The following is a brief excerpt from the October 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, or brand on Facebook.

Facebook Groups — and much of Facebook itself — was not originally intended for marketing purposes. And yet, people all over the world, in every imaginable demographic, have become so highly engaged with the site that brands have gravitated towards its features as tools for promotion. This article discusses the ways in which the newly launched version of Facebook Groups offers opportunities for creative niche marketers looking to target specific audiences organized around shared interests or experiences.

In a simple marketing implementation, guerrilla marketers can join Groups related to their product and post messages to the wall, start conversation topics, ask questions. However, marketers that default to spammy forum posting behavior will most definitely not succeed. Today’s Facebook users are both savvy and sensitive, and Facebook itself has responded to this evolving user standard for promotional material by tightening their own guidelines governing advertiser behavior on the site.

Groups differ from Pages in a few key ways. Unlike Facebook Pages, Groups are not a communications channel designed for brand marketing. Pages allow you to communicate with Facebook users who are your fans – in other words, users who have opted in to receive promotional content that you publish from your Facebook Page via their news feed. Groups, on the other hand, are organizations of Facebook users who have opted in to receive content from (or create content for) their peers with whom they share a special interest or element of identity.

As a channel designed for marketing, Pages offer numerous ways to broadcast to and communicate with users who are fans and with those users’ friends. With a Group, however, admins can send messages to members, but, aside from invites from members, there are no viral acquisition mechanisms to bring new users to the Group.

Why then, are Groups valuable to marketers? Pages allow you two-way communication with Facebook users who are your fans or friends of your fans — they are Facebook’s premier brand marketing tool. Facebook Ads allow you one-way communication with users who are not yet your fans, but whose profile information matches that of your target audience. Groups are different from, and complementary to, both of these options because Groups, if used wisely and sparingly, allow you to communicate in a personal, bi-directional way with Facebook users who are not your fans, but who could be.

For the full article, including specific, adaptable use-cases, please see the Facebook Marketing Bible, October 2010 edition.

In response to numerous complaints, Facebook has changed its Photo Memories sidebar module to no longer display friends who a user was formally listed as in a relationship with. The feature shows thumbnails of old photos tagged with friends while a user browse photos, friends, or other sections of the site, but often made users sad by showing them images of their ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends.

The algorithm that determines whose photos are shown in Photo Memories relied on which friends you frequently interact with on Facebook. Users typically interact heavily with their boyfriends and girlfriends, leading the feature to disproportionately show them. After users had severed their relationship, both in real life and on Facebook, Photo Memories would still show users their former significant others, making it difficult for people to get over them.

Our initial post about Photo Memories received dozens of heartfelt pleas for more control over the feature, or the ability to turn it off. For example, a commenter  named Julie said, “It keeps showing pics of my ex and their new significant other and it makes me sick! I’m still in love and I’m trying to move on but it’s ridiculously hard when every time I log on, their face pops up on the right hand of screen.” An old Facebook group deploring the feature reached over 500 members.

Last night, Facebook’s project manager in charge of photos, Sam Odio, commented on the post saying, “Hi All – I’d like to let you know that we’re listening to your feedback. The photo memories product no longer shows tagged photos of your friends if you were previously in a relationship with them.” While users may still see Photo Memories of their former romantic partners if they didn’t declare the relationship on Facebook, as well of their current partner with that person’s former partners, the change should help heal the heartache for many users.

On behalf of our commenters we’d like to thank Facebook for being so attentive. We’d also like to remind users that they’re welcome to express their opinions about Facebook features on our comment reels.

The latest version of Loopt’s location service app for iPhone and iPod Touch now lets users view and create Facebook Places check-ins through an integration with the Places API. The app’s users see both Loopt and Places check-ins on their map, and Loopt check-ins published to Facebook will appear on corresponding Places pages and the “Here Now” list. Users can also now be alerted when specific friends are within a certain proximity.

At one point, there were rumors that Facebook was interested in acquiring Loopt, but then the location service was not selected to join competitors Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah as a launch partner for Facebook Places.

When users of the new version of the Loopt app view their interactive map, they’ll see icons representing the locations of their Facebook friends who’ve checked in with Places in addition to Loopt check-ins by their Loopt friends. For many, this will populate their map with many more check-ins, making it easier to find someone to meet up with. Friends who check in through Places show a Facebook logo in the bottom right hand corner of their profile picture shown when their map icon is tapped.

