Levi’s has begun to use some interesting event marketing on Facebook to promote sales on its web site, as well as its stores via its Facebook Page and profile advertisements.

As we’ve noted previously, Levi’s has been particularly active on Facebook, working with the company to premiere the social plugins on its web site and using the Facebook to promote its presence at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin earlier this year.

The profile advertisements ask users to RSVP to a sale, for example a recent ad read: “RSVP ‘Yes’ for 30% off at Levi’s Castro Store this Thursday (7/15) – Sunday (7/18) only! Plenty of street parking.” There’s also an option to Like the ad.

Visiting the event’s landing page reveals that thousands of people have responded to the ads, which apparently aim to convert Facebook fans into brick and mortar customers. The page includes obvious information — such as time, location and sale information — but also a Wall, a list of people attending (with thumbnails) and maps with store locations. On the Wall Facebook users discuss their favorite products, give thanks for the sale or just generally enthuse about the promotion.

Levi’s is also advertising Internet-only sales on its Facebook Page. Links provided on status updates and Wall posts take users to the company’s web site, which also implements Facebook social plugins.

So, conceivably, it’s possible to participate in the entire cycle of Levi’s Facebook marketing by responding to the event advertisement, which appears in the activity feed, then responding to a status update or Wall post and Liking something on the web site, which also appears in the news feed.

What’s not included in this campaign is a location-based service tied to advertising, like what you services like Foursquare providing — some sort of way for users to “check in” to Levi’s using a mobile device and share that information back with friends. Perhaps we’ll see something like that, soon? Facebook is already working with McDonald’s on something similar as part of its forthcoming location-based service.

[Update: Per questions, below, we asked Facebook how this fits in with its Promotions Guidelines managing “sweepstakes, contest, competition or other similar offerings.” Facebook tells us that “since this is a coupon and not a promotion, it doesn’t fall under our Promotions Guidelines at this time.”

For the first time in many months, a quiz application has risen to join Facebook’s top three applications overall, at least when measured by monthly active users. Create your Quiz tops this week’s list of fastest-gaining Facebook apps by MAU with over 5.5 million new users.

You can see on the AppData list below just how much Create Your Quiz leads by:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Create your Quiz	22,343,840	+5,557,725	+33.11
2.	Element Analyst Creator	2,711,832	+2,150,378	+383.00
3.	FrontierVille	20,735,154	+2,046,053	+10.95
4.	Frases Diarias	10,672,497	+1,152,640	+12.11
5.	Entrevista tus Amigos	13,511,949	+701,053	+5.47
6.	Millionaire City	3,933,586	+697,906	+21.57
7.	Phrases	20,729,515	+533,169	+2.64
8.	SuperFun Town!	1,428,240	+503,303	+54.41
9.	Chase Community Giving	2,134,606	+489,738	+29.77
10.	EA SPORTS FIFA Superstars	4,892,926	+464,796	+10.50
11.	Verdonia	3,584,918	+395,363	+12.40
12.	建立你的測驗	707,867	+356,098	+101.23
13.	Appbank	2,628,629	+339,450	+14.83
14.	Kingdoms of Camelot	3,030,739	+315,516	+11.62
15.	Baking Life	3,486,467	+309,847	+9.75
16.	QuizBone	1,428,936	+308,454	+27.53
17.	vChatter	1,276,079	+300,898	+30.86
18.	mypatente	294,679	+294,652	+1,091,303.70
19.	Windows Live Messenger	2,866,424	+285,899	+11.08
20.	Make Your Jersey	2,170,657	+283,201	+15.00

Since Facebook made changes in mid-June that began counting “child” apps toward their parents — i.e. apps like Create Your Quiz, which allows users to make their own simple quiz applications — we’ve been able to see just how large some apps in this category are. Just the top three in the category, which includes Quiz Planet! and Quiz Monster, claim over 50 million MAU combined now.

But even after that June change, Create Your Quiz was still tiny, with fewer than two million MAU. It has been the following month that has seen it balloon to its current size.

The developer, Pencake Limited, appears to be tapping into an international audience with both Create Your Quiz and Element Analyst Creator, which just happens to be the number two gainer this week, offering quizzes in over 30 languages — a winning strategy eased by the fact that the quizzes are user-created.

