ESPN Adds Recommended Plugin – ESPN added the Recommended plugin to its homepage this week, showing the stories that a user’s friends might have recommended from the site. The news was shared on Facebook’s Sports Page.

Yahoo’s Fantasy Football on Facebook - Yahoo is set to weave Facebook integrations into its fantasy football leagues after a recent acquisition of Citizen Sports. The idea is to push the leagues to Facebook using the Like button, CNET reported.

PlacePunch Launches – The location marketing platform PlacePunch for brands launched this week, aiming to help businesses funnel check-ins via Places, Twitter and Fourssquare. The idea is to help these businesses reinforce brand loyalty by awarding check-ins special deals.

Facebook Beats Google in US Minutes – ComScore reported this week that Facebook absorbed the most minutes of U.S. users of any web site. With 41.1 billion minutes Facebook beat Google, with 39.8 billion, and Yahoo, with 37.7 billion.

Facebook Most Popular Mobile App – Facebook is the most popular mobile phone app across models, according to Nielsen. This includes Android, Blackberry, iPhones and Windows phones.

Interactive Music on Facebook with MXP4 – Artists and labels may now create new ways to interact with fans on Facebook with MXP4’s apps. The company’s apps are set to allow musicians to use an interface similar to that of a video game, according to TechCrunch, to take their favorite songs and create remixes or sing karaoke. MXP4 claims that the average user spends 9.1 minutes using the app per session and click through rates to purchases exceed 3%.

NYC Emergency Facebook App – New York City’s Office of Emergency Management recently launched an app developed by Stuzo to help New Yorkers prepare for an emergency like September 11. The app includes an interactive map of emergency meeting places that people can use to coordinate a in case of an emergency.

AT&T Gets Earful from iPhone Users on Facebook – AT&T sent out an email to customers this week to announce a $18-19 billion dollar investment in the company’s network infrastructure and was bombarded with negative comments on Facebook. The irony pointed out by TechCrunch was that, in order to leave a complaint, Facebook users had to Like AT&T’s Page first.

Swedish Broadcasters Can’t Promote Facebook – Swedish public broadcasters are no longer allowed to encourage their consumers to visit Pages on Facebook. The Swedish Broadcasting Commission found that this would encourage commercial interests and inappropriately promotes a product or service. Broadcasters can mention a service, but not encourage people to use it.

Facebook Files CAPTCHA Patent – Facebook filed a patent for its social CAPTCHA system this week. CAPTCHA is set to prevent spam, scams and bots from exploiting Facebook users’ social graphs by asking questions that only a human could answer, such as correctly naming someone from their photo.

PlacePop Updates Places App – PlacePop, an iPhone app allowing for the monitoring of Places activity, updated their app this week. Now the app allows the inclusion of descriptions from check-ins, something we said was absent in the original app last week.

Facebook’s advertising auction system is getting an update on the side supply side today, as the company says it is now planning to remove what it calls “short impressions” from being counted in campaigns. Now, if an ad appears on a page that a user clicks past in an instant, then Facebook won’t count it — although Facebook isn’t saying exactly how it classifies an impression as too short versus valuable enough to count.

According to the blog post today:

To improve the value our advertisers receive from our ads, we are increasing the minimum quality of an ad impression required for us to count it.  As a result, the average quality of the impressions we do count will increase overall and many advertisers will see a higher click-through-rate (CTR).

While this won’t affect CPC prices, it should mean an increase in overall CPMs due to the removal of low quality impressions.

For reference, the company’s FAQ on the topic has a bit more. Question: “What is considered a short impression?” Answer: “A short impression applies to ads that are served on pages that are quickly viewed or reloaded. We will not count short impressions in your reports.” Question: “How will my reports reflect short impressions?” Answer: “Your Ads Manager will automatically remove short impressions from your reports.”

Although Facebook’s big new office in India is now open, it’s also been quietly expanding its headcount in another part of Asia — the bustling city-state of Singapore. Following local reports about the plans, earlier this year, Facebook has added the office to its Careers Page location listings, and currently has a number of openings that suggest further expansion.

