Each week, we track the growth and decline of Facebook’s biggest apps here at Inside Facebook. Among those that we watch, there are almost always several quizzes gaining thousands or millions of users. Yet quizzes also have trouble holding onto their users, and are often viewed as a second-class type of app by developers. Is it possible that they could be more successful?

Judging from history, quizzes could do much better, indeed. Women’s magazines use quizzes as a monthly staple — Cosmopolitan’s website, for example, devotes an entire section to fare like Are You Enough of a Bad Girl? and What’s Your Passion Personality? And, of course, there’s all sorts of classic men’s quizzes in magazines like Men’s Health, asking questions like Do You Make a Good First Impression?

And in earlier years online, websites like IQtest.com and TestQ.com found success with IQ tests, while OKCupid.com built a major dating website on the back of quizzes. Examples abound of successful quiz sites online that use both professional and user-generated content.

There have also been successful quizzes on Facebook, but their quality and retention rates are usually abysmal. Profits can’t motivate developers to do better, either; to date, quizzes have monetized badly.

We think that could change. But before going any further, we should pause to define the types of quizzes on Facebook. Broadly speaking, there are three categories:

1. Friend quizzes – These quiz apps are designed to reveal how you feel about friends with quick-to-answer questions. Until recently, Friend Quiz and Friend FAQ had achieved great success in this group with over 30 million monthly active users total, but they were banned by Facebook for breaking the platform’s developer guidelines. Friends Exposed, which had about 20 million MAU, was also apparently suspended recently.
2. Personality quizzes — The largest developer in this category is probably Lolapps, which has an application called Quiz Creator that Facebook users can create their own quizzes within. Generally the aim of these quizzes is to tell their users something about themselves. Right now, Lolapps’ biggest quizzes are How dirty are you ? and what tattoo best fits you?.
3. Skill quizzes – The most recognizable type of skill quiz is an IQ test, but there are definitely others. On Facebook, the biggest skill quiz app appears to be a game from Wooga called Brain Buddies, which tests users on their spatial and mathematical skills and has three million users. There’s also an older Playfish game called Who Has The Biggest Brain?

All three of these categories have the potential to create huge applications, in our view. Friend quizzes have already proven this. At their height, over 60 million monthly users were using a small handful of friend quizzes. But the temptation to use shady tactics like forced wall-posts appears to have been too high for the developers; Facebook has banned almost all of them.

So let’s take a look at the latter two categories, personality quizzes and skill quizzes.

Right now, “it’s like in the early days of YouTube,” Lolapps CEO Kavin Stewart told me yesterday about his company’s user-generated personality quizzes. “There’s a lot of silly stuff, it’s not a high production value, but people get a cheap thrill.”

The low quality doesn’t seem to matter to users, though. Although Lolapps wants to shift most of its attention to making games, Stewart thinks that quizzes will always be popular. “It has been shown again and again that there’s a huge audience for this stuff,” he said. “There will probably be an evergreen interest.”

Lolapps set up its system to direct users to similar quizzes after they completed each one, which helps new quizzes gain users and rise quickly. Since most of the quizzes are short and sweet, there’s an obvious addictive factor — people tend to hop from one to the next, and they’ll also retake quizzes to get a preferred answer. What’s still missing is a way to make money from the crowd.

An obvious method might be targeted product advertisements; after all, many quizzes are just users picking out the things that they like. Quiz apps would also be a natural home for offers or marketing studies. But a more interesting idea, especially for the Facebook Platform, might be the addition of some light game mechanic.

How would it work? Dedicated quiz-takers might take dozens of quizzes daily, but the results never add up to anything. A virtual currency or tokens would serve to keep users more engaged, adding to the number of visits.

Friends could compete to acquire the most tokens, or even to get specific types of tokens that could be associated with specific results within each quiz, for instance a “mean” or “nice” token (in keeping with the high-school feel of most popular quizzes). An even deeper mechanic might attach these to an actual game, like a zoo that specific animals appear in based on a user’s personality.