However, the app’s user comments are littered with complaints about wall spam from users. This recalls earlier large quiz apps, which pushed their viral components hard and quickly added millions of users, but were later banned by Facebook. Whether this will be the case with Create Your Quiz remains to be seen; anecdotally, Facebook seems to be more lax about its enforcement of apps that don’t focus on English-language users.

We’ll leave the rest of the list to stand for itself, but not before pointing out that two other fast-gaining apps use the same child-app mechanic as Create Your Quiz and Element Analyst: Phrases, which creates quote-generating apps, and QuizBone.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games – tracking all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, July 12th, 2010

• Millionaire City Leads the City Builders on This Week’s List of Fastest-Gaining Facebook Games by MAU
• Zynga Has a New Investor and Social Gaming Platform Provider: Google
• The World Cup on Facebook: Among Many Competitors, Quality Social Games Win the Users
• Offerpal Responds to Facebook Credits With Employee Layoffs
• Fowlplay HD Brings Pigeon-Bombing to the iPad

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

• More Massively Multiplayer Games Considered Free to Play Model
• MyTown Creator Booyah Talks About Its Hit Facebook Game, Nightclub City
• Hi5 Raises $14 Million Round, Continues with Social Gaming Virtual Goods Plans
• iPhone & iPad App, Modern Conflict, Raises Mobile Strategy Gaming to New Standards
• RockYou: The Latests Big Developer Planning to Use Facebook Credits Exclusively

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

• Steady Gainers Keep Rolling on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Games by DAU
• Office Wars Gives Corporate Peons Some Much-Needed Comic Relief
• Preview: 3G Studios Bringing First-Person Shooter, Brave Arms to Facebook
• Sony Ericsson Lands in the Gutter With Emusicon Pinball on Facebook

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

• Go Beyond Missile Command on the iPhone & iPad with Paratroopers: Air Assault HD
• New Hires in Social Gaming: CrowdStar, Mindjolt, Zynga, & More
• Social Games Really Are Social – A Majority Play With Friends
• Indian Game Portal Zapak.com Launches on Facebook

Friday, July 16th, 2010

• Lounge and Office Top This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Games
• How to Localize Games: An Interview With Hong Kong Publisher 6waves
• Dumping Twitter Friends with iPhone App Chump Dump
• Social Gaming Roundup: Playdom, FarmVille, Joystick, & More

Over the past few months, Facebook has been testing more ways of “seeding” users with Credits, its universal virtual currency, to spend on virtual goods inside social games on Facebook. Just last month, it started testing a Credits giveaway promoting CrowdStar’s Hello City. Now, Facebook is testing more generic Credits giveaways inside social games running on the Facebook Platform.

Over the last couple of days, users have reported seeing the following notice above many Facebook games. Facebook is testing a variety of Credits seeding amounts – we’ve seen from 10 to as many as 25 for some users. (We’ve even seen some users complaining that their friends got more Credits than they did in this giveaway.)

Facebook’s goal with the Credits giveaway is to accelerate the adoption of Credits as a common virtual currency across apps and games. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told us a few weeks ago, “It makes sense that there should be one currency. If I go play a CrowdStar game right now and get Credits there, I can’t go use those Credits in a Zynga game, so that kind of sucks. One of the biggest inefficiencies in buying virtual goods is all the friction of having to take your credit card out, so having one store of [virtual currency] that you can use everywhere is both good for users and good for all the apps.”

We expect Facebook to continue doing promotions like these over the rest of the year to build up the number of Credits in circulation. For more background on the Credits rollout process, see our recent in-depth story here.

To dig deeper into the social gaming market, check out our in-depth market research report: Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010.

Facebook Faces Another Ownership Lawsuit – Facebook came under a temporary asset restraining order this week after yet another person claimed to have had a stake in the company. Paul D. Ceglia filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of Allegany County in New York alleging that he owns 84% of Facebook per a 2003 contract he signed with Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook has requested the case be moved to federal court.

Ceglia claims he and Zuckerberg signed a contract stipulating that Zuckerberg would design a web site for a $1,000 fee and Ceglia would retain a 50% stake, with an additional 1% stake every business day until Jan. 1, 2004 until the site was completed. The site was to offer Harvard University students access to a live functioning yearbook called The Face Book.

New Facebook Publisher Revealed – A screen shot of the new Facebook publisher was seen on Twitpic this week. It looks like the new publisher is more simplified, including status updates, links and photos, but not videos.