Unlike India, which is in the process of hiring hundreds of people for operational roles, the Singapore office looks to stay relatively small, and serve as more of a regional satellite. Here’s Facebook’s description of it: “Nestled in the heart of Southeast Asia, our Singapore office is where we help support the region’s growing users base, advertisers, and developers.” While most of the openings are contract positions, the fact that Facebook is doing local recruiting points to further local hiring. Here they are:

• Account Executive (Singapore)
• Associate, Ad Operations (Singapore)
• Growth Manager – Contract (Singapore)
• Recruiter – Contract (Singapore)
• Recruiting Coordinator – Contract (Singapore)

Led by Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong and more recently India and South Korea, the greater Asia region has some 117 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to our Global Monitor report. Most of the growth began in 2009, fueled by the popularity of social games and new Facebook mobile features. Regional marketers are now looking for better ways to reach all these new Facebook users. To help them, Facebook has already partnered with Singapore-based ihub Media Group, an internet marketing company, to help out with regional sales; that company also began using Facebook’s Ad API earlier this year, allowing it to sell large volumes of Facebook ad inventory to local advertisers.

As the regional economy continues to expand, look for Facebook to continue building out its presence.

Facebook’s performance advertising system provides a powerful way for advertisers to target users, but it lacks the control and analytics to efficiently utilize its targeting parameters on a large scale. To allow companies to build better tools for designing and managing ads, Facebook released an Ads API last fall.

We’ve recently been profiling companies building tools for advertisers using this API, and here’s our latest in-depth review, of a Facebook ad tool being offered by established web analytics and advertising optimization company Omniture.

While competitors currently offer more specialized tools for some campaigns, ad buyers looking to target, purchase, monitor, and optimize ads on Facebook in the context of their other online marketing efforts stand to benefit from its full-featured Online Marketing Suite.

The suite is a browser-based tool set including three core products which can assist Facebook marketers: Discover for audience segmentation, the flagship SearchCenter+ for ad campaign management, and SiteCatalyst for measurement and optimization. By using these tools together, marketers can determine who to target, efficiently create and purchase ads, optimize spend for maximum returns, and balance their marketing channels. Though the tools don’t always integrate seamlessly, the knowledge gained from Discover and SiteCatalyst allow for adept use of SearchCenter+.

Company Profile: Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit

Orem, Utah headquartered Omniture was founded in 1996 as an independent web analytics company offering web measurement tools. Its success led Omniture to acquire several companies including behavioral targeting specialist Touch Clarity, and be listed in the NASDAQ in 2006. In 2009, creativity software maker Adobe Systems acquired Omniture in a deal valued at $1.8 billion in stock to expand their business software portfolio.
Omniture’s 1,200 employees worldwide, minus 9% cut for administrative redundancy, helped bring Adobe to its current size of 8,355 employees.

Omniture’s clients come from industries including retail, travel, media, financial services, and high-tech and pay a percentage of ad spend to license Omniture’s software-as-a-service. Clients use the software to measure 1 trillion interactions per quarter across channels. By integrating the Facebook Ads API into its system, Omniture’s clients can optimize their social media campaigns and search marketing simultaneously. Online Marketing Suite can help measure not only Facebook ads, but also Pages, applications, and Open Graph-enabled sites.

Online Marketing Suite Product Information

Discover, SearchCenter+, and SiteCatalyst form a creation and feedback loop. By tracking campaigns, learning what works best, then bringing that knowledge back to the audience segmentation and ad creation process, clients continually improve their marketing.

The Online Marketing Suite dashboard shows charts and graphs for each demographic characteristic of a company’s Facebook user base. Clicking a graph such as one showing the user friend counts brings up a full report over which additional metrics can be laid to determine correlations between different characteristics and hone in on targets.

Discover offers more advanced audience segmentation. Clients can see how Facebook demographic characteristics and other variables like how often a user visits the site affect metrics including page views, time spent on site, revenue, and many more. Segmenting by multiple attributes in sequence leads to data about a very specific audience, such as  non-married Facebook users with 200-300 friends from Illinois who like running.

SearchCenter+ show clients their Facebook spend and performance in the context of their other paid search campaigns. This helps clients allocate their spend to whichever channel produces the highest returns. Clicking through to a channel brings up the ads manager, where bids, creative, and targeting can be edited. Unfortunately, targets pinpointed in Discover can be used to instantly populate an ad’s targeting parameters in SearchCenter+. Bids can be linked to analytics for dynamic optimization in response to fluctuations in traffic and conversion rate. If an ad’s CTR is slipping, its budget will be automatically reallocated to more successful ads or turned off.