Brain Buddies and Who Has the Biggest Brain?, mentioned above, are skill quizzes that are already in game-form. Yet although each gained several million users, they never really took off. The key for these sorts of quizzes is probably to sell something concrete. Skill quizzes that test the abilities of a user’s mind, for example, could push versions for seniors or children (Who Has the Biggest Brain does have a pro version).

There’s also the idea that made Tickle, IQTest.com and a number of other sites briefly successful on the internet. Users who took IQ or personality tests on these sites were shown a basic result — an IQ of 130, for example, or their Myers-Briggs personality type. But the tests also offered a deeper look into the user’s strengths and weaknesses, which the user could pay for.

A similar model could be successful on Facebook, especially with the added factor of competition between friends when they post their results.

Of course, from here this is all speculation; following Facebook’s bannings, quiz apps are at low ebb. But most people have a strong urge to find out more about themselves, and Facebook offers the perfect platform for social quiz-taking. So there’s a good chance that a company that finally gets the model right will find itself an overnight success.

April 20 | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps 2010, our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms, is now only a few weeks away. On April 20th in San Francisco, one day before Facebook’s official “f8″ event, many of the leading developers from around the world will be gathering to discuss the future of monetization inside social apps and games on Facebook and beyond.

The agenda for Inside Social Apps 2010 is now live online. Executives and experts from leading social game and app developers, payment services, advertising providers, and investors will be discussing the future of virtual goods monetization in social apps and games from a global perspective. The event will be held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF, located at 1675 Owens St in San Francisco (map).

The full list of 34 speakers is below:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Jens Begemann, CEO, Wooga
• Jim Bobowski, Director Online Partner Marketing, Netflix
  
• Adam Caplan, VP Virtual Currency, Super Rewards / Adknowledge
  
• Renata Dionello, Chief of Staff to the CEO, eBay, and former Director of Consumer Business Development, PayPal
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Facebook & Inside Social Games
• Dave Etling, VP Product Development, InComm
  
• George Garrick, CEO, Offerpal Media
• Steven Goh, CEO, mig33
• Eric Goldberg, Managing Director, Crossover Technologies
  
• Vikas Gupta, CEO, Jambool
• Sebastien de Halleux, Founder and COO, Playfish, and VP Business Development & Strategic Partnerships, EA Interactive
• Ron Hirson, Co-founder and SVP Product, Boku
• Benjamin Joffe, Founder, +8*
  
• Nick Lawler, Managing Director, Maverick Capital
• Keith Lee, Co-founder and CEO, Booyah
• Vish Makhijani, COO, Zynga
• David Marcus, CEO, Zong
• Lisa Marino, CRO, RockYou
  
• Dave McClure, Investor, Founders Fund Angel and fbFund Incubator
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications, ngmoco
• Mark Pincus, Founder and CEO, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, Founder and Executive Chairman, SGN
• John Pleasants, CEO, Playdom
• Keith Rabois, VP Strategy and Business Development, Slide
• Alex Rampell, CEO, TrialPay
  
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network
• Kavin Stewart, CEO, Lolapps
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom, and Investor
  
• Jay Weintraub, Founder, LeadsCon
• Season Xu, Co-founder and COO, Five Minutes
  

Finally, the last set of “early general admission” tickets is now available through Friday at a special price of $379. This price will change after Friday, and space is very limited and filling up fast, so we encourage you to register now.

Inside Social Apps 2010 – April 20th in San Francisco

Three years after the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry. Today, social games monetizing through virtual goods have quickly become one of the hottest sectors of technology and entertainment, both in the US and around the world. Where are social apps going, and who is leading the way?

Inside Network is proud to announce our first conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps 2010, happening April 20th in San Francisco, is bringing together the world’s leading entrepreneurs all in one place to discuss the future of social applications and games monetizing through virtual goods.

