Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’m doing some research on using Facebook to market. I’m interested to learn more about people’s experience using Facebook to market. I’d love to hear what you’ve found works and doesn’t work.

Some more specifics of things I’ve been considering is the different between a Facebook Fan page versus a Group page. My understanding is that Group pages are kind of the “legacy” pages that Facebook is slowly phasing out and moving to Fan pages. Is this true? If not, why would you use a Facebook Fan page over a group page or vice versa?

From what I can tell, it makes more sense to have a Fan page. If group pages are indeed being phased out by Facebook, then a Fan page is even more important. However, how do you best make the transition from a group page to a fan page? It’s unfortunate to lose all of those followers when you make the switch. Is there a way to keep all your followers and just convert your group page into a Fan page? If not, Facebook should make a tool for this.

One other question is, “does it matter which category your Fan page is in?” I imagine like most people you could put your fan page in all sorts of categories. Sometimes the categories match great, but most fan pages could be in a number of spots. Does it really matter? Seems to me that it would only matter if you were the top Fan Page in that category maybe?

Ok, there is a start for the discussion. Anyone have some other thoughts on engaging people on Facebook as well?

I think the image pretty much speaks for itself. One of the funniest images I’ve seen in a while. I love the relationship one.

Today Techcrunch announced that Facebook just passed up MySpace as the largest social network. I think we all knew that this was inevitable. MySpace sucks and Facebook sucks much less.

The worst part of it all is that MySpace is still going to be around for a long time to come. In fact, last I checked it was still growing quite rapidly. MySpace is to social networking what AOL was to dial up. We’re getting really close to the end of AOL, but I’m afraid that we may not see the end of MySpace. Let’s just hope I can keep my children away from it.

Congratulations Facebook.

Today I was trying to click through to Facebook and got a screen saying “Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Of course, this all comes a day after Michael Arrington declared on Twitter that Facebook was loading faster than ever. I actually tried it myself when I saw the tweet and he was right. Facebook was zippy last night. Too bad tonight they decided to follow the twitter model and declare that “It should be available again within a few hours.” Nice of Facebook to leave it vague so that it can be down more than a few hours.

Seriously? Did Facebook actually post on their website that I have to wait a few hours for my Facebook addiction? Seems like Facebook might want to recruit a few more Google engineers that can find a way to recover/update in less then a few hours.

I must admit that over the past couple days I’d read references to Redeye VC’s post about Microsoft and Yahoo employees leaving. I thought it was an interesting experiment, but like he said it wasn’t scientific at all. It definitely classified solely as the interesting test and nothing more.

Well, it turns out that the experiment turned out to be very useful, but not for its intended purpose. Instead, it teaches a cruel lesson about how various online endeavors in this connected web 2.0 world can go terribly wrong. Take a look at the unintended consequences of what happened.

We’ll have to all keep our eyes open for times when unintended consequences affect someone else on the web. It’s a feature of a connected world and there’s really no turning back in many cases. All we can do is be open and honest about what happened and then move forward.

I’ve started my big project to finish a facebook application for miaMessage and Spoil On. I must admit that it’s a little bit daunting to learn FBML and to crack open my PHP knowledge which hasn’t been thoroughly used for a while. However, we’re doing our best. So far the Facebook Developers wiki for FBML has been really helpful and I also found the Facebook Code Examples to be interesting too. If anyone else knows of some great documentation tutorials or code samples, please let me know.

Today I came across an article saying that Facebook will be Launching a SocialAds Network on November 6th. I’m interested to see what exactly this is going to be. Something like Google Adsense for Facebook applications? Or is it more like Google Adwords for Facebook? Or maybe it’s both. I guess it does make sense for Facebook to launch their own ad network first. They certainly want to make sure they have enough inventory to be able to place ads throughout facebook and throughout the gazillion facebook applications out there before they open up an ad network to facebook applications. However, considering all the buzz over Facebook, I’d expect that Facebook should be able to sell ad inventory pretty quickly or use some of the ad inventory from their new ad partner, Microsoft.

In that same article, they also suggested Facebook launching an advanced analytics package and e-commerce features for the Facebook platform. That would be pretty sweet. I’ve thought about the e-commerce package from day one. I’ve always thought that the best way to monetize a facebook application would be for facebook to provide a means for users to purchase things using facebook. The facebook application I’m currently building is one that would really benefit from a well done e-commerce facebook package.