Ads display a preview of how they look when hovered over, and can be grouped from across channels to collectively track sets of related ads. SearchCenter+ doesn’t have as strong of a native interface for creating ad variants as Alchemy, or simultaneously editing multiple ads as Marin Software, but it does support editing in Excel and uploading the altered ads in bulk.

Once ads are running, clients can use SiteCatalyst to view the traffic and return on investment generated by their ads, as well as their Open Graph sites, Pages, and apps.This helps clients understand where to shift their spend and traffic between their Facebook campaigns to maximize returns.

By adding some javascript to their site, clients can see how users who login through Facebook Connect stack up against those not logged in on a variety of metrics. If only small percentage of users are logging in through Connect but they have a high lifetime value, increasing the prominence of of the Connect login button could help increase returns.

Overall, the Online Marketing Suite isn’t the best tool available for some specific needs, but its breadth of functionality makes it a complete solution for Facebook marketing. Clients looking to add Facebook to their marketing mix can benefit from the cross channel context, and the ability to track not only ads but Pages, apps, and Open Graph sites. However, those specifically concentrating on Facebook may find better ad creation and editing tools elsewhere. The Online Marketing Suite’s Facebook Ads API tool is adequate, and clients already using the suite will find the Facebook integration convenient.

Getting Serious About Facebook Marketing

Adobe believes that social media is the fastest growing category of marketing spend, with Compete.com estimating spend will be over $3 billion a year by 2014. As social media is recognized as an essential component of marketing campaigns, tools which look at Facebook marketing in a vacuum won’t be sufficient. Product Manager Jeff Jordan tells us that “a year ago, every executive came in and said ‘We need to a get a Page, get Facebook Connect up.’ Now its not enough to just be on there. They want to know, ‘What’s the return? Are we wasting money and time? Or is it working?’”

Adobe’s clout in the advertising industry led to special access to Facebook’s team and the Ads API. Matt Langie, Director Product Marketing explains “Facebook came to Omniture saying about the Ads API, ‘You guys have the money and the advertisers. We’re in our infancy, give us direction.’ We’ve given them feedback on exactly how we’d like to interact with Facebook — such as having the ability to target things that are in the data but not in ads manager, and dayparting.” Fellow Product Marketing Director Tim Waddell adds that the Omniture Business Unit’s size also gives it an advantage over other marketing tool providers, “Our company has a healthy ecosystem of partners that allows our customers to have Adobe solutions pre-built into partner applications that they rely on heavily, such as email.”

In the future, Adobe wants Facebook to include a better way to track downstream conversions initiated by Facebook ads. It also requests a similar Likes and interests generator, like that used in search marketing, which would help advertisers broaden their targeting while remaining accurate by taking an interest and suggesting additional related terms to target.

Adobe’s vast resources and software portfolio ensure that as Facebook marketing becomes more established, Omniture Business Unit’s clients will have tools to handle every step of the process.

As Facebook wants Credits to be the universal currency in social games on its platform, more and more charitable organizations are also looking to use the currency to raise real money for their causes. The latest is Stand Up To Cancer, a star-studded cancer-fighting television fundraiser special, led by the Entertainment Industry Foundation, “Hollywood’s leading charity.”

Stand Up To Cancer, which says it has helped donate more than $100 million to cancer research since its founding in 2008, is airing as a one-hour special tonight across major networks, and will feature the work of groups it has supported, other anti-cancer medical developments, and dozens of celebrities.

Its Facebook Page, which currently has 318,000 Likes, is primed for the attention, with the landing tab showing off a stat about cancer risk, and obvious ways for users to donate using Facebook Credits. For users who make a donation, it appears that Facebook will give them a small amount of free Credits, too.

Of course, Facebook is waiving its 30% cut on Credits purchases, and passing along all of the donation to the organization. However, if you are donating Credits that you previously received for free through another promotion, they won’t count (see our previous coverage of free Credits terms for more on that). The blurb, from the site:

Facebook Credits are the safe and easy way to make payments on Facebook. You can buy Facebook Credits using PayPal, your credit card, or mobile phone. Please keep in mind if your donation includes Facebook Credits that you received for free, the value of your donation will be reduced by those free credits. Also, your donation may not be tax deductible, so please consult a tax professional. For this event, Facebook is waiving its processing fees and 100% of your donations go to Stand Up To Cancer.