This will be an in-depth one day event geared toward developers on Facebook, MySpace, and the iPhone, senior executives, and investors. At Inside Social Apps 2010, founders and CEOs of the top social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies will be tackling the key issues facing the industry. We’re hosting it one day before Facebook’s “f8″ event in San Francisco, so this will be an excellent opportunity to learn about the key issues facing the future of the Facebook Platform and beyond before Facebook’s official event.

Register Now

The last set of “early general admission” tickets is available through Friday at a special price of $379. This price will change after Friday, and space will be very limited, so we encourage you to register early.

From all of us at Inside Network, we hope to see you on April 20th in San Francisco!

Remember ICQ? Back in the late 1990s, it was the chat service that most of us used, with each person identified not by a chosen handle, but by an assigned five-digit number. But after AOL bought the service, a lot of the users went on to other chat clients: AOL’s own AIM, MSN Chat, Skype, Gtalk and many others.

But ICQ is still around and has millions of users, especially outside of the United States (the company itself is Israeli). And now it has also joined several of its peers in adding support for Facebook Chat, which was launched way back in 2008.

In February, we reported that AIM had added Facebook Chat to its supported services, but ICQ actually quietly beat its partner in crime (AOL owns both) to the punch in some sense, having released ICQ 7 back in January with Facebook support. That included a way to do status updates, although Chat has only gone live today.

There’s no need for a guide on how to set it up, like the one we wrote for Pidgin last month; the Facebook Connect login is prominently displayed in ICQ 7, and the Facebook icon is always beside friends who are also on Facebook. Beyond chat, ICQ also allows its users to directly post to friend’s walls and share photos.

In fact, Meebo was far ahead of AIM, ICQ or anyone else when it became  the first chat service to officially add Facebook Chat back in February 2009. But there’s nothing unique about Facebook integration anymore. With the additions we’ve seen early this year, it’s probably fair to say that Facebook is now integrated with most of the world’s major chat services and clients.

And at the rate that Facebook itself is growing, it may be used by the majority of the world’s internet-savvy people before long — excluding China, of course. The real news isn’t that any particular chat service has added Facebook. It’s that Facebook itself is in an enviable position: the social network has the potential to be the core messaging platform that other services revolve around. Not that such dominance has ever lasted long, for anyone.

While the Facebook Platform is in the middle of a larger set of product and policy changes originally announced last fall, the Facebook Platform team has announced three new additions to its official Platform Policy regarding photo tagging, extended permissions, and user prompts.

Overall, these new policies are designed to address some patterns of behavior Facebook is seeing in some applications that tend to spam the stream. Let’s take a look at each one:

1. Photo Tagging

Here’s the new policy: “You can tag a photo only with the express consent of the user on whose behalf you are doing the tagging, and must only tag images when the tag accurately labels what is depicted in the image.” (DPP V.13)

Facebook adds in their blog post today, “Photo tagging should be used to tag a photo of the real individual in a real photo, and must not be used in collages, with avatars, or for marketing or promotional purposes.”

In other words, the class of apps that specializes in viral growth via photo-tagging collages just got neutered. Facebook has determined that this kind of behavior is not congruent with what it wants the user experience to be with Platform applications. Instead, it seems to prefer to favor more utility-oriented applications that offer photo tagging as a feature, not as the primary viral mechanic.

2. Getting User Consent Even After Getting Extended Permissions

Here’s the new policy: “You must not publish a Feed story unless a user has explicitly indicated an intention to share that content, by clicking a button or checking a box that clearly explains their content will be shared.” (DPP VI.A.1)

The issue here is that Facebook has created a publish_stream extended permission that apps use to publish feed stories on the user’s behalf that is by its nature open to potential abuse by developers who publish feed stories without getting explicit permission from users.

As Facebook adds in their blog post, “As with all extended permissions, publish_stream can add value to the user experience when properly used, and should be used carefully. Although a user grants the technical permission, developers must continue to seek the user’s explicit consent when performing actions on his or her behalf. By doing so, your applications will be consistent with the intent of the product and will demonstrate a high regard for user trust.”

