The Social

The new AOL.com.

As promised, AOL turned on its redesigned homepage Thursday in conjunction with CEO Tim Armstrong's ceremonial ringing of the New York Stock Exchange opening bell. The company formally spun off from parent company Time Warner this week and is now traded publicly, and to commemorate the media-centric rebirth, it enlisted branding agency Wolff Olins to give it a spiffy new look.

Wolff Olins describes the rebranding as "deliberately disruptive and deliberately unlike what is being done by other online media businesses...designed for an environment where media is no longer broadcast, but rather is discovered through fragmented, non-linear conversations." Deep.

'Will you be my friend?'

(Credit: AOL)

Well, the new AOL.com looks pretty much the same as the old AOL.com, except that in addition to the new logo, I'm given the option to navigate through "themes" featuring various drawings and photos. Conveniently, the color scheme of the page changes to match the selected image. By default, I was offered an adorable smiling blue monster peeking out at me from behind all that shiny content that AOL believes will save not only its brand, but the entire beleaguered media industry.

The same fuzzy monster image was hanging on a massive banner outside the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday night, when AOL invited employees, advertising and marketing types, and the occasional celebrity (OMG! P. Diddy was there!) to a glitzy party on the trading floor (in which a significant amount of financial-industry machinery was likely in grave danger of being damaged by splashes from liberally mixed cocktails or rogue bits of sushi rice).

Really important question: What is the monster's name? I'm sure someone internal at AOL or Wolff Olins has come up with a nice nickname for the happy little fellow. Or perhaps this is a matter of major corporate dissent within the new AOL--it's not like we didn't know they'd have some big challenges right out of the gate.

For Madison Avenue, Facebook just got a little less free.

Last week, the massive social network announced that brands, advertisers, and marketers that want to run contests or sweepstakes on its platform have to go through an approval process first.

Getting that approval could be a new revenue stream for Facebook: according to multiple sources in the marketing industry, they're being told that running a promotion in a Facebook application or "fan page" requires buying ad space too.

It's pricey. The minimum ad buy is $10,000 for 30 days, using Facebook's self-service advertising system, according to documents seen by CNET, or $30,000 for 30 days of Facebook home page ads. Priority in the approval process will be scaled, based on how much advertising space has been purchased. It's a move that one marketing industry professional called, in perhaps a bit of hyperbole, "a little Death Star-ish."

A Facebook representative declined to confirm and said the company did not have any comment beyond official documents released on its Facebook Marketing Solutions page.

Let's step back. Cracking down on contests and promotions might seem draconian, but it's actually important for Facebook: the U.S. state and federal laws that govern sweepstakes are extremely complicated, and by allowing only approved contests, Facebook is making sure that its bases are covered.

"Any promotion that any brand, product, or company would run has to have a terms of service against it," said Gunter Pfau, CEO of the Stuzo Group, an agency that has developed numerous Facebook contests and sweepstakes for clients. "Also, depending on the prize value, they need to be filed with various state regulatory agencies."

What, exactly, is new for contests? If a brand is running a contest on its fan page, it has to be handled through an embedded, separately developed application--not, for example, in the page's "wall." Promotions also can't involve Facebook users manipulating their user photos or status messages specifically for the contest.

Legal experts agree that this is necessary. "The (new Facebook) guidelines really cover only a narrow subset of promotions, specifically sweepstakes, contests, and similar competitions," explained Thomas Williams, a partner at the Chicago law firm Howrey, who specializes in trademark law. "That type of contest or promotion is governed by a myriad of state and federal regulations, so what I think Facebook is attempting to do here is merely shield itself from liability that arises out of its users' potential violations of these laws."

Williams continued: "I think it's a prudent and reasonable step on Facebook's part. There are lawyers who specialize in sweepstakes law, and there really are a lot of twists and turns to it."

One thing it'll also do, Stuzo Group's Gunter Pfau explained, is keep dishonest campaigns and promotions off the Facebook platform. "I think it's great news for consumers," he said. "I think what Facebook is doing is really laying these guidelines in place for companies to protect consumers more."

