In the case of your General Motors car or truck, if you don’t have anything nice to say about it, you may want to say it on Facebook. The financially rescued auto maker has recently set up a new customer service team to devote special attention to what people are saying about the brand on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

GM also plans to increase its social media team, which currently consists of 5 members devoted solely to scouring the internet for GM-related chatter, doubling the group by the end of April, according to a recent article by the Detroit Free Press.

This new online damage-control division of GM customer service isn’t just collecting data, but actually interacting with customers who may have specific complaints about their cars or trucks. The General Motors Facebook page has a few more than 121,000 fans, but there doesn’t seem to have been too much recent activity in terms numbers increasing or decreasing. Most of the work has been on GM’s end, with its new service agents seeking out where and how the brand’s customers are talking about the automobiles.

A lot of the conversations are taking place on Twitter, and the customer service team appears to be focusing most of their efforts addressing the dialogue in that forum. There are plenty of negative comments and discussion on General Motors’ fan page, but the company has yet to participate in one of the discussions. There are plenty of other fans chiming in to defend the brand when someone poses a complaint, but none have revealed themselves to be on the GM payroll.

But as the company plans more expansion, expect it to get more involved on Facebook.

Developers iWin, Inc. and Backstage Inc. have transformed the popular Family Feud game show into a Family Feud Facebook game app of the same name, piggy-backing on the already successful online game currently available at iWin’s Web site. The game follows the same format as the long-running game show, with users trying to guess how 100 participants answered survey questions.

Beyond being a well-designed social game, the app is a lesson in how entertainment companies can make their content more meaningful to Facebook users, and make money at the same time.

The Family Feud game can be played individually, but to really rack up points users will want to incorporate their Facebook friends to help them win in the Fast Money round. Each successive round in the game offers the potential to gain more points, and once a certain point level is reached, users are eligible for the Fast Money round, which mimics the final round of the game show. You can then choose friends to invite to play, which will give both you and your friends bonus points when they join the game.

Players are allowed to play a couple games for free about every half hour, and there’s the option to purchase more games by charging your cell phone bill, or through PayPal, Social Gold and other payment services. Costs range from $1.99 for 2 games to $39.99 for 100 games. The Feud Points earned playing the game give players the ability to buy prizes in one of eight prize stages. After purchasing all the prizes on a particular level, the next prize stage will be unlocked. Players also earn awards and titles as they reach milestones in the game or purchase entire blocks of prizes.

Family Feud already has more than 11,000 survey questions in the Facebook game, with new questions being added every week. Users are invited to create surveys about themselves for their friends, participate in ongoing surveys, or offer up potential survey questions. There are plenty of options built into the game to share results or invite friends to play, and the game has gained some popularity in the last couple of weeks and currently has more than 24,000 daily active users.

Last Year’s Defending Champ

The number one bracket application from last year got off to a great start again this March. Watercooler’s 2010 Bracket Challenge is close to 300,000 users about 24 hours before tip-off of the first game (not counting the play-in). The app allows you to invite friends to your own pool or search for existing pools, some of which already number in the thousands.

Pools can be set up as open or invite-only, and there are places to post comments (talk trash), track your brackets, and more. Watercooler is also sponsoring a contest for each level of pool (10-25 members, 26-50 mebmers, 50 or more members) with a prize being awarded to the top bracket from each level.

The Player With The Most Game

CBSSports.com has its own bracket app, and the network has the added advantage of owning the licensing for the live feeds of every game, which they’ll be streaming through a dedicated Facebook page. Once you’ve signed on to set up your March Madness bracket or brackets, you’ll have the option of fanning the NCAA March Madness On Demand page, which is where you’ll be able to watch every tourney game live, as well as have the ability to talk a little trash with friends, other team supporters or rival fans.

The network is also offering $10,000 to the top points-getter, and just filling out a bracket enters you into the contest. While the CBSSports.com bracket interface is not as smooth or refined as the Watercooler app, the facts that it’s associated with being able to view the actual games and that anyone can win the $10K have helped the application reach close to 250,000 fans, with a growth curve that’s as steep as Watercooler’s app.

The Biggest So Far This Year

The prospect of winning $5K, and an easy-to-navigate interface, are among the incentives that has made the Bracket Challenge by Citizens Sports app the most popular so far for this year’s tournament, with about 620,000 active users. There’s no need to round up a group of friends or join one of the thousands of existing pools to get a shot at some dough, with every bracket eligible for the $5,000 prize for the best picks. In addition, users can participate in the Bracket Challenge on the go by downloading a free iPhone app that allows them to see their brackets, track scores and more.

