Even though the targeting system depends on Facebook users providing their personal information and not everyone is always willing to do so – about one third of the Dutch Facebook users seem to be neither male nor female, for example – it will eventually always deliver more details about the ‘targets’ than Google will. Even though it has been ridiculed often in the short time of its existence – by aforementioned Valleywag, for example – we expect Facebook advertising to grow quickly over the coming months. We can’t wait for the results to come in…

Update: Advertising Age reports that Facebook has sent various invitations to New York advertising agencies, for a talk about new ways of advertising. No doubt that the above will be the main subject of this chat.

“Manpower restraints” – 51.1%

“Fear of loss of control” – 46.9%

“Inadequate metrics” – 45.4%

“Culture of their organizations” – 43.5%

“Difficulty with internal sell-through” – 35.8%

‘Fear of loss of control’ and ‘Culture of their organizations’ are basically other ways of saying ‘we don’t think that we have good enough a product to let the public decide for themselves what they think of us.’ Social conversations should be the means to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in general marketers think that it is very well able to do so. They are even slightly nervous to have an (online) community talk about their products. We think, therefore, that the prediction of huge ‘conversation marketing’ spend will not come true. The issue is, that when you need make a lot of effort to affect social conversations in your favour, then a mere increase in social marketing spend is probably not going to solve your problems.

Positive social conversations about a product happen, because people like your product, and not for any other reason. As an example, take Starbucks. The valuable observation that companies and marketers should take from this research, is that they should invest in having a true conversation with the customer themselves, and listen to their needs.

Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are all trying to get their hands on advertising space on Facebook. Microsoft has already signed a contract for exclusive advertising on Facebook’s US pages, but other countries are still up for grabs. Also, all three of the giants are looking to buy a part of the company, it is rumoured, where the most concrete offer would be $500 million for five percent of the company from Microsoft.

Now VentureBeat points out that Google has found a backdoor into advertising space on Facebook. It is apparently actively approaching Facebook application developers – who are free to advertise in their own application as much as they want – to sign up for the Google AdSense program. This way, regardless of any deals Facebook might strike with other companies, Google is ensured of being able to advertise on the popular social network.

At 77 we look at the implication for marketers, which is; more points for Google. The attitude of Facebook to leave the building and use of its applications completely free to the developers has helped it grow and receive goodwill – even though the quality of the applications is often not exactly breath taking – and Google has jumped on the band wagon. We might expect an option in the AdSense program soon that will allow us to place our advertisements with certain Facebook applications, an advertising channel that is really targeted, and thus of high value.

A short time after it was reported that Facebook reached more users in the UK than MySpace, CNN Money writes that the latter will introduce ad-sponsored video channels for its UK users. This could give MySpace an advantage over Facebook, when it comes to user experience, at the same time cutting into YouTube’s market of advertising on video content. MySpace will offer at least the drama Prom Queen, and will be using a similar format as Google-owned YouTube; an overlay advertisement on the bottom 20% of the screen, which links to the advertiser’s website. Also, the ads will only be placed on the video content MySpace has control over and not on user generated content.

What it offers in excess to YouTube, is targeted video advertising. MySpace users give a lot more personal information than YouTube users since MySpace is a social network. Video advertisers will be able to target on age, location, sex, and of course video content. We think that if MySpace can implement this ad system in a short time, it could outperform YouTube. Facebook could rely on its Gadget system for videos in the future, but this will result in third party, or unlicensed content which is much less marketable.

In short, we think the move into professional video by MySpace is a good one and right on time, too. As many online channels will merge and most of the larger sites will start to offer other services (YouTube will certainly become more of a community or at least linked with Google’s new social platform), we feel that marketers should keep an eye open for the fastest movers in the industry.

Facebook now offers its advertisers the possibility to target their ads on members, using keywords from their public profiles, reports Clickz. This news comes after Facebook announced to make all its basic user profiles publicly available for non-members. It seems to us at 77 that both moves are pointed towards the same goal, that is to make targeted marketing a lot easier to their advertisers.

For marketers, it is crucial that Facebook has made user profiles available to them. We suspect that this construction allows advertisers to search for, and categorize users based on keywords. It would make the lives of marketers a lot easier if they could have their ads viewed by everyone who has listed, let’s say, ‘playing poker’ as a hobby. This kind of targeting could be a major step for Facebook in monetizing its popularity. Behaviorally targeted advertising is, according to recent research (reports WebProNews), more effective than contextual advertising. This apart form the fact that contextually targeted marketing is already pretty difficult in a social network.