Users will see a list of Places nearby when they go to check in through Loopt. Clicking a Place brings up a check-in composer where the user can add optional text, upload a photo, and select whether to share to Facebook or Twitter as well as Loopt. When shared to Facebook, the check-in is posted to a user’s wall, the feeds of friends, and the Places page for that location. The ability to include a photo is an improvement on the native Facebook Places interface for iPhone and iPod Touch, though the photo will only appear in the feed story, not on the Places page.

Other improvements to the app include the ability to be alerted when a selected friend comes within a chosen proximity of you. For instance, users could select to be notified when specific out-of-town friends come within 10 miles of them. Users can also now use their email address to register for a Loopt account, while previously users had to register with their phone number. Distribution of Loopt content is limited by both the app and Facebook’s privacy settings.

With Loopt taking advantage of the Facebook location platform, now all the major location services can syndicate check-ins to Facebook. While users of the different services gain from the ability to distribute to and view check-ins from a larger audience, Facebook is managing to make itself the back bone of location aggregation.

We had a few big name brands, a handful of TV and movie Pages and lots of musicians on our list of Top 20 Gaining Facebook Pages this week. Music Pages made up more than half of the list, leaving little room for brands and media to slip their way in — although nothing can seem to deter Megan Fox’s presence on the list. Our list is compiled by our PageData tool, which counts the number of Likes a Page receives each day; it took between 1.4 million and 774,000 new Likes to make the list this week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	Facebook	22,803,054	+1,422,224	+6.65
2.	YouTube	16,995,678	+1,418,843	+9.11
3.	Eminem	17,186,538	+1,299,924	+8.18
4.	The Simpsons	10,269,200	+1,067,313	+11.60
5.	Rihanna	11,789,042	+1,022,883	+9.50
6.	Coca-Cola	14,559,251	+1,009,493	+7.45
7.	Lady Gaga	20,833,583	+973,166	+4.90
8.	South Park	15,307,452	+932,036	+6.48
9.	Linkin Park	14,877,108	+930,319	+6.67
10.	Katy Perry	11,031,606	+899,665	+8.88
11.	Bob Marley	12,556,469	+877,734	+7.52
12.	Shakira	10,934,198	+847,341	+8.40
13.	Megan Fox	15,537,658	+822,698	+5.59
14.	Family Guy	19,500,640	+822,030	+4.40
15.	Michael Jackson	22,021,091	+797,559	+3.76
16.	Lil Wayne	13,873,319	+796,783	+6.09
17.	Harry Potter	4,331,890	+793,126	+22.41
18.	AKON	9,055,699	+780,883	+9.44
19.	Usher	5,312,388	+776,429	+17.12
20.	Oreo	11,681,137	+773,932	+7.10

First was Facebook’s Page this week. It added 1.4 million Likes, grew to 22.8 million and posted about Skype, Bing and privacy issues. YouTube came in second, adding 1.4 million Likes to come in just under 17 million. Coca-Cola was in sixth place, adding 1 million Likes to reach 14.5 million with its basic marketing on the Wall. Finally, Oreo rounded out the list at 20 after adding 774,000 Likes to pass 11.6 million; the company is running a contest with celebrity athletes and coupons.

The short list of media Pages started with “The Simpsons” in fourth place after adding 1 million Likes to grow to 10.2 million. Next was “South Park” at number 8, which added 932,000 Likes to push 15.3 million. Starlet Megan Fox’s Page landed number 13 without much marketing efforts, adding 822,700 Likes to her 15.5 total. “Family Guy” was next at fourteenth, adding 822,000 Likes to hit 19.5 million. The Harry Potter movie Page was next, adding 793,100 to its 4.3 million fan base; the Page has been promoting the release of the series’ next installment later this year.

All the TV shows promoted and posted episodes on their Page Walls.

As previously mentioned, music Page dominated our list this week, taking 11 of the total 20 spots. Eminem was in third place, adding 1.3 million Likes to jump up to 17.1 million total. Rihanna was fifth, adding 1 million fans to the 11.7 million on her Page, which included an interesting landing tab that combined YouTube videos, music players and photo slideshows.