The application has a few added extras, such as sponsorship by Miller Lite, which runs a banner ad on the dashboard inviting users to fan the Miller Lite Facebook page. There’s also a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit bracket, which invited fans to vote on the best swimsuit picture, as well as offering galleries of famous pictures from over the years. Fans can also participate in or contribute to team and tourney trivia questions, and there are live updates of all games throughout the tournament.

Though Facebook long ago outgrew rival social network MySpace, its old rival and other companies have led in terms of helping people share and listen to music. Part of that is due to licensing issues. Facebook has taken a close look at offering some form of music service, but apparently was never able to come to an agreement with record labels on how it might provide licensed music, or how much it would pay out to do so.

Still, Facebook’s Pages and developer platform offer new and established musicians unique ways to reach fans. If you’re in the music industry, you should check out the options below.

ILike

The company launched applications when Facebook introduced its developer platform back in 2007, and it has stayed popular ever since. Its Music app, which includes information about bands, videos, sample tracks, tour information, and more, currently has 12.3 million monthly active users. Applications it has made for artists tend to see decent traffic as well as. All told, it has 15.6 million MAU on Facebook, according to AppData.

However, the company was bought by MySpace last year and it appears to have focused its attention off of Facebook since then. A new crop of companies have been building music-related applications in the meantime.

RootMusic

Beginning this month, bands looking for a free way to create a comprehensive Facebook page will be able to do so with RootMusic. The application gives musicians a quick, easy way to set up band fan pages that are similar to those found on MySpace, but with the advantage of being on a much larger network. Bands will need to have an existing fan page to which they can add the RootMusic application, where they can then make the RootMusic tab the default landing page while still retaining all the common elements, photos, etc. of their existing fan page.

RootMusic gives visitors the ability to stream music while checking out tour dates and band news, as well as the ability to see Tweets directly on the page. Bands can also enable visitors to download music tracks for free. For fans looking for more on the band, the contact information can be populated with links to related web sites.

Involver

Some popular musicians, or at least those with a little money to spend, are giving fans a way to check out music through Involver’s Music for Pages application. Fans can stream songs, gift them to friends or share them in their news feeds. The application creates a Music tab on the artist’s fan page and houses all of the features, including links to external sites where people can purchase music and more. Alicia Keys recently used the application to premiere her new album, and the application was apparently popular enough that administrators have retained the tab to give fans an avenue to enjoy a few songs from the now released album, share comments or link to iTunes to purchase the album.

Hit or Not

In an application that taps into the viral appeal of Facebook games, Hit or Not offers users a fun way to play music mogul while giving real-life  bands and artists a way to get their music in front of a large audience. First and foremost a game,  it gives users the ability to vote up the “value” of certain songs and artists, as well as purchase the music they hear in the application. The developer, thebizmo, was founded by music industry veterans, the game is trying to create a virtual market for real-life musicians, and help them make real money in the process.

Early this week, packaged food company Sara Lee began a campaign to try to reach moms on Faebook, posting what it calls “Saga Solvers” videos to its Page. The videos offer tips to help alleviate the everyday trials moms face, which Sara Lee has been collecting as part of an earlier Mama Saga campaign. Facebook users viewing the videos will also be able to share the videos or suggest the page to friends from the video tab on the Page.

The Mama Saga campaign began last September and collected some of the more common problems faced by mothers. The Saga Solvers series is now calling upon three experts who will give their advice on ways to make motherhood a little easier, as well as help bring a little light-hearted humor into moms’ everyday routines. Sara Lee is also encouraging fans to chime in on how they’d handle the various situations. The first series of videos will run for six weeks and feature advice from Food Network personality Ceci Carmichael. Subsequent Saga Solvers will be announced as the campaign moves forward.

All the Saga Solvers videos are under the video tab on the Sara Lee Deli Facebook page, and all feature some reference, whether outright or subtle, to Sara Lee deli meats. Administrators are also doing a good job of promoting the campaign through wall posts — so far, the videos have about 200,000 views on the Facebook page, while the overall fan page has more than 23,000 followers. Sara Lee is also promoting the campaign through other video sites like Yahoo! Video and Metacafe, with total views topping more than 2.5 million since the launch of the Mama Saga program.

While we don’t have the exact number of women on Facebook who have children, we do know that women comprise 56% percent of the site in the US alone. Several mom-focused groups and applications on Facebook, including those using the popular Circle of Moms app, boast some impressive numbers. Interjecting brand awareness into apps and campaigns as Sara Lee has done gives brands a way to open communication lines with consumers and eventually gather important information about who is buying products and how to shape future marketing campaigns.