But what about the new ad spend requirements? Facebook has historically pitched its developer platform and fan pages as a free way for advertisers and marketers to tap into the power of "the social graph"--its 300 million-plus active users and their connections to one another. And while it's clear that the company sees these free pages and applications as a stepping stone for ad dollars--Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, for example, regularly gives Madison Avenue talks about the company's "engagement ads"--it doesn't have a long track record of requiring advertisers to pay for something that used to be free.

"It makes sense for Facebook, but (it's) a little discouraging to advertisers," commented Alisa Leonard-Hansen, who holds the title of social-media evangelist at digital-marketing firm iCrossing. "Facebook is continually trying to discover new ways to monetize, and they picked up on the trend that advertisers were using their pages to run contests and other promotions. I think Facebook was looking to be able to benefit from this marketing trend."

The ad spend requirements, too, could be considered partial compensation for the new human resources required in Facebook's approval process. Each company running contests on Facebook now has a designated advertising sales representative, and fan pages will continue to have to be policed for potential violations of both advertiser regulations and sweepstakes law.

There might not be a lot of friction as the new regulations go into effect. Companies that don't run contests on their Facebook fan pages or applications won't be affected. Even some that do, especially small-scale fan pages that could easily go unnoticed by Facebook, won't have to change much. "Of course, there are going to be savvy marketers who skirt this and run (contests) under the radar," Alisa Leonard-Hansen said.

It really goes without saying the obvious: this is Facebook's service, and it can do what it wants with it. That doesn't mean marketers will stop grumbling. As one put it in a phone call to CNET, "This is another example of Facebook saying, 'Sorry, eat it, you've got no choice.'"

Unsurprisingly, at least one research company agrees that valuing a company at $1.1 billion before it's unveiled a long-term revenue strategy is a little bit premature.

A firm called Next Up Research released a study this week that estimates Twitter's actual value as somewhere between $526 million and $674 million--or somewhere between 47 and 61 percent of what its valuation was in September when Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, and other investors pumped nearly $100 million into the company..

The positives for Twitter? It's been able to scale to approximately 70 million users while maintaining a single office in San Francisco and about 80 employees--well, sure, but the fail whale does tend to rear its head--and the fact that you can use it almost exclusively as a low-end mobile application means a whole lot of potential for global reach.

Next Up's concerns are pretty predictable: It's not sure how Twitter will keep up its momentum as it prepares to roll out a revenue model. It spelled out a few options that have been tossed around over the past few years--ads on Twitter.com, ads in tweets, charging for access to its application program interface (API), premium accounts, selling data and analytics--but noted that "most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of cult-like Twitter's user base."

Regardless, the research firm is guessing that revenues will come. It's projecting $134 million in revenues in 2013, "in an optimistic scenario." Now let's sit back and see how Twitter does it.

Corporate tools take note: You can tell Twitter exactly what you're doing, and it'll tell LinkedIn too.

Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.

"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.

So, in short, LinkedIn's "status" feature now syncs with Twitter with an optional check box--a feature that the two companies say should be rolling out over the next few days. Likewise, can set your Twitter status as your LinkedIn status by using the hash tag #li or #in, so that you can rest assured that your tweet about "watching Gossip Girl and eating cold pizza" won't immediately show up to potential clients or employers trawling your LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: This was my Twitter status tonight. If you believe that it renders me professionally unsound, please feel free to let me know.)

All snark aside, this is probably a very good bet for LinkedIn, which continues to grow fast and make money but which hasn't yet really jumped into the latest social-networking trend of real-time, streaming information. Inking a partnership with Twitter is much easier than launching some other kind of initiative to get members to update their statuses more often. Tweets sent to LinkedIn, presumably, could also be grouped in with LinkedIn status messages to form some kind of business-intelligence live stream. The sort of information that people want to share specifically with colleagues and professional associates could be of interest to high-end advertisers or the market research community.

Twitter, meanwhile, is going to want to stay in the limelight of the business community as it considers a long-term business model--one of the microblogging service's potential moneymakers has been launching a "dashboard" of analytics for people and companies who use it primarily for professional purposes rather than, you know, filling the world in on which beer was just discovered in the back of the fridge.

Also for Twitter, this is yet another potential source of tweets as it attempts to become the world's foremost repository of real-time information. Earlier this year, MySpace announced an official way to sync Twitter and MySpace status, and in a matter of weeks its link-shortening service had become the second most popular on Twitter (trailing Twitter's preferred Bit.ly).