Lady Gaga’s Page was in seventh place, adding 973,200 Likes to surpass 20.8 million fans. The songstress’ position on the list has been waning in recent weeks, perhaps she’s hit a plateau; if the trend continues she might end up dropping off our list of fastest growing Pages. She’s been promoting her awards nominations and work on a new album on her Wall.

Linkin Park was next at number 9, adding 930,300 Likes to the band’s 14.8 million total; the band has been posting pictures from rehearsals, selling merchandise and featuring its songs and videos on the Page’s landing tab. Pop star Katy Perry was next in line at tenth place, adding 899,700 Likes to jump to 11 million fans; she’s been on tour, in magazines and has been nominated for awards. Bob Marley’s Page followed at number 11 with the Page adding 877,700 Likes to reach 12.5 million mostly by posting fan-generated content.

Shakira was in twelfth place, adding 847,300 Likes to come in just under 11 million fans; the Page has been streaming her upcoming album before it hits stores. She’s also been promoting her Page by making a video specifically for fans and appearing on TV shows. Michael Jackson’s Page took fifteenth place after adding 797,600 Likes to bust 22 million fans, even though the Page mostly just promotes merchandise.

Rounding out the list of musicians was Lil Wayne at 16, who added 796,800 Likes to make a total of 13.8 million; he’s been promoting his new album and writing fans from jail. Akon was at 18 after adding 780,900 Likes to his Page. Finally, Usher at number 19 added 776,400 Likes to reach 5.3 million total fans; he’s been touring and giving away tickets on his Wall.

LivingSocial announced the acquisition of New York-based trip planning company Urban Escapes today. Chief executive Tim O’Shaughnessy says the acquisition will help the company offer its 10 million subscribers around the world opportunities to take advantage of fun things to do in their own communities.

LivingSocial is a social shopping company that currently is focusing on expanding its crowdsourced coupon service, Deals. Earlier this year, it  raised $14 million to help expand its Deals service, expanding into the United Kingdom this summer. Now O’Shaughnessy says the company is in about 100 markets, although Urban Escapes is only in five.

“We’re all about providing people with cool things to do with a great value. Sometimes we’ll work with (Urban Escapes) as a Deal and sometimes, they’ve got their Urban Escapes property and site and they’ll continue driving ahead,” O’Shaughnessy tells us. Facebook will fit into LivingSocial’s leveraging of Urban Escapes in ways similar to how Deals utilizes the platform — by allowing people to share to their stream, he adds.

The acquisition provides an opportunity for LivingSocial to provide services for people in a more “custom” way, O’Shaughnessy says, noting that Urban Escapes is key to this new strategy.

Facebook will fit into LivingSocial’s leveraging of Urban Escapes in ways similar to how Deals utilizes the platform — by allowing people to share to their stream,. “I wouldn’t say that this is the start of an acquisition stream. (But) I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there would be more in the future,” he adds.

The companies will begin working together maintaining somewhat separate identities, he tells us, but as time goes on staffing will increase to accommodate Urban Escape-like ventures in more of LivingSocial’s markets. Staffing increases are likely to take off in 2011, O’Shaughnessy says.

January 25th | San Francisco

Inside Network is proud to announce our second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms: Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, exploring the key uncertainties and opportunities in social games and applications in 2011, happening January 25th in San Francisco.

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening and nighttime of casual networking.

Who Is Speaking?

We’re excited and honored to announce the following 15 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

• Atul Bagga, VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
• Bill Gossman, CEO, hi5
  
• Bret Taylor, CTO, Facebook
• Deborah Liu, Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
• Eric Chu, Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
• Jason Oberfest, VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
• Kevin Chou, Co-founder and CEO, Kabam
• Manu Rekhi, GM Games, Content, and Platform, MySpace
• Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
• Raph Koster, Former President, Metaplace; VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)
• Rex Ng, Co-founder and CEO, 6waves
• Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor
• Sean Ryan, EVP and GM Games, News Corporation
• Sebastien de Halleux, Co-founder and COO, Playfish (now part of Electronic Arts)
• Vish Makhijani, SVP Business Operations, Zynga
  
• Eric Eldon, Editor, Inside Network
• Justin Smith, Founder, Inside Network

A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information.

Register Now

A limited set of 20 “early announcement” tickets is now available at a special announcement price of $149. This price will change when these first 20 tickets are sold out. 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 January 25th in San Francisco!