Quick serve restaurant chain Carl’s Jr and sister eatery Hardee’s are promoting the new Grilled Cheese Bacon Burger through a new application on their Facebook pages called Comfort Place. The application gives you the opportunity to bombard your facebook page, or the pages of a friend, with comforting messages, funny pictures and videos, as well as receive a few coupons for deals on food from the restaurants.

Comfort Place gives you the option of receiving 24 hours of comfort from Carl’s Jr., or passing the comfort along to a Facebook friend. Carl’s Jr. will deliver the comfort in the form of messages, videos and pictures posted to your or your friend’s wall, along with coupons for comfort food from the restaurant chain and it’s sister restaurant chain, Hardee’s.

Clicking on the Comfort Place tab on both the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s fan pages leads to a video from a Snuggie-clad spokesman that explains a little about the application as well as a sweepstakes for a Carl’s Jr.-themed Comfort Pack. Entering the sweepstakes requires becoming a fan of the page as well as entering your email address. Carl’s Jr. will be selecting two winners a week through March 26 and posting the names of winners on its fan page. The Comfort Place page also features a picture of the new Grilled Cheese Bacon Burger, which leads to a $1 off a combo featuring the sandwich.

In case the Comfort Place gets you a little too relaxed, you can check yourself by visiting the DisComfort Place, which features various photos that are meant to be unsettling on a few different levels. We will admit, we clicked through a few laughing, but finally found one that made us pretty uncomfortable.

The Carl’s Jr. page currently has a little over 89,000 fans, while sister restaurant Hardee’s has about 31,000 fans. Even combined, the chains are well below the 1.7 million-plus mark set by McDonald’s, which admittedly is in a different league with its world-wide storefront presence. But even more localized chains like In-N-Out Burger, with more than 480,000 fans,  have numbers well into six figures. We’ll keep an eye on this latest campaign to see if the more laid-back, humorous approach to pushing its brand helps Carl’s Jr. inch closer to its competitors.

BMW is sponsoring a Facebook contest that will send the winning contestant to check out the company’s headquarters in Munich, including the Welt, its flagship showroom and customer service center. The BMW Expert Challenge gives fans of the brand a chance to answer five questions, then invite three friends to help answer 15 more (5 each). The contest is being held to celebrate the fact that the BMW fan page will soon be 500,000 strong.

The contestant with the most correct answers will be entered to win the grand prize — a four day, three night stay in Munich and a tour of the BMW facilities. The winner will also have a chance to meet the BMW Facebook team. As there are sure to be a number of fans that are able to answer all the questions, the winner will be drawn at random.

The contest is easy to find from the BMW fan page with its own dedicated tab, and requires you to answer five questions about BMW, then call on three Facebook friends to answer five more questions each, and so on and so on. While the rules state that the success of your teams’ collective answers is what makes you eligible for the grand prize, the trip is only for one person.

What BMW has really done is create a contest that will yield some valuable contact information for a fairly focused demographic. Most of the questions are very company and brand specific and are probably only easily answered by die-hard fans (or experienced Google users). And while the prize in very nice, it isn’t something that would necessarily appeal to anyone and everyone, like giving away a free car.

With the specialized questions and prize, it’s more likely that those taking the time to complete the questions and pass them along to friends are truly fans of the brand and therefore more receptive to future marketing and ad campaigns.

Valentine’s Day is this weekend, and several brands and businesses are using Facebook to give people on the network a chance to send special gifts to the ones they love, pick up a little something for themselves, or even send a Valentine’s wish to an unsuspecting civil servant. Campaigns vary from contests to games to simple well-wishes in updates.

Target Spreading The Love To Charities

Using the advertising power of both the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day, retailer Target is using a Facebook application called the Super Love Sender to disperse $1 million to a number of charities. The application allows users to choose from three different video cards, featuring football players in full pads with pink wings performing dance routines, singing songs or reciting poems. You can also add a photo that will be featured in the skits and send the Valentine’s video card on to your Facebook friends.

During the card creation process, you can choose your favorite among five charities to receive a portion of the $1 million donation. How much money each charity receives will be determined by the percentage of votes it receives.

Send A Photo-Filled Card On Facebook With Scrapblog

Online photo-sharing service Scrapblog gives Facebook users the ability to put a personal touch are their Valentine’s Day messages by creating photo collages through an application called Share The Love. The app grabs images from your Facebook photo albums, giving you the choice of up to 10 images. You can then customize the Valentine’s Day-themed card with stickers, various backgrounds and captions.