Facebook Set to Announce 500M Users – TechCrunch reported this week that Facebook is set to announce the 500 million user mark with an interesting gimmick. Apparently, Facebook employees have been asked to upload photos of themselves thanking users; these photos were being hosted on a Drop.io account.

Facebook and White Flight – Danah Boyd has released another piece of scholarship on the racial composition of Facebook this week. The book chapter, “White Flight in Networked Publics — How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook” details this topic and comes from her yet-to-be-published book “Digital Race Anthology.”

Previously Boyd noted that teenagers’ preference for MySpace or Facebook seemed to fall along racial lines, with more affluent white and Asian teens preferring Facebook and working class blacks and Latinos preferring MySpace. This latest chapter notes that MySpace has become a “digital ghetto” to many teens causing “white [and asian] flight” to Facebook.

One caveat is that the two companies don’t normally release racial demographic data about their user bases, although in late 2009 Facebook released some states showing that its US user base reflects the general population. Boyd’s statistical support for her thesis is derived from third parties.

For more see the story or the book chapter.

SocialSenseFB Filters Facebook for Brands – Networked Insights introduced its new Facebook Page application this week, SocialSenseFB. The app analyzes a brand’s Facebook fans, what their conversations consist of, how those conversations are impacting the brand and any issues to be addressed.

Involver Launches Tracking Tool – Involver launched a new program this week, AMP (audience management platform), aimed at helping brands track the ways their fan base grows, partially with frequently updated analytics. AMP consists of a dashboard where brand managers can see Twitter and Facebook followers, schedule content and track interaction. Pricing is tied to the number of Pages or fans to be managed.

DeHood Launches Facebook Integration – Location-based service focusing on hyper-local communities DeHood launched a Facebook integration this week at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference. The company also has an iPhone service and iPad app. On Facebook DeHood allows users to invite friends to their DeHood community, find friends already in those communities and post their DeHood-related activities on their Walls.

Govts Get Creative with Facebook – A few foreign governments did some interesting things with Facebook recently. In Ireland, input from Facebook users was taken into account over budget cuts, according to the Department of Finance there. And in the Philippines the government is using Facebook and Twitter to boost revenue by searching from tax evaders online.

Controversial Indian App ‘Whitens’ Skin – Vaseline has introduced a curious Facebook application in India that has caused quite a stir. The App is for a skin lightening cream for men and on Facebook takes a users’ photo divides the face into darker and fairer halves on Facebook to illustrate product effectiveness. Skin lightening products are popular in India and Vaseline’s parent company, Unilever, responded by saying the app was “created for the Indian market as a culturally relevant and engaging way for Indian men to interact with this product.” According to Inside Facebook Gold, India currently has 10.5 million users.

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

In past months, we’ve looked at app demographics for the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively the first and second largest countries in the Facebook ecosystem. This month we’re turning to a smaller English-language market: Canada.

Canada is an important English-language market for Facebook. With 15.5 million monthly active users on the social network, the country has an extremely high penetration of 46.3 percent of the population. That makes it the seventh-largest market overall for Facebook, although its actual importance is slightly greater, as Canadian users tend to engage and monetize at high rates similar to those in the US.

When it comes to games, Canada’s demographics are similar, but subtly different from from the US and UK.  These differences can help both advertisers and developers tweak their offerings for the country’s user. Below, we work through two data points for the country, age and gender.

While it’s well known that most Facebook games attract a larger female audience, in Canada the disparities can be even sharper then usual:

Note especially the first and last games on the graph, Bejeweled Blitz and FarmVille. In the US, we found that over 40 percent of FarmVille’s players were men, significantly more than in Canada. And in our UK stats, we saw that Bejeweled Blitz’s players are 29 percent men; for Canada that low number drops even further, to just 22 percent.

Across all 13 games that we found stats for, Canadian men made up just 37.5 percent of the playerbase, lower than either the US or UK:

However, the lower number of men is not consistent across all games. In Restaurant City, Mindjolt Games and Happy Aquarium, slightly more Canadian men were playing than in the other two English-language markets.

The differences suggest that, rather than any significant cultural variation between the three countries, social graph effects may actually be at work — games may tend to get more men or women simply because users of one or the other sex show up first and begin inviting their same-sex friends to play.

Here’s a look at the age breakdowns for three games:

Bejeweled Blitz stood out to us last month for its older, heavily female audience. As we point out above, the Popcap game is even more female-dominated in Canada than the UK. This graph also shows us that Bejeweled has an older average age, with some 26.5 percent of users clocking in at 46 or older, versus the UK’s 18.1 percent.