This marks the second implementation of Credits for charity. The first was Nothing But Nets, an anti-malaria fundraising organization led by the United Nations — although it has done other virtual goods charitable drives before.

As Credits becomes a more prominent part of the Facebook ecosystem, we expect more charities will look to use it for fundraising. And as Facebook continues to promote Credits, these nonprofit tie-ins help show users that Credits isn’t just for social games, but for making other payments on Facebook as well.

Although we haven’t seen many Malay-language apps on Facebook before, there are two near the top of this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps (defined as those still under a million monthly active users). They help to show that the substantial Malaysian usergroup on Facebook does in fact want apps in their own language — as we’ve noted before, Malaysians and many other speakers of other languages around the world often end up using English-language apps.

The Malay apps are at numbers one and four:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Kad Raya	479,909	+396,983	+479%
2.	Critter Island	323,066	+290,473	+891%
3.	FantaBook	265,292	+214,312	+420%
4.	Kad Ucapan dan Lagu Raya	212,043	+211,103	+22,458%
5.	CBSSports.com Franchise Football	217,328	+209,211	+2,577%
6.	小小戰爭	196,312	+196,004	+63,638%
7.	Ikariam – The free browser game	319,612	+193,153	+153%
8.	All My Quotes	860,158	+189,927	+28%
9.	Free Flash Games	809,401	+157,285	+24%
10.	Riksdagsvalet 2010	223,249	+134,787	+152%
11.	Bubble Town: Party Planet	632,226	+134,456	+27%
12.	快樂島主	723,576	+128,556	+22%
13.	Preguntas Picantes	225,185	+127,755	+131%
14.	Juega al Truco	390,589	+124,163	+47%
15.	Click Challenge	652,444	+109,287	+20%
16.	Digger	124,246	+108,137	+671%
17.	i Like Slots	232,968	+106,773	+85%
18.	Ciaopeople	145,055	+106,298	+274%
19.	for special friends	370,994	+102,031	+38%
20.	scoremaster	161,284	+100,200	+164%

As you may have noticed, Kad Raya and Kad Ucapan dan Lagu Raya sound pretty similar. Both appear to be gifting apps for a the Malaysian version of Eid, a major Muslim holiday.

After Kad Raya, the second fastest-growing apps is Critter Island, a new game from Lolapps that has players entertain furry, scaly and otherwise generally oddball tourists. We reviewed it recently on Inside Social Games, where we’ll also cover the rest of the games on the above list this morning.

Heading down through the list, more foreign-language apps continue to pop up. FantaBook, in Italian, is a bit like fantasy football (or soccer, depending on your region).

小小戰爭 is another game, while Riksdagsvalet 2010 is providing Swedes a way to show how they’ll vote in an upcoming political election. It’s a definite hit with 223,249 MAU, considering Sweden’s population is only nine million people. Finally, Preguntas Picantes is a Spanish-language friend quiz, while Juega al Truco is a card game in the same language.

Facebook has updated its performance advertising system to provide metrics on the influence of social-context on ad performance. Ad managers will now be able to see the number of impressions, clicks, and click through rate of ads with social context, as well as what percentage of an ad’s total impressions which included social context.

Social context, for context, is what Facebook calls the endorsements listed beneath ads which say “John Smith, Jane Doe and 2 other friends like [Facebook Page, group, event, or application].” Advertisers can access social-context metrics in their Ad Manager’s Reports section.

The new metrics could further confirm a Nielsen study which showed that these recommendations improve ad recall by 10%, awareness by 4%, and purchase intent by 2% over the same ad without social context. If the study’s result are proven, advertisers may expand their use of social context ads by increasing targeting of users who have friends who Like the ad’s destination.

However, it is currently unclear if and when this data will be included in the Ads API. Combining social-context with ads API tool advanced targeting parameters such as friend count could create very high performance ads. For instance, only targeting users with 500-plus friends and who have friends who Like the ad’s destination would frequently create impressions showing multiple friends in the social context.

Additionally, it might be useful if Facebook let advertisers break social context metrics down by how many friends were listed in the recommendation. Data showing how crossing the threshold from listing one or two names to “…and x other friends” impacts performance could be valuable, but it isn’t available in the current social-context metrics.

Over the coming weeks we’ll watch to see how these new metrics are used to optimize ad performance.