Facebook, meanwhile, appears to have been more reluctant: a Twitter app on its platform has pulled tweets into status messages for some time, and an unofficial app lets members tag selective tweets with the hashtag "#fb" to cross-post them to Facebook, but the only time that Facebook has put out a big, official announcement about syncing with Twitter was when it added an easy-sync feature for "fan pages," profiles for brands and marketers.

Not surprising. Twitter is a hot name in marketing these days, and in order for Facebook to establish fan pages as an ideal spot for brands to build a presence, an easy Twitter sync is a selling point. But in the long run, it's an advantage for Facebook, which once tried to buy Twitter and was snubbed, to keep its treasure trove of what-the-world-is-thinking somewhat to itself. After all, it can get away with it: with well over 300 million active users, Facebook is significantly bigger than Twitter, and could be diluting its own product by openly sourcing status messages out to Twitter. LinkedIn, better known for its networking features than any kind of status updating, isn't running that kind of risk.

Until then: "At SFO airport at bookstore. Deciding between @gladwell and @tferriss. Need real, serious insights. Thoughts? #li."

Toilet Cat does not approve of this message.

(Credit: Flickr: Vagabond Shutterbug)

Look what just landed in the department of bad social media campaigns! Toilet paper brand Charmin has put out a casting call for five bloggers who will spend five weeks working as "Charmin Ambassadors" in a pop-up bathroom in New York's Times Square.

I'm going to say it right now: The Procter & Gamble-owned brand has creeped me out for a while with those commercials that feature cartoon bears gallivanting in a forest with rolls of soft and fluffy toilet paper and then sneaking behind trees to do their business. I don't want to think about pooping bears. Sorry. But this new campaign, detailed Tuesday in an article in the Business Courier of Cincinnati, really pushes it to a new level.

"Job requirements include interacting with hundreds of thousands of bathroom guests, maintaining their own blogs and content on Charmin-branded Web sites and popular social media sites, and sharing family-friendly video from the restroom space and surrounding areas," the Business Courier article explained. I'm afraid this is pretty much validating and encouraging those weirdos who like to post to Twitter about bathroom visits.

The new campaign tag line is "Enjoy the go." GROSS.

The bloggers will be paid $10,000 apiece, which I sincerely hope they will use to invest in a name change and a wardrobe of high-end disguises, because if I were one of them I'd be way too embarrassed to go on through life with my current identity.

But don't worry! Charmin has loads of experience so there's absolutely no way this will look stupid. According to the Business Courier of Cincinnati, "This is not the first year Charmin has hosted a temporary, or pop-up, bathroom in Times Square. In 2008, it kicked off a "Plush Potties for the People" tour that traveled from Santa Monica, Calif., to Times Square, where it settled for the holidays."

Plush Potties for the People. As one of my colleagues put it, "You've got to be s***ting me."

Guess what? Facebook is tweaking its home page design yet again--something that invariably seems to tick off members at first before they realize they actually don't mind that much. The company seems to have been previewing the new look to advertisers, one of whom forwarded the details along to industry blog Mashable.

It doesn't look too different. The biggest change is that Facebook's home page news feed will now be divided up into "top news" and a more real-time "recent activity" view.

The explanation:

"Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent."

A screenshot from a document that Facebook sent to brand advertisers about an impending redesign.

(Credit: Facebook)

Note the mention of birthday reminders. On a given member's birthday, a pop-up version of Facebook's "gifts" application appears on that user's profile so that friends can purchase virtual gifts to display. The "gifts" feature is also currently the center of the fledgling e-commerce plans that Facebook has been bouncing around for quite some time now: It's currently the hub of its "credits" virtual currency, and advertisers can purchase sponsored gifts that members can give to one another. These have also been tested out with a select number of nonprofits.

For users, it sounds like Facebook is correcting some of the changes that members seemed to complain about the most with its last redesign. "Facebook has also put information back into the stream that people have asked for, including photo tags, friend acceptances, relationships, event RSVPs and group memberships," the explanation obtained by Mashable read. Also in there will be information about what a user's friends do on brands' "fan" pages, potentially increasing the exposure for advertisers and marketers looking to jump on the social-ads bandwagon.