The photo cards are displayed on your wall, and any tagged friends in the photos are also alerted. There are elements of social gaming built into the application, and the more cards you create, the more points you amass to unlock exclusive content and features.

Facebook Keeps Your Valentine’s Day Virtual Gifts A Secret

Facebook offers a virtual gift giving service that allows you to schedule a birthday gift for your friends as much as a week in advance, and they’ve extended the service to include Valentine’s Day gifts. You can send the specially-themed gifts now, and they’ll appear as a wrapped present until Feb. 14. The gift message includes a link that gives the recipient a chance to easily send a gift of his or her own to the Valentine’s Day admirer.

Love Yourself And Win An iPod from eBay India

To promote its online auction service, eBay India is giving away a couple of prizes to Facebook users who express their love for themselves through status updates. The user that gathers the most likes for their update, which must include a reason they love themselves as well as a special eBay India tag, will receive an iPod Touch. The administrators will also choose an update that they feel is the most creative, and that winner will get a Sony Playstation Portable 3004. The campaign is a way to plug the auction site, as each update and like will include a link to eBay India through the tag.

Skittles Promotes Random Acts Of Kindness

In on of the most unique campaigns of the lovers’ holiday, Skittles is calling on all Facebook users to create a Valentine’s Day message that will be sent to a predetermined parking enforcement officer. Made with the help of Involver, the contest will give one lucky meter maid thousands of messages from random people as part of Skittles’ Mob The Rainbow campaign. The current count is well over 21,000 messages created, all of which will be presented by Skittles to the civil servant on Valentine’s Day.

You can send a message of 140 characters or less directly from the Skittles fan page or have them generate one for you. There’s also the option of mailing in a Valentine’s Day card to the Skittles offices in San Francisco. With more than 3.7 million fans of the Skittles brand on Facebook, the potential number of Valentine’s Day cards could be huge.

Health and beauty product manufacturer Dove is taking aim at the male market, with a marketing campaign that is combining the brand’s Facebook presence with a variety of other media. Dove has been pushing the “Men+Care” line for a while on its Facebook page, but recently took a huge step towards speaking to male consumers in a more direct manner with a commercial that aired during the Super Bowl.

Dove has almost 113,000 fans of its Facebook page, most of whom are women. The company has been pushing its men’s line of products for a while through wall posts and some coupon offers, but most of the marketing has been geared toward getting women to buy the products for their men.

The Men+Care line currently has its own tab on the Dove fan page, which gives users a chance to watch the Super Bowl commercial, check out the dedicated Men+Care Web site, learn a little more about the actual products, and print a coupon for a buck off a Men+Care product.

Along with the Super Bowl commercial, which has been receiving a lot of praise on the Dove fan page, the band has also signed Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints as a spokesperson, using him in a few commercial spots and playing up his role as a father.

While there are plenty of cosmetic brands using Facebook to connect with consumers, the efforts of these companies are almost exclusively geared toward the ladies. There are, however, a few brands known for their men’s products that are doing quite well on Facebook, showing that there is interest in these types of products.

Old Spice has an very active page with more than 425,000 fans, while the AXE fan page has about 192,000 fans. Both brands are going after the same market as the Men+Care line, though have chosen to tailor ads to appeal directly to a certain type of guy. Dove doesn’t appear to be targeting the exact same demographic, instead opting for a more family-oriented type of chap. It will be interesting to see how much buzz the Super Bowl commercial generates for the Men+Care products, and if Dove is able to appeal to this segment of the male market.

HP, Intel, Best Buy and Rossignol have teamed up to offer prizes to Facebook users through a new game application called Go Big, in which players rack up points completing snowboard tricks. Players compete for weekly prizes, including laptops, snowboards and gift cards, and one grand prize winner will receive a vacation for two to Whistler ski resort.

Entering some personal information gets you into the game, where you control a snowboarder to attempt tricks and score points on four different slopes. You can repeat each course as many times as you like, and scores from the four venues are totaled for the high score that puts you in the running for the prizes.

Gamers can also customize the look of their snowboarder or update their gear to improve jumping ability and speed. Completing a series of tricks can also unlock larger tricks which will help score higher point totals.

The Go Big interface features easy links to the respective Web sites of the four sponsors, but only Best Buy is currently cross promoting the game on its site with a dedicated splash page highlighting a few HP products. Go Big has also been mentioned in wall posts on the HP and Best Buy fan pages, directing Facebookers to the HP game age to play to win.