Inside Facebook

In an effort to demonstrate its social movie marketing potential, Facebook is gearing up for the premiere of new surf movie One Track Mind on Facebook Film next week. The 48-hour showing will go from 5:30pm PT on Thursday, October 16 until the same time on Saturday, October 18. From the flyer:

[Director] Chris Malloy and crew are celebrating the release by inviting fans to participate in a live video broadcast starting 5:30pm Pacific time on Thursday, October 16th. Surfers from the film and Brushfire Records recording artist Matt Costa will join Chris discussing the film.

The movie will be streaming throughout the 48 hours through the Kyte video player built on the Facebook Platform.

Facebook goes on to elaborate on the tools the producers are using to market the film inside Facebook:

The player lets fans chat live while watching the film. Check out how One Track Mind is using Facebook’s free marketing tools—Photos, Video, Events, Notes, Posted Items, FBML, Platform applications, and more—to promote the new film One Track Mind.

We’ll see over the coming months whether Facebook intends to make Facebook Film a bigger part of its overall advertising plans.

Facebook has been growing by leaps and bounds in 2008. In June, Facebook became the largest social network by reach at 132 million uniques, a 35% jump from the end of 2007, according to comScore.

Inside Facebook has been gathering per-country data periodically from Facebook’s advertising tools over the last year. Since our last report on Facebook’s international growth in July:

• Facebook’s user base grew by nearly 25% to 102 million active users. Facebook added nearly 20 million more members during the third quarter, 80% of which came from outside the US.
• 17 countries now have more than 1 million Facebook users: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Turkey, Chile, France, Australia, Colombia, Venezuela, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Argentina. South Africa and Belgium will be next to cross the mark.
• Facebook’s torrid growth in Europe and South America has continued. 10 of the 15 fastest growing countries in 3Q08 were European; 3 were South American.

Here’s a look at the top 25 Facebook user populations by country, the fastest growing countries during 3Q08, and the fastest growing countries overall for 2008. (Note: this data is self-reported by Facebook users, and growth rates are approximately but not exactly quarterly.)

Top 25 Countries on Facebook as of 8 October 2008

Top 40 Fastest Growing Countries on Facebook in 3Q08 (%)

Top 40 Fastest Growing Countries on Facebook in 2008 (%)

Additional Inside Facebook Resources:

• Tutorial: Translating Your Applications Using Facebook’s Crowd-sourced Translation Service

Appssavvy, a direct sales team for Facebook and other social media app developers, announced yesterday that it has closed a $3.1 million round of funding led by True Ventures. Jon Callaghan led the investment for True. Scott Kurnit, founder of About.com, also participated in the round.

Appssavvy has built its business to date by acting as direct sales reps for many of the largest Facebook app developers to major brands. The company has matched up the likes of 42 Friends, Bantr, Flixster, FrozenBear, MesmoTV, Playfish and SGN with brands like adidas, Clorox, and Sony, and agencies like Carat, Horizon Interactive, Moxie Interactive, Palisades Media and Universal McCann.

Appssavvy founder and CEO Chris Cunningham says the company will use the funds to continue to grow its core business. “We have and will continue to focus on the core assets to our business model of building-out a world class sales and marketing team; establishing relationships with social media application developers and publishers, and brands and agencies; and leveraging and developing tools and technologies specific to furthering the success of social media application marketing,” he said.

As the Facebook Platforum matures, many large app developers are either building sales teams in house or hiring reps like Appssavvy to match them up with large brands. “The importance of third party applications on usage patterns is an important trend, akin to the video market a few years ago ─ we believe connecting application developers with advertisers is the next, inevitable, step for this emerging space,” Callaghan said.

Friendster, the biggest social network in Asia, will announce later this evening that it is expanding its application developer program by adding support for the Facebook Platform API. With tonight’s launch, Friendster will be the first social network to have implemented support for both the OpenSocial and Facebook Platform application development standards. Friendster launched OpenSocial support just this August, after implementing its own application platform in 2007.

The Friendster launch is a big opportunity for Facebook application developers interested in Asian markets. Facebook developers will be able to easily port (most parts of) their Facebook applications over to Friendster with very little work, gaining access to Friendster’s audience of 57 million users. According to comScore, Friendster’s user base only has a 22% overlap with Facebook’s, so Friendster offers access to an audience largely untapped by most Facebook developers.

In addition, Friendster is less restrictive about which parts of the application can be monetized. Developers can put ads on any real estate they control, including the profile page.

Facebook Platform API categories that will be supported as of launch tonight include: users, friends, notifications, photos, FBML, FQL, authentication, requests, and profile. The news feed API will not be supported, but it will be in the future. Friendster’s Director of Marketing Jeff Roberto says that Friendster intends to keep its Facebook Platform implementation up to date with Facebook’s, but it will just take a little more time to initially get in sync.

“Our vision with the developer program is to build a very open platform and to make it easy for developers who have built on common standards like Facebook and OpenSocial to deploy on Friendster,” Roberto says. “We will maintain our Friendster APIs, Facebook APIs, and OpenSocial APIs.”

