s daily active user number seems to be growing well, though.

FarmChat will likely be able to avoid the grisly fate of Farmville Gift Sender, a knockoff of Facebook’s top game that was banned for intellectual property infringement. Yet the chat app, which takes number 14 this week, is almost certainly based on Farmville; it describes itself as a place to “meet new Game player friends in chat rooms and learn other players’ game cheats.”

Also take note of Zoosk. We said last week that the dating app is one to watch, and its slow climb up the rankings (from number 20 to 15) seems to bear that out. Before long, Zoosk may become the first truly successful dating app on Facebook — besides, that is, itself.

Always tracking the line where games and social networks meet, Inside Social Games has seen a myriad of new games and happenings from the past week. Here are the headlines:

Monday, January 11th, 2010

• iPhone Game Blockoban: So Fun It Blocks Out Your Time
• Set Sail for Your Island Farm Paradise with This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Games
• Dr. Pepper Runs Offline Promotion for Virtual Goods in Electronic Arts Games
• Compression: An iPhone Title that Squeezes the Puzzle Genre

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

• Happy Hotel Growing on Facebook – the Start of the Next Big Social Game Genre?
• Announcing Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010
• Shanda Games Buys Mochi Media for $80 Million, International Gaming Competition Heats Up
• Teen Virtual World Habbo Hotel Signs on with Facebook Connect
• Zynga Brings Back Social Advertising Offers, With Tight Supervision

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

• Holiday Hangovers End On This Week’s List of Facebook Games With the Most New Daily Active Users
• Facebook’s Credits Virtual Currency Begins Testing Payment Issues Resolution Features
• IFB: Zynga’s PetVille Game Has a Quality New Advertising Offer Wall from SocialVibe
• F.A.S.T. and Skies of Glory: A Review of SGN’s Flight Simulators
• Offerpal’s Ads Go Live On Zynga Games, Now in Café World and Vampire Wars

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

• BitRhymes Combines Game Genres in Facebook App The Warlords
• SGN Names Randy Breen as its New Chief Executive Officer
• Space Station: Frontier is Part Tower Defense, Part RTS, and Completely Fun Chaos
• MySpace Platform To Soon Get Big, Core Upgrade

Friday, January 15th, 2010

• Chinese Games Break Out in This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Games
• Castle Age Brings a New Level of Detail to Facebook Role-Playing Games
• Orca Offers Monetization Services for Social Games and Beyond
• Social Gaming Roundup: Helping Haiti, Tracking Farms, Korea, and More

Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!

Zong is a provider of mobile payments serving the digital content, social media, and gaming industries.

Deal United is a provider of virtual currency monetization solutions for social applications and online games in Europe.

Social Video Bytes is a new video ad network for social network applications.

LifeStreet Media is a performance advertising platform focused on social applications.

Offerpal Media is a managed offer network for social applications and online merchants.

Super Rewards is a monetization solution for applications and games running on social networks like Facebook.

Surfpin is a provider of mobile and landline payments for game and application developers.

AdParlor is an advertising network designed specifically for social networking sites.

SoftLayer provides managed hosting services for social application and game developers.

Plancast Updates Features, Imports Facebook Events – Plancast, a site that allows you to share your events schedule with friends, updated several features this week, most notably you can now import open events you’re attending on Facebook and they’ll be automatically shared with your subscribers (but you can opt out).

There’s also a new search box in the top right corner of the site users can reference by first or last name, username, bio, plans, description and location. User tagging allows you to invite people by prefixing the @ symbol, a la @username, which will send an email to your friends or more directly +username will automatically include someone in an event (you can also opt out).

Other smaller features include: blocking individual users from subscribing to you or including you in their plans; ongoing plans are now collapsed on your homepage and URLs in the “What” field are now hyperlinked.

Avon’s Mark Brand Forays Into Facebook – Avon’s Mark brand for young women launched a new Facebook e-shop recently, targeting the women under 30 demographic. Mark’s fan page currently has more than 86,000 fans and is part of a larger social media campaign that includes mobile apps.

“Mark Girls can advertise their ability to sell products right on their Facebook profiles, and the widget functionality of Mark’s e-shop enables us to drop the shop into other places to give the brand a presence wherever people hang out online,” said Annemarie Frank, director of digital media and strategic alliance of Mark.

New VP at Appssavvy – Todd Bowman was selected to be the new senior vice president of sales for appssavvy this week, becoming the fifth member of the social media sales company. Most recently Bowman worked at Condé Nast Digital Media and will now be supervising a direct sales team for social media space led by new senior account executive serving the East Coast Jared Zlotnick.

Bra Colors Give Cancer Group Fan Boost – The Dallas-based Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer foundation reported that, due to the recent postings of bra colors on Facebook status updates, their Facebook fans jumped from 134,000 to 154,000 as of Friday.  “We’re so delighted,” said spokeswoman Andrea Rader. “We think this is just a phenomenal example of how powerful the Internet can be in getting this message out.”

[Bowman photo via Appssavvy ]

We just wrote yesterday about recent updates to Facebook’s Developer Roadmap, the calendar Facebook originally launched last October to give developers a better sense of what’s coming down the Platform product pipeline.

Today, Facebook made another update to the roadmap, announcing that the new Email API will be going live next Wednesday, 20 January. In addition, Facebook has posted new information for developers on how exactly the API will work.

Basically, developers will have 2 options for implementing the new email sharing features:

1) If developers want to make sharing email optional, users will see this extended permissions dialog:

2) If developers want to require users to share their email to use the app, users will see the following prompt:

To help with user education around the new Platform email sharing features, Facebook says it’s going to place the following message above every canvas page of every application for the next three months. This is a pretty aggressive user education campaign, especially in light of the way Facebook has rolled out Platform changes in the past.

In addition, Facebook posted that it is going to give users the option to share their real email address or a proxied email address. According to Facebook,

“In our tests we found that users strongly prefer having the option to share an anonymous email address. In rare cases we will set the default for the dialog to share a proxied email (instead of the user’s actual email address). We will only do this in a small number of cases (if any), based on an algorithm that will auto-detect applications that we suspect might be abusing email addresses.”

This will enable Facebook to maintain some sort of quality control over the email channel – preventing blatant abuse when users choose to share their proxied email address instead of their real one. Here’s what the UI will look like:

Email Policy

In addition, Facebook has posted draft policies for email use. As you may imagine, Facebook is prohibiting the reselling of user email addresses, requiring CAN-SPAM Act compliance, and requiring a privacy policy. We’ll be watching this area closely to see how both users, developers, and the privacy community handle the situation. Obviously, once a user delivers their primary email address directly to a third party, there’s nothing Facebook can do to stop abuse, other than punish known abusers with Platform restrictions or suspensions.

Here are Facebook’s draft email policies:

a. You must not give or sell users’ email addresses to any third party or affiliate.
b. You must comply with the provisions of the Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM Act and all other applicable spam laws (e.g., provide a visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism and honor opt-out requests within 10 days).
c. You must explain clearly to users, in a privacy policy or elsewhere in a conspicuous place, how you will use their email addresses.
d. Emails you send must clearly indicate that they are from you and must not appear to be from Facebook or anyone else. For example, you must not include Facebook logos or brand assets in your emails, and you must not mention Facebook in the subject line, “from” line, or body header.
e. All emails to users must originate from the same domain, and you must provide us with the name of that domain in the Facebook Developer application used to manage your application.

We’ll of course have more details as Facebook continues to roll out Platform changes.