Last night I had the pleasure of attending a talk held at HeronBridge College dealing with all the new online trends and how one can make a career out of this. Guest speakers Ingrid Rubin and Jaco Meiring did a combined presentation, highlighting what is happening within the “digital space” and what effect it is having in our day to day lives.

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The Facebook Blog reports that a redesigned profile will be launched aimed at making things simpler, cleaner, and more relevant, while still giving you control over your own profile.

The new design will allow Facebook members to use tabs to prioritize fresh pictures, messages, or “feeds” on main profile pages and compartmentalise mini-applications and “static” information such as a curriculum vitae.

These changes are motivated by feedback from users as well as a trend toward people flooding the internet with digital content such as videos, pictures, and musings they want to instantly share. This is according to Facebook vice president of marketing Chamath Palihapitiya.

For more on this update, Facebook recommends that you start with their “Overview” album, or, if you’re itching to find out what happened at the Open Door Event, check out the video of it.

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If you have a question about your Facebook account, please visit the Help page.

More and more the balance of power is changing in favour of what the consumer decides a Brand is all about. Many factors have contributed to this but the most significant being technology and the ability to rapidly disperse information in a totally transparent manner giving the person-on-the-street that ability to voice her/his voice.

The internet and specifically web 2.0 has provided the various platform for this with blogs, social networking sites, forums, wikis to name a few. Marketers need to embrace this change, understand the conversations that are happening around Brands in this space and continuously find ways through passive engagement adding “content” value and allowing consumers to then “pull their Brands in” rather than aggresively pushing our one-sided messages onto them.

See Andy Rice of Yellowwood in an interview on eTV talking about this trend.

The South African facebook network has reached 500,000 members, right now it officially sits at 506,669. Isnt this amazing, from just 80,000 members in June.
I thought that the growth may have started to level off but there aren’t any signs of this happening right now.
Speaking from my own experiences around social networking, and I have registered on most of them, facebook is really the only site that I really enjoy. The continuous flow of new apps and widgets makes it a great “time-out” to go and explore and, if one looks like fun then I’ll interact with it and send it on to my friends.
I also enjoy receiving the short email messages or “super pokes” from my friends / meta-friends, I dont have time to chat to them everyday and this is always a reminder that they are thinking of me; albeit a mass communication.
The appeal of friends from primary school days finding me is also more than I can resist, I suppose it is that “nosy” trait that woman seem to have in seeing what they have done with their lives, how many children they have etc.
The only part of the site that I dont enjoy is the banner advertising, facebook is still not providing advertisers with geo-targetting for South Africa and I am being served ads for totally irrelevant international products and services. I also happen to intensely dislike advertising in my personal space and I consider my profile on facebook my personal space, I chose to be there and want to customise it myself, not have intrusive advertising getting in the way.

I will, however, continue to frequent this site on a daily basis until I stumble across another social networking platform that holds equal appeal.

Yesterday Facebook made a hugely anticipated announcement regarding a new advertising system, but not about broadcasting messages, but about getting into the conversations between people. Facebook Ads includes three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with its audience; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

In other words advertisers will now be able to build their own Facebook business pages and design them any way they like. You can add photo’s, videos, discussion boards and any flash content you want to bring to your page plus any application a third party developer has made.

The second part will consist of Social distribution, now this is interesting. When somebody engages with your page that is spread virally through the network. When someone says they are a fan of your brand that becomes a trusted referral. It goes right to their Mini feed. A strong trusted referral for your brand. You will be able to craft the types of social actions you want to spread across the social graph.

But probable the most important part of this announcement is regarding the third service – “Insights” which is geared toward marketers. Facebook will be able to track how much people are talking about your brand in public forums across Facebook. As you run ads on Facebook you will be able to see the exact mind share you are getting.

Has Facebook finally found a way to make themselves useful in the commercial and advertising market? I guess we will have to wait and see…

facebook is about to hit 400,000 members in the South African network, sitting at 399,294 at this very moment. The growth in the last two weeks, in SA network has been phenomenal. On Sunday, 14th October there were 360,000 members… in 13 days the network has grown by 11%. There are currently around 50 million active members worldwide.

Many cynics of social networking sites say that facebook is just a “fad” and members will soon move onto something else, but with the continual renewal of applications and the easy-to-use format which provides a phenomenal platform for communicating with friends online, this is one “fad” that aint going anywhere.

To add credibility to this statement, a deal has just been concluded with Microsoft who have agreed to invest $240 million into facebook for a 1.6 percent stake in the company; this then values the site at around $15 billion. Under this agreement Microsoft will be the exclusive third-party advertising partner until 2011; this says to me that Microsoft do not see this social networking site as a “fad”; they beat Yahoo and Google to the deal table, who were also in talks to acquire an interest in the company.

facebook will be making a major announcement on the 6th November, in New York, regarding a new way of advertising online which enables companies to better target ad placement ensuring that they can block unwanted associations. This announcement happens to be at the same time as the Adtech “business of modern marketing” conference is being held.

The US online advertising industry is currently at around $40 billion and analysts predict that it will double in size within three years; with online advertsing in South Africa said to be at around R200 million for 2007 we have alot of “catching up” to do and marketers need to understand the value of social networking sites…..these are places that lots of people do spend there precious time out of choice and will continue to do so. facebook has also announced recently that 50% of their members are over 25 years of age, so it is not just a youth site anymore.

…..I know where I would be planning to spend some of my marketing budget….