Facebook has been a useful and cost effective aid to health departments of all sizes to get the word out about H1N1 vaccinations this flu season, especially during the economic downturn when many faced slashed budgets and staff shortages.

The National Association of County and City Health Officials said in December that with lower staffing levels and funding, health departments across the country saw Facebook and other social media “as a quick and inexpensive way to communicate with residents” about the flu.

Specifically the association said such tools have been particularly useful in reaching 18 to 24 year-olds, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) list as a priority group for the H1N1 vaccination. To illustrate the success of such tools the association pointed to an immunization drive by county officials at Howard County Community College in Maryland where 2,500 young adults were given the H1N1 vaccine in two days after a Facebook and social media campaign.

As an arm of the U.S. government the CDC has been active on Facebook in getting the word out about H1N1 prevention and immunization, state and county health departments have also, and the Canadian government launched a particularly useful application to educate Facebook users about the flu response there.

Canada’s Public Health Agency has a Facebook page with about 1,900 fans and tons of information about H1N1, how to prevent it and how to get it. The interactive application, “Public Health Agency’s H1N1 Information Centre,” is essentially a manual that answers every conceivable question about the flu.

Another app developed in the U.S., “I’m a Flu Fighter!” was created in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston. It’s a pretty simple way of sharing with your Facebook friends whether, and how, you received a flu vaccine. If you need one the app helps you find a vaccination location near to you using Google Maps, but it offers users little else in terms of information.

Comparable to Canada’s page, the U.S.’s Department of Health and Human Services’ Facebook page has 3,600 fans, flu information in six languages, videos, information for seniors, news stories about vaccination and links to health departments all over the country. There’s a lot of information, but it’s not as accessible or easy to use as Canada’s app.

Other Facebook pages for county and state health departments essentially provided the same information, sometimes including event information for flu clinics, sometimes using mobile text notifications, and always linking to news stories and health guides pertaining to the flu.

According to the CDC it’s currently flu season in the Northern Hemisphere, which will peak in February and taper off in March. The H1N1 flu first hit the international scene last year when it was labeled a pandemic by the World Health Organization and found to be more lethal for younger and older people.

Only three days after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that destroyed much of Haiti and killed untold thousands of people, more than $8 million dollars has been raised by the Red Cross via text messages for charity through being popularized on social network sites like Facebook.

Although it’s unclear exactly how much money was raised directly by Facebook users, the viral text messaging campaign they helped create was very real. The Red Cross reported Friday that as a result of the mass social network campaign it received $35 million in donations in the first 48 hours after the earthquake — more than half through online contributions and at least $8 million by text.

To what extent Facebook has served as a direct conduit to Haiti-related giving is unknown. The widespread enthusiasm isn’t just obvious from all the status updates, as Facebook users have raised $100,000 for charities through the Causes app.

Text message money waas raised by individuals texting to charities asking that $10 or $5 be added to their monthly bill to be donated to charity. Pleas for this specific type of donation took over status updates and news feeds on Facebook— at one point there were 1,500 Facebook status updates a minute mentioning Haiti— and users of social networks were the initial points of information about the quake, not the traditional media.

MGive, which runs the Red Cross’s mobile giving campaign, incorporated a Facebook application — Red Cross International Relief — to allow users to give on yet another forum. The app asks you to donate and then invite friends to use it, as well as posts a box to your profile with a link back to the app and that prompts you to enter your mobile number to make a donation.

And more impressively, that the donations to the American Red Cross exceeded the total amounts “received in the first 48 hours of both (Hurricane) Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.” The organization also posted a map from MGive breaking down giving in the U.S. by state.

Facebook’s Causes app acted as a conduit to fundraise for a several projects, including $59,000 for Oxfam America’s Help Earthquake Survivors. On Wednesday, Facebook added a handful of charities to its Haiti donation lineup and those had raised considerable sums as of Friday as well: more than $19,500 for World Vision’s Haiti Earthquake Relief, $54,000 for Friends of the World Food Program and $28,500 for Compassion International.

