Following this belief, Facebook has now taken the latest step in its online advertising with the introduction of ‘engagement ads’. The ads focus on brand interaction and growth, allowing users to give ‘branded’ gifts, make comments or become a fan of a brand. Users are also able to give a thumbs up or down next to an advert and give a reason why.

Traditionally social media sites and most internet websites focus on display advertising such as banner adverts and pay per click marketing. Facebook’s latest move focuses more on traditional marketing aspects such as brand awareness and interaction, making the social network more of a focus group than an advertising platform.

It is well known that Facebook has had dismal success with online advertising. The social network which generates the majority of its revenues through advertising sees clickthrough rates of around 0.04% according to one report, which in reality is 400 in a million. Of course most of the users are penniless students as the report states, and have more of an interest in chatting with friends than responding to advertising messages.

All of this information is being highlighted right as Facebook brings their application development contest to a close. Some of the more interesting applications include BarTab where you can send a drink to a friend’s phone for $1. The drink can be redeemed at participating restaurants and bars. Partybuzz is another interesting application which focuses on the offline parties that are being organised online by friends. The application gives an overview of the average age, girl/guy ratio and number of singles.

While all of Facebook’s new engagement advertising is very interesting, everything will depend on the bottom line. In a recession display advertising and brand awareness budgets are always decreased in favour of measurable methods, which are going to be PPC and SEO. While great fun, if the engagement advertising campaign doesn’t meet the needs of advertisers, Zuckenberg will have more trouble engaging advertisers than he will users.

Despite only one in 12.5 million people wanting to buy male-enhancement products by clicking on a link in their junk mail, spammers are still making a profit, so a recent research paper claims.

Researchers at the University of California carried out a study on spam email and found that for one email advertising pharmaceuticals (specifically male-enhancement products (what else)) they got a conversion rate of 0.0000081%. That is 28 conversions out of 347,590,389 targeted emails addresses. Despite such a miniscule conversion rate, researchers claim they would have generated $2,731 in revenue.

The stats around spam are staggering. The BBC report that more than 90% of all email is spam, and there are only 200 spammers worldwide responsible for 80% of all spam. Apparently, most of these are in China or Russia.

According to the research, it is people in India, Pakistan and Bulgaria that are clicking on the “pharmaceuticals” spam the most – read into that what you will.

It seems though, that a real life version of Rate Your Doc has sprung up in the US. Doctor.com claims to be “The number 1 Doctor Resource Online”. Basically, it is a search engine that enables you to search for a doctor by state and city, medical speciality and by what insurance they accept. When you have performed your search you then get a Google Map mash up with the search results pinpointed.

Doctor.com doesn’t just let you search for your doctor though; it lets you rate your doctor! By the side of each search result is a little star rating (because the quality of service a doctor provides can always be summed up by a star rating). Other options offer you to “Save on Doclist” and one can go about updating their Doclist till their heart’s content.

According to Doctor.com “Nearly every licensed medical professional in the United States has a Doctor.com profile” which seems slightly baffling. There are apparently 1.2 million profiles in the database. Honestly, it all seems a bit Scrubs to me. But you’ve got to hand it to the chaps from Doctor.com, it is a fantastic effort at social media for the medical profession.

Reva Health is another health company that is incorporating really successful social media aspects into their website. The company provides a search engine for dental and cosmetic surgery clinics around the world which also includes a similar Rate Your Doc style reviewing system.

I really don’t see something like Doctor.com working in the UK. Mainly because our lovely state health service doesn’t really need to market themselves towards the public quite as aggressively as is needed in the US. However, it’s good to see the medical profession using Scrubs as a business model.

E-mail accounts beginning with the letters A, M, P, R and S were found to be the most targeted whilst Q, Y and Z were most often left alone – often with a discrepancy worth 20% of an inbox.

Dr Richard Clayton, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, is presumably a man who suffers from junk mailers as he is the one behind the research. He explains his findings by trying to understand the way spammers send out their e-mails, saying that once they find one e-mail that works (for example email@address.com) then they will look for other addresses that begin email@. Because there are more e-mails accounts beginning with S than Q, it stands to reason that these will be found more often. If you find you sometimes have to struggle to get your desired username, you could well be heading for more spam; the more common your username, the more likely you are to be targeted.

This goes against conventional thinking that it was the e-mail provider that was targeted rather than the username.

More than 550 million e-mails were used in Dr Clayton’s research and his comprehensive search has only thrown up one anomaly – the letter U which seems to get more spam than any other letter despite there being relatively few addresses beginning with it.

Probing Deep has blogged about this story and from his experience it works out. He has two e-mail addresses, one beginning with M and the other F, and true to Dr Clayton’s claims the one starting with M receives a lot more spam. Others have decided that setting up an e-mail address as Quincy or Xavier is the way forward.

This news has previously been mis-reported as being about a letter’s position in the alphabet, but that has since been clarified.

It’s a simple procedure to start up your Lively world too; all you need to begin with is a Google account, where you can then download a plug-in for your browser that allows each user to customise their avatar. With the customisation option, each user can alter the appearance of their avatar from hair colour, skin colour and eye colour’s, and should you feel more adventurous then start dressing your character by adding bling to them as much as you possibly desire.

Then there is the fun of designing your own virtual room for your avatar with the many templates available to choose from. With further customisation selections, the theme of a room can range from indoor rooms to outdoor rooms such as a desert island to a 5 room apartment, where you can even include furniture, background music, and YouTube videos on your virtual plasma screen. These Lively rooms provide a point of interaction for Internet users, being able to chat, show emotions and if your avatar is blessed with guns, move furniture around, should you feel compelled to perform some Grand Design action in a virtual world.