We’ve received multiple reports from developers complaining that some apps are growing by forcing users to accept extended permissions, then spamming their feed as a result, without Facebook doing anything about it. This announcement appears intended to be a signal that Facebook plans to crack down on that more.

3. Posting the Same Feed Story to One Friend’s Wall at a Time

Here’s the new policy: “You must not provide users with the option to publish the same Feed story to more than one friend’s Wall at a time.” (DPP VI.A.2)

Facebook adds, “When asking users to publish a Feed story, do not use a friend selector or other means to select more than one friend at a time… We’ve noticed that a number of applications aren’t using the permission in a way that is consistent with product intent, including publishing photos that auto-tag multiple friends without the user’s consent, and posting the same Feed story to multiple friends’ Walls, which spams the stream.”

This one is pretty straightforward. Some developers are asking users to post content to a bunch of friends’ walls, and not all users may even understand what they’re doing.

In all cases, Facebook enforces punishments (such as removing access to communication channels) and suspensions on a case by case basis. Usually, first time offenders get lighter punishment, but as the severity of the problem and/or scale of the app grows, Facebook’s Platform policy team imposes stiffer penalties, occasionally suspending or banning apps altogether.

The U.S. Census Bureau is launching a huge nationwide campaign incorporating social media, broadcast media and print to encourage people to fill out their census forms this year. In the U.S., a census to count the population is mandated by the Constitution every 10 years principally to apportion federal representatives, but also for funding purposes like money for schools, roads and other infrastructure.

We reported in January that the Census Bureau had decided to incorporate Facebook into its campaign in a big way, principally to reach out to minorities and young people; at the time the Page had 360 fans, today it has more than 20,000. Today the bureau added a My Community application to their Page, with the help of page management company Context Optional. It enables the user to learn facts about their community, as well as get an idea for who else is supporting the census where they live.

My Community is a tab on the Census Bureau Facebook Page where users enter their zip code in order to see a Google Map of their community, as well as an animated graph of their community’s census results over time, starting in the 1800s. The app also asks users to publish their use of the app to their Wall and invite their Facebook friends to use it as well.

The app is a good addition to the Census’ Page, which also features a 2010 Census tab with information about the paper census in dozens of languages, a Census Videos tab with 50 videos promoting the Census and a Photo tab that does the same.

The My Community app is an interesting way for the Census to create an interactive snapshot of the user’s community. It provides both a visual tool of the community’s growth with a line charting growth over time and interesting information about that community. Accompanying the graph are interesting tid bits about each region during a given decade, such as the county’s total population broken down by sex, the number farms in the county, the percentage of children in school and the median age.

Finally, My Community includes a leaderboard for regions of the country that have the most “Census supporters” who have supported the Census on Facebook. This is a gaming mechanic that might inspire citizens to compete for the top spot by getting friends to register, too.

The Census’ web site has all sorts of information about the U.S. population, and a million ways to break this information down — by wages, ethnicity, region, etc. My Community seems to be a step towards bringing that wealth of knowledge to its Facebook fans in a way that encourages them to fill out their census form and asks their friends to do the same. There are lots of possibilities here for the Census to bring their statistical data to Facebook, but this app seems to serve an immediate purpose: fulfill its role of counting the U.S. population.

LifeStreet has been quietly signing deals with Facebook applications developers over the last year and, from what we hear in the industry, it has become one of the larger banner advertising providers on the platform. Now, it is revealing a little more about itself and its plans for Facebook, and beyond.

To be clear, San Carlos, Calif.-based LifeStreet doesn’t run advertising offers like what you see within social games. It runs banner ads like what you see on most web sites, but within Facebook apps. In general, these sorts of ads are not well-targeted, and cost relatively low amounts based on the number of impressions (or CPM), although LifeStreet says its technology can improve targeting — and CPMs, as a result.

LifeStreet is also in the cost-per-install business. While most social game developers do not run banner ads, they do buy lots of Facebook ads. LifeStreet, like RockYou and 6 Waves, essentially provides an alternative ad channel for reaching users, possibly at lower prices than what a developer might pay on Facebook itself.