Corporate America has followed on the heels of Facebook and social media users as most major cell phone companies have waived text messaging fees related to Haiti donations and major credit card companies waived their percentage cut of credit card donations. Even the companies managing the mobile campaigns have waived their typical waiting periods to get the cash to Haiti more quickly. Then a whole host of other corporations and tech companies jumped onto the Haiti charity bandwagon.

To what extent the social media campaign for Haiti will grow or taper off isn’t easy to predict without more data, yet as aid begins to filter into to the desolated country organizations are turning their focus from fundraising to recovery. A good example of this is Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti group: Thursday the site’s post was “Please donate!” replaced Friday morning by the announcement of the formation of a Haiti Earthquake Alliance which will work to coordinate aid efforts.

In the latest announcement about a Facebook app developer working to integrate branded advertising, Zynga, Universal and partner companies said yesterday that a week-long campaign in December for the movie Public Enemies had been a big success.

The movie stars Johnny Depp as real-life 1930′s bank robber John Dillinger. To fit this theme, the two companies, with the help of direct ad seller Appssavvy and marketing agency Ignited, created and offered Public Enemy-themed virtual goods within crime role-playing game Mafia Wars.

With nearly 23 million monthly active users on Facebook, the game is one of Zynga’s biggest; it’s also been around the longest, and is often a place where Zynga tries out new ideas. While other social app developers, including Playfish and Slide, have run branded virtual goods before, this is one of the company’s first big tests.

The results? The numbers below aren’t completely clear, and we still don’t know what really matters — how much the goods built the brand and drove movie sales — but here’s what the companies are reporting:

• Around 55 million “interactions,” presumably meaning times that users somehow made engaged with the goods. A lot of people appear to have had meaningful engagement with the goods.
• “Delivered by a multiple of 13, which ultimately supported the film’s Blu-ray and DVD break-out during the busy holiday season.” We’re not sure what this number refers to, but it sounds positive.
• Stories about the goods were posted to players’ Facebook news feeds more than 7.6 million times, delivering nearly a billion viral impressions, which means that the average feed story was viewed 131 times.
• 25,000 ‘Likes’
• 26,000 comments on the Mafia Wars Facebook fan page.

[Image via alive not dead.]

Games hold the top four spots on this week’s list of emerging apps from AppData, but the remainder goes almost entirely to polls and quizzes. Facebook has questions, and developers seem to have the answers — even if most of these poll apps continue to get low user ratings.

Also take note of the several foreign-language apps. The two using Chinese characters are both games, while Mignon & Sexy and Akinator are both French quizzes. Foreign-language apps are a growing part of these lists, which highlight apps that are growing quickly but have yet to break past a million monthly active users (MAU). Here it is:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Garden World	835,217	+396,647	+47.49
2.	Wild Ones	788,966	+368,478	+46.70
3.	Three Kingdoms Online – Best Browser Game of 2009!	857,967	+338,310	+39.43
4.	My Town	672,974	+319,219	+47.43
5.	Mignon & Sexy ?	313,942	+264,843	+84.36
6.	開心寶貝	427,189	+225,895	+52.88
7.	Poll Daddy Polls	478,447	+182,934	+38.23
8.	Polls	328,769	+179,316	+54.54
9.	Flying Dog	826,573	+171,154	+20.71
10.	Akinator	234,321	+158,488	+67.64
11.	Show Some Love!	391,229	+141,964	+36.29
12.	Dr. Phil’s Personality Test	480,945	+127,651	+26.54
13.	Happy Hotel	950,714	+126,684	+13.33
14.	Who Has The Best Profile Picture ?	333,175	+120,909	+36.29
15.	Name Generators	890,438	+119,280	+13.40
16.	What is the symbol of your personality?	354,310	+115,104	+32.49
17.	New Year’s Resolution Generator	208,435	+108,666	+52.13
18.	Who Are You In Your Group of Friends?	311,967	+98,913	+31.71
19.	開心花園	446,177	+97,802	+21.92
20.	Warstorm	423,940	+94,324	+22.25