Google are hoping that their Lively virtual room will take social networking to a new level of interaction with people on the Internet; the potential is huge with being able to place your avatar in any Lively room available online. At the moment Google are providing it for free but rumours circulating expect once Lively has become, well lively, then a small fee may be expected for premium versions of room templates.

Comparisons are already being made to Second Life, but Google’s Lively aim to create small virtual environments amongst users rather than one large virtual world. As AdLab run down their first impressions of Lively, this new concept may take time for new users to comprehend but sooner or later you could be watching clips of the new football season on the big screen in your living room (in a virtual world of course…)

As reported by Brand Republic the service will allow users to access all of their social networking sites from one interface by displaying the most popular functions of each site in one place. This means that people wanting to make quick updates will not need to log into each site individually to make the changes they want.

Mike Butcher of Techcrunch notes that the popularity of these types of services and all the mobile apps that are coming out lately will largely depend on the technology in users’ hands. If the user experience is less than stellar then the use of mobiles for accessing social networks as well as using browsers, then the mobile movement may not move anywhere – at least until the technology catches up with the ideas.

But these ideas are not supported by the evidence noted of usage of mobiles to upload content to social networks. In the US a whopping 32% of MySpace users upload content taken on a mobile phone. It’s clear that there is already a connection between sharing content such as photos, ringtones, and more on mobiles.

Soon, you wont even need your computer to do it.

In response to the internet’s popularity as a source of information and as an escape from real life worries a UK charity has broadened its online presence.

As well as creating pages on social networking sites Bebo, Facebook and MySpace, Contact a Family – a charity that offers support and advice to parents of disabled children – have set up a virtual office on Second Life. Second Life is an online, 3-D world that allows users from across the globe to meet, trade property and have children together.

Funded by the government, Contact a Family is moving online to reach a wider audience. Every Wednesday their virtual office is manned allowing parents to pop in for a chat and at other times Second Lifers can use the location as a library.

Mark Robertson, the charity’s head of information, said: “The first place anybody goes for information these days is the internet. There are issues with accessing support in real life, even popping out to a local advice centre. Online and telephone support is and has been for some time important to parents of disabled children.”

This is not the first time a charity has entered a virtual world in an attempt to reach out. Last year, Childline booked a room in Habbo Hotel and, in 2006, World Vision opened a store on Second Life.

Picture from The Guardian

Web comics were one of the first thriving internet communities. Long before Facebook or Bebo the internet housed bustling forums where artists, writers and fans discussed each new episode, blogged, linked and started to accrue significant traffic. Many of the communities which offered free or cut price hosting to web comics (often in exchange for banner displays) survived the dot-com crash and are still going today. Kovalic’s Dork Tower isn’t the only web comic that’s made it from online to the kudos reaping status of in print – this author still has copies of Tycho and Gabe’s Penny Arcade kicking around in his flat.

John Kovalic’s RSS strategy is driven by a genuine appreciation of the blogging fan base he enjoys and by the willingness to let gamers enjoy his insightful art for free – and it is also a very clever strategy.

Simply put, Kovalic allows the daily updates of Dork Tower to be given away for free. Fans do not even need to make the drip to Gamespy, who host the comic, to read it. The full comic strip is available via RSS and fans can read it in Google Reader, Bloglines or on blog communities like LiveJournal where users can add RSS feeds as ‘friends’. There is an element of honour in the ‘viral marketing’ strategy here (a strategy which keeps Dork Tower on most gamers’ lips) as each daily update as a call to honour in which gamers are asked to buy the book or simply shop at Warehouse 23 – Steve Jackson Games’ retailing website. John McHahon (FuzzFaze) the enthusiastic blogger who complies the RSS feed even gets a credit and a plug for his blog at fuzzface00.livejournal.com.

The music industry is beginning to copy this strategy. We have artists like Price and Radiohead who’ll give their music away free and concentrate on the more lucrative touring business. Just a quick scan of the web turns up insightful comments on the strategy, we’ve the PhD student Valentine Zacharias, the media students of We See The Light discussing the trend and even sites like the NY Daily News and Jose Martinez pointing out that Police’s reunion tour was 2007′s top earner.

Hi,

Fake accounts are a violation of our Terms of Use.
Facebook requires users to provide their real first and last
names. Impersonating anyone or anything is prohibited.
Unfortunately, we will not be able to reactivate this account
for any reason. This decision is final.

Thanks for your understanding,

Aubrey
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

Whoops! Needless to say, Jon blogged about this and attracted the attention of Robert Scoble, Dennis Howlett and Steve Rubel to name but a few.

It worked. The next email he had from Facebook reads as follows

Hi Jon,
Upon further review, we have decided to reactivate your account. Our Terms of Use, to which all users agree when they first sign up for the site, stipulate that you must not “impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent yourself, your age or your affiliation with any person or entity.” However, since others on the site seem to know you by this name, and since you don’t appear to be using the name to impersonate or to hide your identity, we have determined that you are not violating these Terms. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. Please let me know if you have further questions or concerns.
Thanks for your understanding,
Jerry
Customer Support Representative
Facebook

Remember Friendster? Over at WebProNews yesterday Robert Scoble asked Will Facebook Get “Friendstered”? and notes the following similarities between the two sites.

1. They didn’t take care of PR and didn’t take care of bloggers. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing. Several people at the dinner tonight noted that Facebook hasn’t responded to claims that Facebook’s employees are spying on data that the public doesn’t have access to. And that’s just one PR complaint.

2. They kicked people out that they didn’t like. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing.

3. They didn’t respond to new competitors who took away their coolness. Facebook? They are about to meet their biggest competition yet.

Facebook faces a mountain of expectation now. Could that be its undoing?