Causes, a company that helps Facebook users donate to charitable organizations, raised $9 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates, Founders Fund Management LLC, Ron Conway and Marc Benioff. This latest round of funding brings Causes’ total financing to $16 million.

As we reported previously, Causes started selling charitable donation gift cards in $25 and $50 denominations at Safeway and Vons grocery store locations in California recently. The cards are a way to give a charitable gift that allows the receiver to select to which charity to donate.

Causes makes money by asking for a voluntary tip of 10%-plus on transactions.

Bloomberg reports that Causes’ Facebook application connects 119 million people to its more than 1.5 million charitable causes. Our AppData service shows that Causes currently has 26.7 million monthly active users and 1.4 million daily active users.

The app allows Facebook users to rally friends for donations but its birthday function, where the person with the birthday asks friends for a gift to their favorite cause,, has been used by 100,000 people totaling $7.6 million, according to the report. The company also has corporate partnerships and in January, Causes began to power the Facebook Charity Gift Shop.

The following article is excerpted from the October 2010 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, or brand on Facebook.

Facebook’s long-awaited entrance into the location space, Places, brings a new dimension to the tools advertisers and marketers have at their disposal on the social network.

Places, which builds on momentum from earlier forerunners in the space like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt, allows Facebook users to temporarily share their location via check-ins. Users can share where they are at any given moment with friends by “checking in” to a venue. Facebook’s twist is that friends can tag each other at Places, like they do in photos, which brings in an extra viral element compared to other location-based services.

Businesses can use check-ins to incentivize different kinds of behavior and reward new or existing customers with deals if they go to outlets at specific times.

A Basic Use Case

Use Case 1: Deals in exchange for a single check-in to virally market a business to new customers.

This is a fairly standard technique that was pioneered by earlier location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla.

In exchange for a single check-in, a local business offers a free good or discount. In turn, the check-ins can fuel word of mouth promotion for a local business because they appear in the news feed, allowing other friends to see it. A business can also offer deals to the first 50 customers who check-in, incentivizing people to come quickly for an offer.

Example 1: Silicon Valley shopping mall Westfield Valley Fair is offering a $200 discount on precious stones if Facebook users check-in to the mall.

If the user checks in, they’ll get a coupon code that they can present to a store associate for the discount. Westfield is working with Santa Monica-based Fan Appz to power the location-based coupons. In earlier Places promotions, Westfield offered a 15 percent discount on clothing from Betsey Johnson or a chance to win a pair of Jonas Brothers concert tickets to customers who checked in.

The full Facebook Marketing Bible entry on Facebook Places for marketers includes an additional ten use cases and even more examples. For more strategies on how to market your business with Facebook Places, Questions, social plugins, and many more features, check out the Facebook Marketing Bible.

Whether through inadvertent security problems or malicious, aggressive actions by third party applications, Facebook has sometimes struggled to completely maintain the privacy of user data. The latest example: distinct user identity numbers in URLs have been getting passed by third-party developers to advertising networks, as The Wall Street Journal published as part of an ongoing series covering online privacy last night.

There’s more to the meta-story, too. The article mentioned LOLapps as one of the guilty developers; we covered how Facebook blocked its applications on Friday. It is now live again, for unstated reasons.

First, what is the Journal concerned about? The URLs in question can be used by third parties to figure out user names, but as with profile photos, friend lists and other information, all of this is already public information. Facebook changed its terms of service last December to require all of that information to be public, after having previously offered a setting, and terms to match, that allowed users to set all data to be private. When it introduced the Graph API — a way for developers to this access public user data — back in April, it made all interests public, too.

Although Facebook says it is working to control the URL ID problem, the fact that users’ real names are already public makes the particular news less interesting than it might seem.

The previous series of decisions was what made user names public in the first place, and provoked many privacy activists and a portion of the user base — for those who wanted complete privacy on Facebook, that move amounted to the company breaking its word. It has argued back that its service needs to be more open to be valuable to users, so it can do things like offer a developer platform that allows for socially rich applications.

Most users around the world either don’t care, or have so far continued using Facebook even with the more open approach that it has moved to. The site’s traffic numbers have continued to surge, for the most part, regardless of privacy changes, or redesigns, or other negative press, for that matter.

The real story isn’t just about the user IDs being aggregated and associated with public information by third parties, it’s about this happening to all user data provided by Facebook — and by any other web service. Over the years we’ve heard reports about unethical application developers, staying quiet, often in countries where any enforcement is difficult or impossible, and quietly building applications that get users to willfully share more private data like photos, videos, and anything else accessible on the platform.