Overall, LifeStreet is also one of several online advertising companies that started elsewhere but made a big push on to Facebook in the last year or so; others include Adknowledge, and more recently, Traffic Marketplace. Adknowledge has been busy buying up advertising companies, although its focus seems to be offers lately, as shown by its big purchase of Super Rewards last summer. LifeStreet recently made a Facebook acquisition of its own — SocialCash’s ad network — in the latest sign of consolidation among banner ad providers on Facebook.

We recently sat down with its chief executive, Mitchell Weisman, to get some more details.

The company began life in 2005, trying to better optimize online performance advertising, using a variety of factors to try to serve the best ad in real time. These factors include the different stages of behavior users exhibit before they decide to click, which ad creatives they click on, what landing pages get the best responses, etc. It also shows how different types of ads perform over minutes, days, weeks and longer to help performance ad buyers decide what to run. Like many others in the industry, the company also collects user data, like cookies, to try to figure out which types of ads a given person is most interested in.

It decided to focus on Facebook early last year and introduced the latest version of its optimization technology to Facebook developers last spring. It quickly reached what Weisman describes as a $3 million to $4 million run-rate in gross revenue for the year; it started with a $1 million a month run-rate in June to a $40 million rate by the end of the year.

Overall, Weisman says the company is live on 8,000 web sites and Facebook applications in 50 countries, for a combined audience of more than 100 million monthly active users, mostly on Facebook.

What about advertising quality? Ads from third-party ad networks have appeared before, in advertising offers, and many of the ads have been deceptive or otherwise low-quality. In trying to write about the industry, one finds that almost no one has written in detail about it, even online.

The industry is tight-lipped by nature, partly because the complexity is hard to explain, and explaining can give away a business advantage. Some in the industry are also generally quiet because of controversial practices. Among many issues, some companies try to do things like stuff traffic counts in order to charge advertisers more, or show deceptive ads to users, or buy and sell sensitive and ill-gotten user data. Indeed, as the San Francisco Business Times notes in a recent article on the company, many LifeStreet executives were previously at a behavioral marketing firm, Claria Corp., that was sued for distributing adware on users’ computers without permission.

Facebook, however, has been trying to crack down on issues originating in the online advertising industry, increasingly policing third-party advertising content on the site. Although LifeStreet is pulling advertising from advertising exchanges around the web, Weisman explains it has a customer service team in place, that has pre-screened thousands of ads before its system runs them. He also says his company talks to Facebook regularly to make sure ads are acceptable.

LifeStreet appears to be in a solid market position on Facebook. While other competitors run banner ads, most are also focused on offers or other forms of monetization.

There are still risks, of course. One is that Facebook has been cracking down on the viral channels that many applications have used to reach users and maintain engagement, especially with the removal of third-party notifications earlier this month. Of course, as Weisman points out, most Facebook developers on the site today have repeatedly adapted to significant Facebook platform changes in the past, and will continue to do so.

The other question is where this leaves LifeStreet’s overall advertising business. One obvious place it could expand to is advertising in social applications on other platforms, although Weissman isn’t sharing more on that, at this point.

It has been working on its technology for the past 4 years, and now has a 40-person engineering team working to deliver better-optimized banner ads. Facebook’s platform is allowing the company to build out its technology, operations and revenue, but Weisman plans to eventually make a push against the biggest competitors online.

Rivals like Google AdSense and AOL’s Advertising.com — to name but two of dozens — provide performance ad networks that include optimization services. Weisman believes LifeStreet’s technology will allow the company to compete with, and win market share away from these competitors. However, given the lack of data on the company, analyzing this claim is difficult.

For the time being, LifeStreet’s newly-gained position on Facebook appears to give it a relatively large base for expansion where its optimization technology can help developers and publishers make more money.