Facebook will run ads anyway, as they have been doing for a long time. Its users can only benefit from targeted advertising so it seems to us, that this is a good development for both users and advertisers. Facebook is becoming the Google of social networking.

Of course, people are worried about privacy issues. On this subject, the Times Online wrote a critical and interesting article about Facebook and MySpace’s privacy statutes. The article also points out that only two in ten users have not allowed Facebook to publish their profiles. The editor of the article questions whether the other 80 percent knows about the things Facebook can do with the information. It might be possible that a large part of its users do not know that they have options regarding their personal info, but in that case they obviously don’t care much about it. In short, we do not see any problems with this issue when it comes to marketing.

The motive for Facebook is getting more users and strengthening the connections between it existing users because it’s easier o find out who else of one’s friends is on Facebook. Marketers do not yet profit of this new search option, as they can still only reach individuals through it and not, for example, interest groups. And it does not look like Facebook will at any time incorporate a mass message function, so for advertising purposes we will need to approach Facebook with social and viral marketing in mind. That means we will still need to create campaigns that social networkers will be glad to share because of its entertaining value, like this one:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf4EZtY5Zm8]

Search Engine Land pointed us to where Joe Whyte published a list of what he claims to be all the social media sites. It’s a good and extensive list but we already miss at least one site: dodgeball. We are still keeping an eye on this Google-owned social mobile network, and it seems to be taking off slowly in NYC.

For marketers, this list is indispensable if you are looking for a social network to advertise on as it provides us with new social media we had not heard of yet.

Microsoft has entered the mobile market, striking a deal with Nokia that secures the Windows Live services to be freely distributed on all Nokia N models. At 77 we think that’s a good move by MS, mostly because the method of social mobile networking (MSN) becomes predetermined with the phone a customer buys.

The whole Windows Live package is free to download for owners of a Nokia N series phone as of yesterday (from
Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, UK, Sweden, Saudi Arabia and the UAE)
, and will be distributed with the Nokia Series 40 handsets next year.

Many advertising Euros can be made on mobile search and mobile social networking, and Microsoft is securing their position with this agreement. It seems Google is lagging behind, as they only have a deal with LG so far, even though there have been rumors Google wants to start their own mobile phone network. Yahoo has secured its software to be available on
HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung machines as mobile search is expected to grow tremendously over the next few years.

For marketers, Microsoft will soon offer a social network (MSN) that is already popular in Europe on the mobile phone, which can be very valuable when mobile social networking takes off. Companies should be willing to experiment with this network as first movers will reap the most benefits here. And it seems that Microsoft is working hard to offer something good for marketers in this field.

Facebook is reported (WSJ) to be preparing a system for personalized ads. The advertisements would be based on users’ profiles. This move has been expected for a long time, and the real news lies in the announcement that Facebook will start trying to predict the type of products that its users will need in the near future, and adjust the advertisements they will see accordingly.

This ad generation process is different from Google’s in that it tries to figure out for itself what type of product the user would need, without her actively searching for anything; a bit like the automatically generated ads on Gmail that are based on the content of emails. And like Gmail, the system will encounter resistance from privacy-concerned customers.

We think that, when predicting needs, it will be hard to get the ads right on subject. It is probably a good option for Facebook clients that use the social network intensively. For these people, preferences will be easier to predict due to their extensive profile. Also, people willing to share a lot of their personal information will probably object less to being targeted by personal marketing campaigns. For the average user, it might be better for Facebook to stick with regular context advertisements.

Users of social networks use their mobile devices more and more to visit or update their pages, mobile media research company M:Metrics reports. According to 77, marketers will have to focus on applications for social networks that can be easily accessed on a mobile device as well. Think small screens, small buttons (so easy controls) and constant accessibility.

With 12.3 million mobile users from the US and Western Europe logging into a social network in the month of June, this market is already large enough to invest in, and not an emerging market that we need to keep an eye on.

The research further found that in the UK and the US, MySpace was the most popular network to be accessed on a mobile device, while in France, Germany, Italy and Spain, MSN was most popular.Also, in the UK and US the users were slightly older on average, which might explain or be caused by the different platforms.