Why so much redesigning? Facebook's executive team likes to pitch the company as a living, evolving product. At an event last week in Palo Alto, Calif., Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg underscored Facebook's belief in constant "iteration," a term you'll also often hear CEO Mark Zuckerberg using.

"The great thing about Facebook is (that) we are constantly evolving the site and constantly evolving the usage," she said. "People protested the new home page redesign, but engagement went way up and users continued to grow."

If you're running a business that has a presence in a virtual world, market research firm Gartner thinks you might want to make sure your employees' avatars aren't dressed like Lady Gaga at the VMAs.

"Companies with codes of conduct for other Web activities, such as blogging, should be able to extend those policies into virtual environments," a release Wednesday from Gartner announcing its new report "Avatars in the Enterprise: Six Guidelines to Enable Success" explained. "However, because 3-D environments add the visual dimension, they will need to make sure that their policies also cover dress codes."

That means your avatar might want to lose the sparkly pink torpedo bra, metallic leggings, and giant bat wings. When it's representing your company, that is.

The presence of businesses in virtual worlds like Second Life is nothing new--and has been much derided in recent years. But according to Gartner, it's still on the rise, particularly when it comes to training and virtual meetings. "Avatars are creeping into business environments and will have far reaching implications for enterprises, from policy to dress code, behavior, and computing platform requirements," the release explained. Gartner estimates that 70 percent of enterprises will be regulating the avatars of employees who use virtual worlds for business.

Two years ago, Gartner put out a study detailing the risks and pratfalls of doing business in virtual worlds, among them the difficulty of brand and reputation management. Now it's getting more specific: Gartner now says that employees ought to know how to operate their avatars properly, use the same degrees of discretion and professionalism that they do on social-networking sites, and even keep separate avatars for personal and professional use.

Pretty much everyone in the audience at Sheryl Sandberg's talk on Tuesday morning as part of New York Advertising Week understood the meaning of the slide she displayed that read "Nielsen and Facebook are in a relationship." A nod to announcements on Facebook's homepage "news feed," the "in a relationship" phrase is now a recognizable slice of Internet culture--much as social network Facebook itself has become ubiquitous.

And Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, hopes it will be just as ubiquitous in the advertising world. Her goal on Tuesday was to formally announce the social network's "strategic alliance" with data and audience measurement firm Nielsen, starting with the launch of a product called BrandLift, a market research tool that can measure audience response to advertisements on Facebook "in a matter of days."

Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank joined Sandberg on stage to detail the basics of BrandLift. "We recognize just how increasingly important Facebook is within the whole ecosystem of media," he said, adding that it would be "crucial in building (marketers') confidence in using the Internet as a tool."

Sheryl Sandberg (file photo)

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET)

Burbank confirmed what he told CNET News last night, that BrandLift measurement would eventually reach beyond the hugely popular social network. "(Brands) have asked us to extend this tool beyond Facebook," he said. "Working with Facebook, we expect to do that, too."

But for now, it's all about the social network. Sandberg pitched Facebook to the ad industry audience, as she has done in the past, as a hub for meaningful connections and communication. "Facebook is where people go when they want to share, when they want to connect, when they want to reach out to the people they know," Sandberg said, and she brought up instances as varied as grassroots activism in Iran and the two girls in Australia who updated their Facebook status messages rather than calling emergency services when they were trapped in a storm drain.

"I thank them, and we're glad, we're especially glad they got rescued," Sandberg said, noting that the girls' choice of crisis communication highlighted just how important Facebook is to personal connections in members' lives. "(But) next time you use emergency services, 911. Better option for sure."

What she also talked about: How fast Facebook has been growing. Last year at Advertising Week, she said, she announced that the social network recently had hit 100 million active users. This month, Facebook hit 300 million. And a full 50 percent of them still return to the site every day, Sandberg said, something that surprised her because she'd assumed that late adopters would be far less active than early adopters.

More numbers: Facebook's mobile applications are used by 65 million people. The average user spends 5.75 hours on the site per month. And the average user now has 130 friends, up from 120 a year ago.