Facebook added another blog post to its study of the Gross National Happiness Index (GNH) today, analyzing positive and negative words used in status updates in the English speaking countries of Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

In October we wrote about Facebook’s foray into measuring national happiness and in February we followed up with a note about Facebook’s measurements about the happiness levels of people in relationships.

Overall, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and Valentine’s Day were among the happiest across-the-board, as Facebook data intern Lisa Zhang writes. Weekend days, such as Friday, Saturday and Sunday, seem to the happiest days of the week for everybody, even as the deaths of popular celebrities like Health Ledger and Michael Jackson affected happiness levels in the countries studied.

Interestingly, negativity trends down over time for the nations studied, Zhang explained this by pointing to Facebook’s changing demographics (more older people) or the economic recovery.

Specifically, our neighbors to the north are apparently much happier the day before Canadian Thanksgiving than the actual day, perhaps Zhang writes because “everyone likes Sundays more than Mondays,” and Canadians seems to be slightly affected by U.S. holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.

People in the United Kingdom had the least variation in mood, according to the study, with the least number of peaks, Zhang writes, “likely due to the heterogeneity of U.K. bank holidays.”

Finally, Zhang said the most interesting outlier for Australia was February 13, 2008 when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized in Parliament to indigenous Australians; on that day the 4% of status updates in Australia contained the word “sorry.”

It’s an interesting proposition to determine the happiness level of a country based on something as small as a status update, to a large extent these types of analyzes from Facebook are self-selective in that countries with widespread Internet access are more likely to have a higher standard of living in the first place. No one will argue that there are loads of other factors that might play into a nation’s happiness level, nonetheless, the seeming alignment of the measurements around major holidays give credence to the idea that it’s possible.

Zhang also notes that the data was collected anonymously to protect user privacy. Other controls in the study: each nation is analyzed separately to control for population differences, cultural differences and language differences. But, this also means that it’s very hard to compare happiness levels between nations.

This week’s top Facebook app by gain in daily active users is Who is following you ?, a social graphing app that claims to show its users how often friends interact with their wall. Like all apps of its kind, its only way of measuring is by using the same public information every other app can see.

“Who is following”, as we’ll refer to it from here, has really popped up out of left field; it’s certainly not an app that we’d noticed before, despite its 10 million plus monthly active users. Could it be that “Who is following” is really a reincarnation of Fan Check by Smile, which appears to have been quietly banned by Facebook? (Update: It’s not; the company’s name is Inmaili.)

It’s difficult to tell exactly where the DAUs that are streaming into “Who is following” are coming from, either. A few days ago, it more than doubled the number of users visiting on a daily basis despite a much smaller rise in MAU. Its DAU as a percentage of MAU now stands at 18 percent, improbably high for this sort of app

One thing we do know is that “Who is following” tries hard to get its users to allow it to make wall postings, while simultaneously being careful to point out that it can’t actually count visitors to your Facebook page — Facebook often bans apps that claim to be able to do more, which may have been Fan Check’s downfall.

Feel free to comment below if you know more. In the meantime, here are all 20 top apps by DAU on our AppData list:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Who is following you ?	1,927,538	+1,267,291	+65.75
2.	Country Life	3,021,571	+443,866	+14.69
3.	Facebook for iPhone	15,166,472	+393,751	+2.60
4.	Social City	2,851,283	+375,781	+13.18
5.	Zoo World	2,523,588	+372,851	+14.77
6.	Café World	9,183,779	+286,873	+3.12
7.	Mafia Wars	6,823,340	+270,936	+3.97
8.	Bubble Island	832,712	+252,350	+30.30
9.	Poker Blitz	234,680	+234,642	+99.98
10.	PetVille	5,151,262	+211,919	+4.11
11.	Happy Aquarium	4,779,802	+165,151	+3.46
12.	iHeart	1,708,148	+147,190	+8.62
13.	Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones	9,097,125	+131,947	+1.45
14.	Tiki Resort	706,868	+116,583	+16.49
15.	Happy Pets	1,865,998	+103,881	+5.57
16.	Supermodel: The Game	201,742	+101,375	+50.25
17.	Animal Paradise	1,006,343	+98,890	+9.83
18.	Tarjetitas	120,921	+91,663	+75.80
19.	MindJolt Games	3,420,044	+90,876	+2.66
20.	Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos]	166,436	+83,989	+50.46

As you can see, games dominate the list, led by Country Life and Social City. We cover them over on our sister blog, Inside Social Games. The only other non-game app in the top ten is Facebook for iPhone, which along with Facebook for BlackBerry® smartphones has grown at a reliable, if slow pace for months.