A black, or at least gray market exists on the web for user data from any number of sources. Between security holes, readily public information, scams (including deceptive medical surveys and other privacy-infringing advertising offers), scraping and other methods, the problem transcends Facebook and impacts any social network and other online data service. The market for data about people, no matter how it has been obtained, includes a range of above-ground companies including performance marketing service providers, advertising networks, and we’ve heard even credit car and insurance companies. The scope of how data is being used, for anything from targeting ads to providing insurance rates, is currently unknown.

Facebook data, combined with all of the other possible sources out there, could be aggregated to create detailed, unauthorized and secret profiles of users.

One of the more intriguing points of The Journal’s article is about Rapleaf, a company that collects and distributes personal data about people. It has been quietly building a business buying and selling user data over the couple years, and it has previously come under heavy criticism for how it has used data.

It has become more public more recently, doing things like writing blog posts that describe how it is handling technical issues. It also claims on its web site that it keeps all sensitive user data private.

As we wrote in early May:

The bigger issue, as we’ve mentioned before, is that there are increasing reports of rogue applications and others who scrape and store Facebook user information then resell it on the black market for any number of purposes, from online lead generation to phishing and other scams. The extent of the problem is not well-understood, but Facebook appears to lack means to control third party redistribution of its data beyond doing things like suing companies or kicking them off of its platform.

Developers in the Facebook community have widely confirmed the existence of these practices, although most larger and more reputable developers have stayed away from this type of business. Facebook has had large teams of people working in security for years, and it says it has a number of steps in place to fight back — like ways of detecting third parties that are abusing user data, we’ve heard.

Congress has been begun to examine the more general problems of online privacy and user data control. The ad industry, fearing impending regulation, is already trying to self-police. Between the scope of the problem being unclear, and ongoing privacy and security problems at web companies, the government is likely to examine the entire industry even more closely.

Non-game apps represent 14 of the 20 spots on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by monthly active users, an unusually high number for a list that is usually dominated by games. Few of the names will be unfamiliar to regular readers:

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Phrases	43,450,986	+4,895,619	+13%
2.	Friend Facts™	10,341,332	+2,897,819	+39%
3.	Causes	26,710,879	+1,752,904	+7%
4.	SmileyCentral	3,197,495	+1,483,789	+87%
5.	ESPNU College Town	2,497,395	+1,248,151	+100%
6.	Give Hearts	13,351,381	+1,226,038	+10%
7.	Are YOU Interested?	12,837,649	+1,138,934	+10%
8.	BandPage by RootMusic	7,050,189	+1,024,854	+17%
9.	It Girl	4,877,026	+997,417	+26%
10.	Millionaire City	10,848,865	+970,004	+10%
11.	iHeart	14,029,968	+828,356	+6%
12.	Marketplace	8,575,352	+786,239	+10%
13.	Windows Live Messenger	8,490,497	+780,854	+10%
14.	Birthday Cards	7,062,943	+733,278	+12%
15.	Frases Diarias	7,910,172	+692,936	+10%
16.	Quiz Planet	16,483,138	+665,185	+4%
17.	xo Hearts xo	1,354,784	+623,612	+85%
18.	Crime City	1,050,548	+595,369	+131%
19.	Warstorm	1,685,638	+536,188	+47%
20.	Texas HoldEm Poker	36,254,411	+524,479	+1%

Phrases, at the top of the list once again, has picked up almost 10 million MAU during the course of the month, but half of that number came from the past week alone. If the app were to continue at its current pace for another month, it would surpass FarmVille as Facebook’s largest app by MAU.

Friend Facts™, the latest friend quiz to make it big, is on a growth spree of its own, with 2.9 million new MAU over the week. The longer-running app Causes follows at some distance with 1.7 million new MAU.

SmileyCentral, at number four, is a new app from Mindspark that goes beyond the usual gifting app. This one requires the download of a toolbar, which will seed smiley-faces throughout your Facebook experience.

Every app after SmileyCentral, we’ve seen recently on this list: ESPNU College Town, Give Hearts, Are YOU Interested? and so forth down the list. While many developers have talked about fast-growing apps being automatically disabled, there are over a dozen here that have, apparently, figured out how to work with Facebook.