Standing out in the other direction we have Happy Pets, a CrowdStar pet-raising game. A large majority of Happy Pet’s players are under 25 — a particularly valuable group, since teens may be more likely to bring their disposable income to their favorite games over other forms of entertainment. This particular game also gives a good example of how a marketer could use social games to home in on an age group audience with a clearly expressed interest — in this case, cute animals — that could aid in product targeting efforts.

Full data on Facebook’s audience growth throughout Europe and in countries around the world is presented in the July 2010 edition of the Facebook Global Monitor report, available through Inside Facebook Gold.

An Inside Facebook Gold membership also includes data on language growth, audience demographics by country, and user behavior stats for the Facebook business ecosystem. To learn more about membership, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.

Facebook has just released a design change that makes the Events page layout more similar to profile pages and public Pages. The in-house app appears to otherwise function the same as before, so here’s a quick look at the changes.

All information about users who were invited to the event now appears on the left-hand side, having been previously been located above the page’s wall. The right-hand radio button RSVP options now appear as regular buttons, at the top right of the page. Details about your current RSVP status, as well as the Event administrator who invited you, are now also at the top of the page. The Wall itself now includes the regular Publisher tool, like what you see elsewhere. Sponsored ads now fill most of the right-hand side.

By making the page more like other profile-type pages, Facebook is further standardizing how its 500 million or so users navigate the site, thereby reducing confusion and potentially increasing engagement. The change appears to be live for all users now.

RestEngine, a social application messaging platform and email service provider, has emerged from private beta after five months of refining the product while working with developers including Crowdstar (Hello City) and Lolapps (Band Of Heroes).

The company helps publishers programatically create highly personalized emails based on a recipient’s in-game status, perform A/B email testing, navigate content transformation by social network proxy email systems, and track results through their own API. These featues are designed to aid user growth and retention even as Facebook has tuned-down a variety of communication channels in recent months.

By sending emails that note a user’s score, energy level, friends also playing, or next in-game task, RestEngine’s clients enjoy high click-through rates and increased user engagement. The company has also compiled some of the tactics it has learned into a “Email For Social Application Best Practices” deck that is now available for downloaded in exchange for an email address.

Early this year, Facebook removed notifications as an application communication medium because aggressive use had been degrading the overall Facebook user experience. They were replaced with an email API, allowing applications to ask for or require a user’s email address. Predicting this new channel would be essential to social application publishers, Josh Aberant and Joe Waltman bootstrapped RestEngine to help publishers prepare emails before being sent to a message transfer agent for delivery.

With developers in mind, RestEngine built the RESTful API, which allows programmatic integration with their system without a graphic web interface. The 3.5 employee company have signed 7 clients, and have since become profitable, coordinating transmission of roughly 100 million personalized emails a month at cost-per-thousand messages sent rates similar to most email service providers. Rates vary based on complexity and volume, but all clients get full access to all functions of the API.

To use RestEngine, clients send an HTTP request to the RESTful API with parameters for personalization and targeting. RestEngine then constructs and queues the unique messages. Some recipients will receive their mail through a social network proxy address, which Facebook offers so users are not required to provide applications with their actual email address. However, Facebook transforms emails sent to these addresses, including adding a special footer, which sometimes breaks the formatting. One of RestEngine’s best features is that it pre-transforms emails sent to proxy addresses, thereby minimizing Facebook’s changes and increasing the likelihood that delivered emails look as intended. The prepared messages are then passed to Message Systems, the message transfer agent which powers RestEngine.

Clients use RestEngine to run re-activation, merchandising, cross-promotion and viral acquisition campaigns. For instance, Lolapps’ Band of Heroes uses RestEngine to send users individualized emails notifying them when their energy has replenished and they can play more. Crowdstar’s Hello City offered 5 free credits to its email subscribers and encouraged recipients to pass the deal on to friends. RestEngine seeks to revamp email and replace the news feed as a viral channel through these kinds of messages.

Learning the needs of developers, the company has created some powerful tools which differentiate it from other email service providers. RestEngine’s enhanced API calls go beyond that of Facebook’s basic mail API, allowing bundling of 10,000 calls instead of the standard 100. Its split-testing system assigns unique codes to each unique email allowing clients to track the success of different variables such as text or images. The RESTful API also pushes back reporting data which can be integrated into a publisher’s existing analytics system, though RestEngine’s programmatic interface lacks any native analytics. RestEngine sees tapping into a user’s social graph to create compelling messages as the new frontier. Their mails can integrate Facebook’s data to display photos of friends, ask a user to try an in-game task which their friends have completed, or prompt a user to join their friends in an ongoing collective task.