The next non-game app to show up is iHeart by Mmkay, but that’s bad news disguised as good: the poking app, which once had over 25 million MAU, is slowly dying. It does seem to be holding onto its DAU better than the monthly users, though. Further down, Tarjetitas is in much the same (sinking) boat.

At the very bottom of the list we have Friends Emotions [Emociones de Amigos], a Spanish-language friend quiz. This app has grown steadily since its introduction a couple weeks back, and is now almost ready to cross a million MAU.

As Facebook makes its way into the inner workings of how governments interact with the public, we’re comparing how different governing entities — from small communities, big counties and entire states and countries — are using its tools. We’ve previously looked at other areas, like parks and libraries. This week, we compare how different governments large and small are using Facebook to get the word out about elections in the US.

Although national and state elections won’t be happening until this November, the topic is relevant today for a few reasons. One is that many local elections happen throughout the year, meaning local governments are busy trying out Facebook as a new place to encourage voting. They’re likely encouraged by seeing Facebook’s relevance in big 2008 campaigns, when both major US political parties, and especially President Barack Obama’s campaign, used the service to promote themselves.

Facebook has also grown by more than 200 million monthly active users in the last year or so, 60 million of whom are in the US. Today, more than 112 million people are using the site every month — that’s a third of the US population, and another reason Facebook is a venue that governments can’t ignore.

But before we start digging in, we should note that there are always a bunch of caveats when it comes to governments and the way they use the web. A variety of laws and established bureaucratic processes define which employees can interact with the public, and what information they can share. For example, one Page we saw posted a link to local election results, but didn’t state the actual results on the Page. Why not? There may be laws that require election results to be posted on public forums (such as a departmental web site) before they are shared anywhere else.

But, those concerns aside, the departments we saw did some pretty interesting things with their Facebook Pages, sharing information almost exclusively from their official web sites, but presenting it in a fun and interactive way. Walls were the primary depository for most of the information in the form of shared links such as press releases; many had open Walls where users could share their own posts. Notes were used frequently by about half of the Pages. Photos, when used, were pretty interesting and many used events to promote governmental activities.

All the Pages we saw included basic contact information, although one red flag was that several of the Pages have not been updated since the end of 2009, sort of defeating the purpose of using Facebook to update the public about elections (unless, of course, there have been no elections).

The Office of Alabama Secretary of State’s Facebook Page has 210 fans and shared the RSS feed of official press releases on the Wall in lieu of status updates. This turned the Page into an informative, albeit not very interesting, place.

Williamson County Elections Department’s Facebook Page has 69 fans and took a different approach to sharing information, providing good, useful information with status; the department also has a Twitter page. Some of the information provided via links shared on the Wall and status updates included the number of early voters, a notice of electronic voting equipment tests, the early voting schedule, and polling places, among other things.

Another good example of sharing useful information on Facebook was Delaware’s New Castle County Department of Elections with a Page counting 55 fans and announced several candidates who had filed for office on its Wall.

The Office of the Los Angeles City Clerk-Election Division had a Facebook Page with 160 fans that makes good use of the events function up until it stopped updating the Page in 2009. The Wall is filled with updates about elections voting information, like time and place, and how to apply for special voting privileges, like vote by e-mail. Another good feature of this Page is that the landing page for the account is a well-informed “about” section that lays out the department’s purpose.

