I recently setup and developed a marketing.fm facebook application which is available here. With some serious help from widgetbox and their create your own facebook application maker it was easy to setup. It is simply another publication of this blogs feed in a cool flash widget.

Hat tip to David Berkowitz and Charlie O’Donnell for this one.

I setup a Marketing.fm widget awhile back and basically forgot about it as it did not make much sense to put it in my blog sidebar. After checking the stats I am impressed that it made its way out onto the web. It turns out our marketing widget has 57 subscribers. We have received about 500 hits this month from the widget – most coming from this media 2.0 blog. (blog not in English)

If you are interested in checking out the marketing facebook app click here. I also think its great that I snagged the name “marketing” for my application back when registration first opened up for all Facebook developers.

Technorati Tags: facebook, marketing widget, marketing.fm, advertising 2.0, facebook app

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Marketing.fm Facebook App

This can make your head spin a bit – Facebook is now widely considered a platform, and now Super Wall is a platform on top of a platform. It’s a good thing I guess that no one is slowing down long enough to really think too hard about how quickly the online world is evolving.

Essentially this means social networks such as Facebook are allowing third party developers to build in functionality that they may not ever add to the system to make the user experience more enjoyable, shareable, viral, and useful. Not all of the programs fit this profile and many will fail. Others, such as Lookery, are devoted towards creating ad networks on top of these systems.

Facebook and other social networks are looking at yielding some of their ad revenue to third party developers who can build and sell advertising delivery systems to others at a possible cheaper rate. One of the biggest problems to date with Facebook advertising has been its poor ad performance. This is definitely not to say advertising will stop, or even slow down on FB.

As the social networks become the new programming platforms this can mean many different things for developers and advertisers. How much of your resources should you devote towards building your functionality into someone else’s platform? What recourse do you have within this private space? Is having access to the millions of MySpace, iVillage, or Facebook users worth the resources? What happens if the system goes down?

Hopefully these questions will all be answered soon.

This brings us back to something Lee Jones wrote about Facebook almost one year ago comparing the big networks at the time – what is funny is that everything is still true!

While Facebook has not officially been sold, it still looks like News Corp. got the best deal in terms of price and overall reach. A lot can still change however:

1) NBC is revamping iVillage to be an all inclusive, NBC Universal-online destination

2) Yahoo! could purchase Facebook and take social networking to new levels

3) MySpace, although still the leader, could lose some ground if the other social networks develop dynamic and exciting new features.

It is fascinating to see the growth that these open systems are stimulating – I am waiting for some developer to build the first social networking program in top of the Facebook program. (hey, its now possible.)

Technorati Tags: myspace, facebook, social networking, AOL, ivillage, social networking platforms, marketing.fm, online advertising

Post from: Eric Friedman
You should follow me on Twitter here
Social Networking Platforms

Today’s Advertise Different post is about the upcoming Mountain Dew promotion to hype the upcoming Xbox game Halo 3. (As a gamer I am excited for this game to drop, and may even have to buy an Xbox because of Halo 3 coming out.) On the marketing side of things I think this is a great promotion. The drink will called “Game Fuel” and it appears it will feature Halo 3 on the labeling. This makes sense for everyone involved and to me is simply one of those moments where I am glad cross brand marketing exists. It also shows a great connection with the consumer.

Connection points and obvious facts:

• Gamers drink Mountain Dew.
• Mountain Dew drinkers play Halo.
• Mountain Dew helps you stay up to play video games.
• Microsoft is coming out with a new game, Halo 3, soon.
• Pepsi wants to stay connected with gamers as well as promote a game that is basically guaranteed to be a smash hit.

All very obvious facts but sometimes it is hard to see things for what they are. This partnership makes sense to me for multiple reasons and will hopefully generate some good ideas. I come across many integrations that I just do not understand and have to wonder how they get past the whiteboard stage… This is thankfully not one of those times, and I think it will do well.

Technorati Tags: Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Halo, Halo 3, Microsoft, marketing.fm, marketing, advertising, cross promotions

Post from: Eric Friedman
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Advertise Different: Mountain Dew and Microsoft Xbox 360 and Halo 3