Friendster becomes the second major social network to license the Facebook Platform API under the Facebook Open Platform (fbOpen) initiative. Late last year, Bebo launched its platform using Facebook APIs, shortly before being acquired by AOL.

As brands continue to use the Facebook Platform as a way to deeply engage Facebook users, agencies and marketers are increasingly looking for case studies on ways applications can deliver for their clients. Some big brands recently released new Facebook apps, so be sure to check them out. More examples of recent “app-vertisements” are available here and here.

1. Electronic Arts Warhammer Kill Drill

“Electronic Arts reached out to Context in order to engage the audience for the launch of its latest MMOG, Warhammer Online,” says Kevin Barenblat of Context Optional, who created the application. The app includes physics-based animation and ties into a promotional point system for the game, and interactions on Facebook earn points that are credited to the user’s EA account.

2. Reebok Talkin’ Crazy

“The ATR Talkin Krazy basketball sneakers allow ‘ballers’ to tag up their shoes with a dry erase marker as a means of smack talking while on the court. We saw unlimited potential for an app-vertisement that would highlight the coolest features of these sick kicks,” says Greg Roth of Buddy Media, who created the app. The app allows users to send “smack talk” to their friends in the form of virtual Reebok gifts, personalized messages, or YouTube or Vimeo videos.

3. ABSOLUT Global Cooling

This app allows users to share cocktail recipes with their friends/ For every drink that is sent, ABSOLUT will donate $1 to one of 5 environmental charities of their choice, up to $500k. “ABSOLUT had been running the campaign on a microsite for much of the year and reached out to Context to tap into the viral communication channels of Facebook.  Using Facebook platform as a marketing platform ABSOLUT seeks to build brand affinity for Global Cooling as well as support the environment,” says Context’s Barenblat.

Developers interested in getting higher than remnant CPMs can take advantage of a short term offer from Lookery that’s good for tomorrow only.  The offer guarantees $0.25 net CPM for US traffic in the 728×90, 300×250, and 160×600 ad sizes. For more information, click here.

While it’s widely known that Facebook and Microsoft are collaborating on implementing Live Search in Facebook sometime “by the end of the year,” there is another Facebook group at Microsoft that you may not have heard of.

Sebastian Gard, Viral Marketing Manager in the Digital Experiences team at Live Search Consumer Marketing, is heading up an experimental effort at Microsoft to drive use of Live Search through the viral spread of - you guessed it - Facebook applications.

The first of Microsoft’s applications, Knocked Up, went live last night. It makes use of Live Search’s image search capabilities, along with advanced photo morphing software from Microsoft Research, to let Facebook users see what it might look like if their friends mated with popular celebrities. The often hilarious results can then be tagged with friends’ names and placed in their Facebook photo albums.

Inside Facebook spoke with Gard about his team’s efforts to use the Facebook Platform as a marketing channel for Live Search, and how his efforts related to Microsoft’s collaboration with Facebook overall.

Sebastian, what is Microsoft doing building Facebook apps like “Knocked Up”?

We’re really just trying to drive use of the Live Search platform. We’re taking this powerful platform and building a few narrow, entertaining applications on top of it. This is the first of those.

We really went into this with a sense of fun. At the same time, we’re Microsoft, and we have access to Microsoft research that makes our apps a little bit more solid and mature than what else you might see out there. We have access to some great code.

How is this achieving your goals at Live Search Consumer Marketing?

Search is very broadly horizontal.  As we compete with Google, if we can come in with a very narrowly focused message, Facebook applications offer us the opportunitity (though a somewhat limited one) to get our message across. We can build on top of Live Search capabilities like image search and pulling in celebrity photos based on search popularity. We could see this applying to QnA and Maps as well.

How does Knocked Up take advantage of the Facebook Platform?

Well, we’re dealing with very photographic content, which seems to do well on Facebook. We also create an album for you and automatically save all the pictures you create there. If you tag friends in the photo, that’s a huge attractor. You can use Knocked Up as a “weapon” with your friends, and get huge threads going.

We’re trusting word of mouth to spread the app, as there’s no way currently to click through to the application from a photo album. We’re going very light on the use of Facebook invitations and requests.

How does your group interact with those integrating Live Search with Facebook?

Live Search is being integrated into the Facebook platform, which is very exciting, through we’re not specifically a part of that effort. Facebook is taking a very thorough approach to how they’re putting Live Search in, however - they’re not just plugging web search in like we’ve seen other social networks do.

Thanks Sebastian. Any final thoughts?

The challenge for us is really how can we keep up a steady stream of ideas like Knocked Up? Can we get the community involved? It will be really interesting to see.

Last week, we wrote about CBS launching the first significant Facebook Connect implementation on the web at TheInsder.com. While we’re still in the very early days of the Connect-ization of the web, two more sites have quietly launched Facebook Connect implementations in the wild today - MoveOn and Red Bull - that show the potential power of Facebook Connect to 1) spread political campaigns and 2) allow brands to engage their customers more virally.