Mignon & Sexy, the simple either / or quiz in French that’s also the first non-game app on the list, is a great example of how even minimal functionality (and, some might say, a shoddy user interface) can pick up heaps of users if the subject matter seems interesting. “Mignon”, by the way, means cute; “sexy” speaks for itself, and is a subject that, as they say, always sells.

Following up are Poll Daddy and Polls, both apps that let their users create polls and quizzes for others to take. Poll Daddy is part of a well known web company, WordPress creator Automattic, and made its name on news websites during the 2008 political season.

Getting away from the various quiz and poll apps, there are two others further down the list: Show Some Love!, coming in at number 11, and Name Generators at 15. The former is a variation of the ever-popular poke-style apps that are now bringing in virtual currency (love bucks) and more game mechanics to keep people involved. Pillow Fight, which recently outgrew this list, is a larger version of the same trend.

Name Generators, which comes up with fantasy names (your Princess name, stripper name and so forth), has flirted with popularity for weeks, but has one big problem: users don’t return. Check out the graph below, showing daily average users — the number is pretty low. If you’d prefer to read more about the up-and-coming games, head over to our list on InsideSocialGames.

You can now access MySpace’s Fan Video site via Facebook Connect, the first integration that we’ve seen between Facebook and MySpace, although we’ve been hearing for months that it is on the way.

MySpace is trying to make itself a central site for entertainment and other content. The fact that it is using Facebook Connect that it believes it can get value out of pairing Facebook’s network with its content. This integration is pretty clever, although not in a core part of MySpace.

The Fan Video site allows you to sign in, browse a scrolling interface of videos (with The Cure’s hit song “Close to Me” fittingly playing in the background), then create a video. You can choose from a selection of celebrity musician’s videos, up to five, with each featuring some moment where your Facebook or MySpace profile appears (see the sample screeenshot).

You can also make one for a friend, include your profile photo, and choosing who to send it to from your Facebook or MySpace friend list.

We expect we’ll see more, and more significant integrations of Facebook Connect on MySpace over the course of this year.

For developers tracking Facebook’s Platform Roadmap, which was initially unveiled in late October last year, Facebook has updated the dates on a few items that you should be aware of.

According to the latest version of the Developer Roadmap, the following changes have been moved back and are now currently scheduled to go live in February (instead of sometime this month):

• Invitation changes (moving to an Inbox tab)
• Inbox changes (sharing app content)

In addition, the following items have been updated and are currently slated to go live in “late January”:

• Home page application navigation (moving bookmarks from bottom menu bar to left side)
• Counters
• App and Game Dashboards and Dashboard News APIs

Finally, a few items have been updated and are scheduled simply for “Early 2010″:

• Internationalization support for stream attachments
• Application branding on canvas pages

Notifications are scheduled to be removed in “Early 2010″ as well, but no specific date has been given. The new Email API will be going live in “Mid January.” Of course, we’ll keep you up to date as Facebook further updates the Developer Roadmap.

DiGiorno’s Pizza is inviting Facebook fans to get on the bus for a chance at winning a Fantasy Football draft party in Las Vegas with former NFL running back Jerome “The Bus” Bettis. The contest is being run through the brand’s Facebook page, and visitors to the page that are 21 or older can enter to win once each day through February 12.

The DiGiorno’s brand page is fairly popular, with close to 85,000 fans, and recently there have been some significant spikes in fan numbers which may be attributed to the contest. DiGiorno is cross-promoting the contest through their Twitter and YouTube accounts, which may also be contributing to the extra page traffic. The “You Bettis Believe!” ad campaign and contest gets its catchy name from the involvement of former NFL player-turned-commentator Jerome Bettis, who is the face of the campaign and is set to host the fantasy draft party in Las Vegas. In case you never saw him in action, his nickname comes from his ability to continue running with multiple defenders on his back.