The Ohio Secretary of State’s Page also lays out the department’s purposes on the Info tab in a lot of detail, much more than any other Pages we saw. Specific details about the office were provided via status updates. One directed fans to a full list of candidates, for example, while another shared the language of the May primary ballot and yet a different status update announced initiatives for women in Ohio; most of these linked to the department’s web site.

Florida’s Polk County Supervisor of Elections didn’t lay out its departmental purpose as explicitly as Ohio’s Secretary of State, but provided details with status updates about what the department does for the public. An update on March 19 was “Ever wondered how many registered voters there are in Polk County? Or how many live inside a city vs outside? You can find all sorts of interesting statistics on polkelections.com under facts and figures.” One on March 18 was “Have you moved recently? You probably remembered to change your drivers license and update your magazine subscriptions, but did you update your voter registration? Visit polkelections.com to find out how.”

The Page also made good use of events and shared some interesting photos of elections-related events.

What we saw is that elections departments are looking to Facebook as a way to disperse important, if not always exciting, information that affects their constituents in very tangible ways. Some of the departments that seemed to take more time and expend effort into creating interesting status updates, or post photo albums of elections events, ended up with Pages that piqued curiosity, whereas other Pages that simply used Facebook as a repository for election-related information didn’t manage to step from informative to interactive.

As more government entities begin to experiment with Facebook we’re likely to see new and different ways they find to make usually uninteresting bureaucratic information more relevant to people. If you’re in government and looking for more details on how you can use Pages to raise election awareness, be sure to check out our Facebook Marketing Bible.

Facebook is making new efforts to ensure that performance advertisers’ content accurately reflects what each ad is about. Facebook has ramped up its part-automated and part-human evaluation efforts to reject inaccurate ads over the last two weeks, according to ClickZ.

The issue is that some direct-response advertisers will use ad content that purports to be targeted, but without using Facebook’s specific targeting filters. An ad saying “37 and male in Los Angeles?” for example, is not being allowed if the ad does not actually target Facebook users who are 37 years old, male, and self-designated as being Los Angeles. Lead-generation campaigns for financial services and higher education are apparently seeing click-through drops as a result of this creative not being accepted. Some incentivized ads, like “Get A Free Laptop!”, are also not being allowed if the ad takes at least several pages to explain the details of how the offered item can actually be obtained.

While some marketers are complaining, Facebook’s enforcement is not surprising. Ads that are deceivingly targeted, or do not clearly deliver on their promises are not valuable to users. Facebook needs to make sure third-party ads are high-quality to, if nothing else, make sure users have a reason to pay attention to them. Many deceptive ads have run as offers or banners within third-party applications on Facebook’s platform over the years. To this end, Facebook has been refining its terms of service, and banning monetization companies and taking developers offline who don’t comply.

The evaluation systems described in the report appear to be new and Facebook hasn’t responded to our requests for comment. However, the terms they enforce appear to date back at least as far as January 4, 2010, when the company last updated its advertising guidelines. One clause, 5a, specifically prohibits “false, misleading, fraudulent, or deceptive.” advertising — which squarely nails deceptive incentive ads.

In terms of false targeting, though, the terms are not quite as clear. However, clause 7 — especially a. — seems close enough that no update to the terms is warranted. Here’s the full thing:

7. Targeting

a. Any targeting of ads based on a user attribute, such as age, gender, location, or interest, must be directly relevant to the offer, and cannot be done by a method inconsistent with privacy and data policies.
b. Ads with adult themes, including contraception, sex education, and health conditions must be targeted to individuals at least 18 years old.             Platform ads should do this via Demographic Restrictions, not by obtaining user data.
c. Ads for dating sites, services, or related content must follow these targeting criteria (does not apply to ads on Facebook Platform):

i. the Relationship Status targeting parameter must be utilized and set to Single;
ii. the Sex targeting parameter must be utilized and a single value of Male or Female must be selected;
iii. the Age targeting parameter must be utilized and the age range selected must start at least at 18 years old;
iv. the Interested In targeting parameter must be utilized and a single value of either Men or Women must be selected.

[via CNET]