Ford Targets 100 Socially-Networked Millennials for First Drive of Ford's New Small Car, Fiesta

As part of what Ford is calling the "Fiesta Movement," 100 specially selected people will be given new Ford Fiestas before the vehicle launches in North America in 2010. The cars for the movement were built this week in Germany and are now on their way to the United States.

"It's all part of a plan to build excitement and spread the word about the arrival of the new Ford Fiesta to the next generation of customers," said Sam De La Garza, Ford's small car marketing manager. "These 100 socially-vibrant Fiesta Movement 'Agents' will then relate their driving experiences through social media sites such as Facebook, FlickR and YouTube."

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Join the Fiesta Movement

4 Highly Engaged Brands on Facebook

Here are 4 mini case studies for Mountain Dew, Red Bull, Southwest Airlines and Dunkin Doughnuts.

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Facebook Passes Blogger, Falls Behind MySpace In Engagement

Facebook is poised to overtake Google's Blogger as the top social media site on the Web, if it hasn't already.

In the category of engagement, both Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace have shown gains over the past year. MySpace actually has a firm lead in that category, growing 15% in January to 266.3 minutes per user, per month-a 31% increase over last January. Facebook, meanwhile, showed an increase of just 4% since December and year-over-year growth of 3% to 176.6 minutes.

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The Top 20 Most Engaging Facebook Applications

AllFacebook just made a list of the most addictive applications on Facebook.

1. Slots
2. Facebook for BlackBerry Smartphones
3. Scratch and Win
4. Digsby
5. Wordscraper
6. Facebook Toolbar for Firefox
7. Super Scratch Offs
8. Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures
9. Egg Breaker
10. Pull Tabs

The article gives greater detail about these and the 10 apps that follow.

Ashton Kutcher and Cheetos Friend Video Series on Facebook

Typically, MySpace and Bebo are the socnets that serve up celebrity-backed web series (or any webisodes whatsoever). "Katalyst HQ" is a first for Facebook. It's a "behind-the-scenes" reality series starring Ashton Kutcher, and underwritten by Frito-Lay's Cheetos brand. It will be distributed on Facebook through an app called FunSpace. This app was created by Slide, a social application maker that is also a joint-venture partner with Katalyst.

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The Next Mobile Social Network Could Be Your Car.

Ford teamed with Microsoft to create its Sync system, which essentially turned its cars into souped-up MP3 players with hands-free calling. In 2009, Ford's more ambitious, as it presents a greater vision for what driving is all about. Soon, the car (using Sync technology) will become a social network hub and node.

See the video interview with Ford's President of the Americas Mark Fields

Facebook Now Nearly Twice The Size Of MySpace Worldwide

In November 2008 Facebook drew 200 million unique worldwide visitors; more than 1 in 5 people who accessed the Internet that month visited the site. When sites are that big growth generally stagnates, but in Facebook’s case it’s still skyrocketing. In December, 222 million people visited the site says newly released Comscore stats, a 10.8% month over month growth rate. 22% of the total Internet audience went to Facebook in December.

Facebook now has nearly 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace, which added 4 million new users in December to 125 million total. The page view difference is more dramatic - Facebook had 80 billion monthly page views in December v. 43 billion for MySpace. Just six months ago, the sites were about the same size.

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Passion-Fueled SocNet Seems To Be Designed Around Ads

A new kind of social network, Fuego Nation, has launched in private beta.In contrast with socnets modeled after Facebook and MySpace, Fuego Nation is not designed to help users keep in touch with friends. Rather, it is positioned as a way for adults to engage with others who share their interests and passions — many of which are often not shared by friends.

The network is organized exclusively around member interests, beliefs and motivating behaviors. Upon signup, each person highlights core interests in a micro profile — called a Passion Card — with a unique jukebox-carousel display. Ads are interspersed throughout.

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Social Networks Grow Up: More Adults Connecting Online

Brian Solis points out that PEW Research released a report documenting the increase in social networking activity among U.S.-based adults for both personal and professional relationships.

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Bugaboo - A New SocNet

The baby stroller company built a socnet into its site: Bugaboo Friends.

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Does Facebook Replace Face Time or Enhance It?

Time Magazine takes a look on how Facebook is shaping interpersonal communications, how people who would never return one another's calls are Friending each other.

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Facebook Blows A Whopper Of An Opportunity

Burger King launches a Facebook application that encourages users to remove Facebook friends. Sacrifice ten of them and you got a free Whopper. 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week.

Facebook is overjoyed, right? What a great example to show the Madison Avenue agencies on how a big brand can get real engagement from users. This is the future of advertising. Or it could have been, if Facebook hadn’t shut it down, citing privacy issues.

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Typical SocNetters Address 110 People/Week; Spend $101 Online/Month

With 40 million active users in the US, social networking has grown 93% since 2006 — and is poised to play a vital role in the current economic downturn, according to a trend report from Netpop Research. Crucially, Netpop also predicts a related increase in social media advertising opportunities.

The report, "Social Networkers US: Who they are and what they mean for next generation advertising," drew from a projectable sample of 4,384 broadband users to pinpoint the specific demographics, online behaviors, preferences and "passions" of online contributors and social networkers.

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Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope

A report on Twitter from the HP's Social Computing Laboratory.

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Ad Model Has Failed For Social Nets

While online ad spending is projected to continue expanding - albeit at a much more modest rate of growth - the contraction of the general economy is expected to put even greater downward pressure on the price of both online display and search advertising, according to a new 2009 outlook for the Internet industry released Monday by a top Wall Street researcher. That analyst, JP Morgan's Imran Khan, also predicted that advertising models would fail for two of the Web's hottest emerging platforms - online video and social media - and that it would take longer than expected for a substantive mobile advertising marketplace to emerge.

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