The contest has its own Draft Party tab on the fan page and features The Jerome Bettis Party Playbook, a collection of video clips and illustrations advertising the bake-at-home pizza. Entering the contest involves divulging email, address and phone number, so DiGiorno will have plenty of information to sort through for future ad and marketing campaigns. There are the obligitory tabs for sharing word of your entry in your news feed and inviting friends to enter themselves in the contest.

Become a fan, get a free bagel — and schmear!

So goes the new pitch from Einstein Bros Bagels and Noah’s Bagels, both part of the Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, Inc., which began giving away free bagels and spread to Facebook users Monday in exchange for becoming a fan of their pages.

Upon visiting the pages a Facebook user lands on the Free Bagel tab of either store, once you become a fan and allow access to the Free Bagel app, a printable coupon for a free bagel and spread appears, redeemable at any participating Einstein Bros or Noah’s Bagels store.

The promotion also prompts you to share the deal on your wall so your friends can join in (and bring more attention to the company).

Thus far the promotion seems to be working, at least for Einstein Bros, which noted on a status update today, “More than 15,000 news fans in 3 days! We can’t believe it! Welcome to our new fans and thanks to those of you who have always been here.” The page currently has almost 24,000 fans.

Free bagels is one part of the companies’ new Facebook features, created in conjunction with Context Optional. Another is a new Google Maps-powered store locator, found on the Locator tab on each store’s page. There is also a New Food tab, featuring the stores’ newest offerings.

The Facebook pages have also proved to be a place where fans of the chains can go to give feedback, and sometimes receive responses, such as a discussion created on the Einstein Bros page about coupons that weren’t printing.

Facebook may be blocked in China, but it isn’t in Hong Kong. In fact, 38% of the population, or around 2.7 million people, are using the service every month. This market is big enough that dental care conglomerate Colgate decided to create a local Facebook campaign to advertise its ActiFlex electric toothbrush. The effort includes a branded site that takes you to a branded Facebook application.

You can use the app to take one of your Facebook friend’s profile photos: Paste a funny cartoon face over their mouth, resize it to fit, and then publish it to their wall. The idea is that the funny image will help advertise the need for better dental hygiene… using ActiFlex. The app appears to have just launched, and it has a few thousand users so far.

Hong Kong’s connection to Facebook has become increasingly strong, having doubled in users during 2009, according to our Global Monitor report. It is home to some social game developers, and many game players — anecdotal evidence suggests that games have been one of the many reasons people have joined the site. The city’s marketers are also getting on Facebook more; the creator of the Colgate app, Agenda Hong Kong, also has a deal to work with Air New Zealand on a branded app (although it doesn’t appear to have fully launched).

Facebook launched a new page, yesterday, aimed at spotlighting the earthquake in Haiti and other disasters around the world. The Global Relief page, live for less than 12 hours is up to 1,400 fans already, although we expect that number to climb quickly due to the attention on Haiti earthquake relief.

The page’s design is currently aimed at moving Facebook users to other resources to enable them to assist in the Haiti disaster. One tab uses the Causes app and directs users to donate under the “Global Relief on Facebook” moniker; an Other Pages tab features 11 groups working in Haiti, including Yele Haiti and Catholic Relief Services.

On the Info tab, Facebook notes that the Global Relief page “will spotlight efforts on Facebook to help respond to disasters around the globe.” This allows users to participate in relief efforts without having to leave Facebook’s page.

This morning alone the page has already posted two status updates directing Facebook users to help by donating water or money to Oxfam America through the Causes app. As of this morning “Help Earthquake Survivors in Haiti” had more than 7,600 members and had raised more than $34,000 dollars, and both were growing quickly.