Competition and skepticism
Sandberg had good reason to persistently highlight both Facebook's staggering growth and its newfound cultural significance: The advertising industry simply hasn't had a whole lot of faith in social media. "We've had some stumbles, some of our own making, and I think it's fair to say we have more of our fair share of critics," Sandberg said, mentioning that she'd once gotten a phone call from her parents asking whether she was looking for a new job because they'd read a report that Facebook was running out of money.

Facebook has also had to compete for marketer attention with the (at least for now) more buzzworthy Twitter, which rose to fast fame amid celebrity endorsements, a high-profile role during last year's U.S. elections, and the seemingly ubiquitious placement of "tweets" on cable news programs. A Twitter profile and a Facebook fan page can be directly competing products.

But the real skepticism surrounding Facebook's potential as a moneymaking power--at least as long as it remains supported primarily by advertising--comes about because, at least until this point, there has been a lot of marketing buzz-speak but not a whole lot of concrete numbers to measure its actual success.

"You want measurement, measurement you can rely on, measurement that you believe is valid," Sandberg said. That's why Facebook approached Nielsen as a respected third party, she explained.

Brands have found significant success with Facebook fan pages, which are free to create, she said. But adding paid advertisements through Facebook's "Engagement Ads" product can enhance those brand pages significantly, Sandberg explained. (It also means Facebook gets paid.)

"A year ago we introduced Engagement Ads. Rather than having to go to different sites or go to landing pages, consumers were able to engage with marketers directly with the ads themselves," Sandberg explained. "(They can) RSVP to the event, 'fan' a page, watch a video and comment, send a branded gift, or respond to questions from a marketer." As part of Tuesday's announcement, Sandberg announced that Engagement Ads have been expanded to include an easy way for Facebook members to request free product samples.

There were some skeptical questions from the audience, notably one that inquired about the poor searchability and indexing features on Facebook profiles and fan pages. The audience member asked whether this was potentially being upgraded.

"The short answer, is do we want to take content and make you more easily able to find it, find it now, find it later?" Sandberg responded. "Of course. And it's something we're definitely working on."

Update Tuesday 4:14 a.m. PDT: Facebook and Nielsen have officially announced their multiyear deal.

As part of the Advertising Week festivities in New York, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is slated to make a marketing-related announcement on Tuesday morning.

The announcement of a partnership with Nielsen on a product called "BrandLift," which polls Facebook users on ads they see on the social network, was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

There weren't a whole lot of details disclosed, even when the two companies confirmed the news of "a multi-year, strategic alliance" later on Monday. Nielsen BrandLift, a release explained, is the first product created from the deal. It will use opt-in polls on Facebook's home page to gauge user sentiment around advertisements, measuring "aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability, and purchase consideration." It'll roll out in the U.S. to a number of test partners this week and to all advertisers over the next few months. There will be "hundreds" of BrandLift tests in that time, the release explained.

An end date to the multi-year deal has not been disclosed, Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank told CNET News on Monday evening.

For now, Nielsen BrandLift is part of its partnership with Facebook. But the product "will expand to other websites" eventually, Burbank said. He wouldn't comment on repeated rumors that Facebook would be launching an ad network for sites participating in its Facebook Connect program.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook has a history of big New York marketing pushes to further establish itself as a major player on Madison Avenue. Earlier this year, Sandberg keynoted the AdAge Digital conference to pitch Facebook's "active network" of friend connections as a powerful advertising tool, and two years ago Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the social network's first major advertising initiative shortly after Microsoft had taken a $240 million stake in the company.

(Part of that 2007 announcement included Beacon, the ill-fated advertising program that Facebook finally put the kibosh on this week.)

Getting statistics on advertising effectiveness is important for Facebook, especially with a longtime industry player like Nielsen on board. While Facebook has been growing in prominence as a digital ad destination, it's still had to do some convincing to combat the industry attitude that social-media advertising doesn't work.

Also sure to be mentioned at Tuesday's announcement? The fact that Facebook has recently hit 300 million active users around the world and continues to grow fast. That's a lot of eyeballs.

Nielsen's own measurements of Facebook traffic place the social network as the fourth largest unique audience in the U.S. (and remember, most of its traffic is now overseas), and that out of all Web-based brands it enjoys the most individual time spent per user.

This post was expanded at 7:33 p.m. PT.