1) MoveOn.org - Spreading a cause through Facebook Connect

MoveOn has implemented Facebook Connect to spread the word about its Obama/Biden sticker campaign. When you sign up for free stickers, you can tick a checkbox to publish the story to your Wall. When friends see the story, they can go directly to the MoveOn page and get more stickers.

2) Red Bull - Engaging customers through Facebook Connect

Red Bull is using Facebook Connect in their blog comments, allowing users to login using their Facebook account and then share their comments with their friends on their Wall. Friends will then see Red Bull on your profile page and can easily click out to the article on the Red Bull blog to further engage with the brand.

Red Bull has also created a Facebook Connect portal - it’s the first Flash app to integrate with Facebook Connect on the web. Here, users are able to read content from other Red Bull sites, comment on the postings (which will also display on the other sites), and view comments left by their Facebook friends.

We’re still very early in the game, but these examples show the ways that Connect can enhance the rest of the web by making it more social and allowing anyone to leverage the power of Facebook’s social graph to share information - right on their own site.

This is the first article in a series that aims to arm developers with tools to sell space to advertisers.  It’s by no means the defacto standard, but rather represents a vision of the most favorable direction Facebook application developers can take.

In this article, we’ll discuss the concepts related to user engagement, what the terms mean, and how to communicate them to advertisers. Little did I know that it would end up following Brian Morrissey’s Adweek article calling for better integration between Silicon Valley and Madison Avenue.

What is Engagement?

In advertising, “engagement” is an over-arching term used to describe user interest in an ad.  In rich media ads, “engagement time” is the actual time spent with the ad.  This is similar to the analytics concept “average time on site”.  “Interaction rate” is a term that was created by the rich media advertising providers to describe the frequency of interactions users have with an ad during a given period of engagement.

Engagement time and Interaction rate — when paired together — allow us to evaluate the interest of the user and the value of the time spent with a rich media ad.  If this language is employed when discussing applications as well as ads served within an app, it will help savvy media buyers conceptualize the effectiveness and attractiveness of both.

Much of today’s interactive ad space is sold based on a CPM, or Cost Per Thousand impressions, basis.  As a result, some of the most trafficked sites are getting all of today’s ad budgets, even though the average user spends most of their time off the beaten track.  There are increasing rumblings, however, that a better measurement for online ads must include engagement and interaction rather than just “eyeballs.”

Looking at an Example Facebook App

Take, for example, SuperPoke. SuperPoke starts with a basic CTA in notifications and feed stories that pull users in. Once enticed to enter SuperPoke, the user is given a screen with poke options.  Here, the user is engaged and interacting with the app.  This is an excellent context for small, relevant ads.  It’s also an important place to measure interactions, and where the user spends the bulk of his/her engagement time.

SuperPoke is great at generating page views and visits.  In fact, the app does a great job drawing users back on a regular basis.  When selling to those that only look at traditional metrics like impressions and visits, this is about as much as they care to know.

However, selling advertising in an app should employ the same concepts and language associated with rich media advertising. Interactive advertising is becoming less about visits or impressions, and more about engaged time spent. Savvy media buyers will expect the same from an app based purchase.

Going Forward

The challenge for developers in the near term is to sell to less advanced media planners that seek to buy on a CPM basis.  You can’t blame or argue with them - it’s what they’re used to for buys in other media.

However, more advanced planners will ask tough questions about engagement, and will put their plan and money behind placements that drive both user engagement and “eyeballs.”  Over time, this will become the standard (it already is for the leaders in the industry) - which is great news, because engagement is an area in which many Facebook applications can excel over other forms of media.

In the next article in this series, we’ll discuss some of the challenges inherent in integrating ads in apps, like balancing user experience and brand interaction. In the third article, we’ll discuss advanced targeting and metrics that take full advantage of an app platform such as network and cohort effects.

Please be sure to comment if you have questions or a different viewpoint!

For Facebook application developers looking for a way to monetize unsold inventory, Sydney, Australia-based social ad network Triana Global is guaranteeing floor CPM and CPC rates for new developers willing to try its networks. App developers can choose between two offers:

• $0.15 USD CPMs on standard banner sizes
• $0.08 USD CPCs on standard banner sizes

Current apps on the Triana network include Friends Finance, Private Photo Gallery, and Friend Wheel, so you can check them out to see what kind of ads Triana Global is running.

“For publishers that take the CPC option of $0.08, they normally end up getting eCPM’s of around $0.50, with some of our publishers over $3.00 eCPM. The $0.15 CPM is great for publishers whose CTR is less than 0.2%, but is still looking for some good payouts,” says Triana’s Nabil Naghdy.

The offer is good on all global traffic, and is similar in price to guarantees from other ad networks we’ve seen in the past, like Lookery and Platform-A, but with fewer restrictions. However, like all ad networks, developers should see what works best for their particular application.

Triana also works with app developers on MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, and Orkut.