RestEngine says that its service is not just for game developers, but “any company who feels limited by existing Facebook communication channels”. The company is working with other social app publishers including quizz makers and is  talking to off-platform developers. In the meantime, they are open for business, and are sharing social email tips including where to place calls to action and how to facilitate email virality in their free best practices deck.

Following up on a couple cryptic clips, Columbia Pictures yesterday released a full-length trailer for “The Social Network,” the unauthorized movie about Facebook’s early years.

The new trailer also has lots of dramatic words and images, like the clips, mostly of people using Facebook, but it includes scenes from across the span of the movie. Set over a slow choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” the movie footage shows actor Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg, starting with his time as a student Harvard and ending with what promises to be a dramatic finale at Facebook’s former headquarters in downtown Palo Alto. The overall mood is surprisingly dark, as many are noting, considering that the story is about the web software business.

The Los Angeles Times points out that “The Social Network,” directed by David Fincher (“Se7en,” “Fight Club,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) and written by Aaron Sorkin (“A Few Good Men” and “The West Wing”), is actually a lot more than a movie. Although the movie is based on “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich and premieres in October, the film will likely be used as ammunition in a vigorous public debate about online privacy.

“The Social Network” will probably serve as a stimulus to discuss the hot-button issue. This is evident in the way the film’s being treated on the movie circuit, as The New York Film Festival will feature the film as its opening night movie.

This was a particularly active week, in terms of fast-growing foreign-language apps: two each of Chinese- and Arabic-language apps are features, along with three in Spanish and one in French. The two in Chinese lead our list of emerging Facebook apps, measured as those still under a million monthly active users.

Here’s the AppData top 20 list:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain, %
1.	建立你的測驗	707,867	+542,418	+327.85
2.	開心 Lounge Bar	833,258	+479,018	+135.22
3.	Death Time Calculator	849,761	+385,233	+82.93
4.	Office Wars	517,611	+342,552	+195.68
5.	Casino City	904,293	+283,677	+45.71
6.	Toilet Paper Roll	276,716	+272,146	+5,955.05
7.	Fanglies	268,063	+267,804	+103,399.23
8.	Horse Saga (renamed)	719,454	+242,497	+50.84
9.	OndaPix	621,215	+239,636	+62.80
10.	Birdland	858,038	+193,301	+29.08
11.	Tu foto con la bandera de España!	163,438	+157,915	+2,859.23
12.	Click Challenge	312,286	+156,935	+101.02
13.	Maya Pyramid	532,893	+143,304	+36.78
14.	اعرف مزاجك اليوم	659,915	+140,689	+27.10
15.	الصندوق السحرى	312,856	+127,137	+68.46
16.	Quel est votre talent?	329,639	+126,091	+61.95
17.	Quién es mi mejor amigo	228,194	+122,999	+116.92
18.	Nike Future	295,231	+116,564	+65.24
19.	My Vineyard	873,665	+110,811	+14.53
20.	Kungfu Online	200,472	+99,803	+99.14

建立你的測驗, the first app, bills itself as a psychological test app. That’s probably a bit of a self-overestimation, as it actually appears to just be a quiz creator, something we’ve seen plenty of elsewhere — though there’s no arguing with their growth potential. It’s followed by 開心 Lounge Bar, a Chinese-language game that we talk about a bit more, along with the rest of its category, over on Inside Social Games.

Death Time Calculator popped up for the first time last week; as the name succinctly implies, it offers a quick and random guess at your time and cause of death. The app is likely flirting with danger by automatically posting to user’s walls without specifically asking in a popup, though.

The next non-game app is Toilet Paper Roll — although it is a bit game-like. Like the “keyboard mash” apps we saw popping up a few weeks back, this app centers around frantic repetitive activity, in this case trying to unroll as much of a virtual roll of toilet paper as possible in 10 seconds. Click Challenge does more or less the same thing, without the TP.

OndaPix and Tu foto con la bandera de España! are both in Spanish and have to do with photos; the former is a simple photo editor, while the latter is even simpler, just sticking your face on a Spanish flag.