Integrating Facebook Open Graph (formerly called Facebook Connect)  is a relatively easy way to give your website a boost.

1. Promote Your Site In Your Users’ News Feeds

When a user connect his or her Facebook accounts to a site, that site can then publish information to that user’s News Feed. For example, if a user’s user’s Facebook and Yelp accounts are linked, when the user leaves a review on Yelp, that review can then be simultaneously posted to the user’s Facebook News Feed. The user’s friends will see a snippet from the review and a link to read the whole thing over on Yelp.

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Facebook is no stranger to encouraging or suggesting user actions. The site regularly suggests potential friends as well as encourages users to connect with friends who haven’t been active on the site lately.

But it appears this may be the first time Facebook has actually used peer pressure to encourage action. This new message, apparant to visitors who sign in, encourages users to scan their Skype address book for friends that they might not have connected with on Facebook.
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While users have long pointed out the need for a “dislike” button, Gary Coleman’s untimely death comes as the first celebrity passing since Facebook’s release of the “like” button to the greater internet (i.e. not directly on Facebook). The awkwardness of having a “like” button on an obituary is obvious. Users don’t appear to be too concerned with the unfortunate “like” button, but that may change in the future as more and more negative news headlines get paired up with “like” buttons. Plane crashes and terrorist attacks come to mind.

One solution that sites can implement immediately is to add a setting to their content management system (CMS) to allow editors to remove the “like” button.

During last week’s F8 Developer’s Conference, Facebook announced its new Open Graph platform, which will connect the world’s largest social network to the rest of the internet. Using this new platform websites will be able to incorporate information from Facebook, making it easy to tailor content to user’s interests. In short, Open Graph will make it easier using Facebook… even when they’re not on Facebook’s website!

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Every website design guide will tell you that large blocks of text will be ignored. However, it’s not every day that this is so clearly illustrated.

On Wednesday, a website called ReadWriteWeb.com inadvertently proved that a certain segment of users will completely ignore all text except for the exact phrase they are looking for.

ReadWriteWeb published an article called Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login. Google picked up that post and presented it a news result for the search “facebook login”, which meant that (at least for a few hours) it came up above the normal Google results for “facebook login”.

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In 2010, Facebook will develop new tools to measure the ROI of marketing and advertising on their platform.

During the first day of Social Media Week 2010, Fabio Freyre (Facebook’s VP of Advertising), hinted that Facebook is currently in advanced stages of “developing additional tools and analytics” to measure online and offline engagement within their own platform. These tools will be stronger and more robust than the tools Facebook has previously made available, which merely poll users about brands.

One of the biggest questions regarding social media and engagement is, “how do we measure this stuff?” There are professional agencies that are dedicated to measuring social awareness, buzz, engagement, and ultimately return on investment (ROI).

Specifically with Facebook, how does one know how much value to place on a “fan” (a person who has attached themselves to the Facebook page of a company, brand, or organization) of a particular brand? How much is that fan worth? What is the scale of engagement that fan has with his “community”?
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(source: Mr. Kris)

Organizations are flocking to social media hubs to attempt to engage with their audience, and every organization has a different motive. Some are corporations attempting to rebrand themselves (@GMblogs, @Chrysler, @ComcastCares)  while others attempt to continue the conversation away from the brick-and-mortar standard of yesteryear. (more…)

(source: Matt Hamm)

Blue Fountain Media is working with the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, and it has been a rewarding experience to know that we are helping them for an overall greater cause. Gift of Life is one of largest bone marrow registries in the United States. They focus on the Jewish community—finding a matching bone marrow donor is difficult, but since tissue type is genetic, a patient is most likely to find a matching donor of the same ethnic background.

The Madoff debacle affected the Gift of Life in more ways than one, and that’s where we come in. Blue Fountain Media has been doing Social Media Marketing for their bone marrow and donor campaigns.

When we started these campaigns, Gift of Life had some questions:

So how can social media help us?

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