Today, Facebook launched a new design and new ways for applications and websites to use the Like button, which is now integrated on 350,000 sites. Users can now Like specific pages or objects within an application, providing a new viral distribution channel for application content including virtual goods. Sites can now display Like buttons for Facebook Pages, creating quick a way for users to subscribe to a Page’s updates while not on Facebook itself. Lastly, the new Like button design called “box count” highlights how many users have Liked something so far.

Previously, users could only Like an application as a whole, with the news feed story created by the action leading to an application’s Page. This prevented sharing of specific in-app content like a mini-game, leaderboard, or virtual goods. This was especially prohibitive for less linear games, utilities, and apps with many distinct features. Now, developers can add Like buttons pointing to any IFramed page or canvas endpoint by integrating Open Graph meta tags.

Since Facebook removed application notifications in favor of allowing developers to contact users directly through email, many developers have been looking for a new viral channel for acquiring new users. “Based on feedback from the developer community,” Facebook says it has now implemented a new channel, though not a dedicated one. By Liking an in-app object, a feed story will be published linking directly to that object. This means in addition to purchasing a virtual good, a use can Like it to show it to their friends. This could have a significant impact on virtual good sales, as well as spreading awareness of virtual goods as a concept.

Open Graph-enabled third-party websites can now include Like buttons that create a connection with a Page, not just share an object. Page Likes can be more valuable because they opt a user into receiving updates about the Page in their news feed, and displaying the connection on their profile. Developers don’t need to include any description of what the Like button actually points to, meaning users may be unaware that their click is in fact subscribing and connecting them. The change will help developers convert one-time visitors into members of their Page’s community.

Facebook’s new box count style of Like button displays a large speech box encapsulating a Like count stemming from a rectangle showing the Facebook favicon and the word “Like”. This version is bigger than many Like buttons, with larger height than width. By putting the focus on the number of people who’ve already Liked a piece of content or Page, the button informs the user of its popularity. This exerts peer pressure to click, or from a different perspective, provides a mass recommendation for the content. Sites with higher traffic and Likes will benefit more from box count Like buttons than smaller sites where this style could actually dissuade users from clicking because they can see how few have clicked already.

Facebook continues to rollout new designs and features to the Like button in an effort to give users and developers flexibility. These changes will make the Like button even more ubiquitous across the web, while providing additional ways to expose content on Facebook to new users.

Along with the introduction of its Credits gift cards last week, Facebook also filed a few trademarks around the concept — essentially taking its existing trademarks, and expanding the definition to include gift cards.

Among the new filings are the “F” logo, the word “Facebook”, the Credits logo and the Facebook logo. Here are quick excerpts from each filing, detailing the trademark that Facebook is looking to add.

The “F” logo

Goods and Services: Gift cards; pre-paid gift card services, namely issuing gift card certificates that may be redeemed for goods or services.

Mark Description: The mark consists of letter F featured in a blue square with a lighter blue line along the bottom.

The word “Facebook”

Goods and Services: Gift cards; pre-paid gift card services, namely issuing gift card certificates that may be redeemed for goods or services

Mark Description: Not available

The Credits logo

Goods and Services: Gift cards; pre-paid gift card services, namely issuing gift card certificates that may be redeemed for goods or services.

Mark Description: The mark consists of The mark consists of an image of a coin with a globe featuring two arrows depicted inside, with the letter F featured in a blue square with a lighter blue line along the bottom.

The Facebook logo

Goods and Services: Gift cards; pre-paid gift card services, namely issuing gift card certificates that may be redeemed for goods or services

Mark Description: The mark consists of an image of a coin with a globe featuring two arrows depicted inside, with the letter F featured in a blue square with a lighter blue line along the bottom.

Recently, we launched the Inside Network Job Board – dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Playfish, Ngmoco, BOKU, Stumptown Games, and Glu Mobile.

• Acquisition Marketing Manager (San Francisco, CA)
• Game Developer (San Francisco, CA)
• Policy & Compliance Manager (San Francisco, CA)
• Sr. Analyst (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Business Analytics Manager (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Engineering Director, Marketing & CRM (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Server Developer (San Francisco, CA)
• Systems Operations Engineer (San Francisco, CA)
  

• Android Software Test Engineer (San Francisco, CA)
  
• Android Client Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

• Publisher Account Manager (San Francisco, CA)

• Senior Engineer-Android & iPhone (Portland, OR)

• Sr. Product Manager (Casual Games) (San Mateo, CA)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.