“The new Facebook messaging product holds a lot of promise. We really like how the seamless consolidation of social communications across email, chat, SMS Facebook messages will give brands more ways to hold organic conversations with fans. At the same time, we recognize that the advanced social screening tools will make it even more important for brands to listen to their community and respond by continually optimizing their communications. The days of interns “managing” your Facebook status updates are officially over.”

- Mark Curtis, CEO, enter:new media

The new Facebook Places product was rolled out yesterday in a clear and direct response to the popularity and (ad potential) of similar services such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Like other location-based social networks, Facebook Places lets users see where their friends are and share their physical location. So what does this announcement mean right away to brands?

As of right now:

It’s Not Available Everywhere…Yet. As of right now, Places is only available in the US and only via the Facebook iPhone application and through mobile access to touch.facebook.com. It will be rolled out to more geographies and on other platforms like Android shortly.

Facebook is Playing Nice With Foursquare and Gowalla. Executives from both networks spoke at last night’s launch event touting their integration with the new Places product.

Places Have Pages. Places pages show you a map, lists of friends who are currently checked in and an archived activity stream. Place pages can be added to users’ profiles if they “like” them. Brands must “claim” their place in order to manage their address, contact information, and other settings. These claims will need to be verified by Facebook and there is indication that you will be able to “merge” your places page with your brand page.

Advertising Options Haven’t Changed…Yet. There is no increased ability to advertise to fans who have checked in at or around your “place.” However, this too may just be a matter of time.

The API is Coming Out Today. Brands will be able to start integrating places into their applications starting today. It’s going to be interesting to see what new branded experiences app dev teams will be able to deliver with these new features

Facebook made it official. The long rumored narrowing of custom tabs has finally been set in stone. As you know you have until August 23rd to adjust your platform from a width of 760 pixels to 520 pixels. This dramatic reduction in real estate is just one of a number of changes to custom branded tabs that can either present a major challenge or open a whole new range of possibilities depending on how you handle it.

These custom tabs have established themselves as key tool to bringing immersive and functional branded experiences into the Facebook platform. As brands find new and exciting ways to create branded content that gets shared and exposed to new audiences, its become critical that those brand’s flagship pages on Facebook effectively communicate the brand experience as well as facilitate a range of promotional initiatives.

Going forward it will be incumbent upon brands to use limited real estate less as an end destination and more as a portal – a gateway to an expanded range of value – without requiring that new user to leave Facebook.

One tactic we have been using effectively over the last year has been to leverage the enter:newmedia platform to create a tab-based super application that extends the user experience of the branded Facebook page. This approach exponentially increase the possibilities for brands far beyond the limits of four narrow tabs.

The bottom line is that many brands are now being forced to redesign their branded content on Facebook – yet with the right tools and some creative thinking, this could be a major step forward.

Translation: the new privacy settings are unlikely to jeopardize the efforts of brand marketers and managers using Facebook to promote their products.

The singular objective of the Facebook security enhancements has been to protect the consumer, not to impede the efforts of marketing users. Consequently, brand marketers shouldn’t be alarmed by the new privacy settings: expect little net change to your marketing operations.

According to All Facebook, five major security enhancements were announced:

1. A new button has been introduced that users can use to opt out of applications from the entire Facebook platform.

Marketing Impact: Tune your marketing activities to prevent end-user frustration. Over-solicit, and you could wind up pushing your target market to opt out of all applications. Further, it’s now imperative to deliver value in every interaction. Do so, and a frustrated user may remember that the connection to your brand is worth preserving.

2. Users can now hide their lists of friends, likely impeding fan and friend recruiting.

Marketing Impact: If you’ve been sifting through the lists of fans and friends to find more targets, it’s time for a new strategy. Brand marketers using this approach to recruit audiences, though, were overdue for a change anyway! The goal of your Facebook marketing efforts should be to trigger this behavior among your fans and friends. Design applications and develop content that users will want to spread for you.

3. Users can hide their interests, making it more difficult for you to ascertain which people would be most receptive to your brand.

Marketing Impact: There’s virtually no change as a result of this. Since interests were only released when community pages were rolled out in April, it’s unlikely that any transformative social media marketing practices had time to emerge.

4. Past status updates can be hidden, constraining brand marketer research.

Marketing Impact: This development looks more significant than it really is. Unless you’re working with a small number of highly targeted Facebook users, it’s unlikely that you’d sift through this much content. Past information is concealed from searches, which can be limiting, but it should have no impact on a referral/viral growth strategy.

5. With only one click needed, privacy is getting much easier for users.

Marketing Impact: Again, there’s virtually no impact. Facebook users can easily restrict access to “Friends Only,” “Friends of Friends,” “Recommended” or “Everyone.” Unless you’re sifting through users to find targets, which is inefficient and time- and resource-consuming, this shouldn’t change your on-platform marketing activities.

Despite the magnitude of the changes, particularly in regards to personal privacy control, brand marketers shouldn’t be impacted too severely … as long as you’re using well-planned, properly executed social media marketing practices. If you suspect the privacy changes could disrupt your Facebook marketing efforts, contact us now.

[Thanks, All Facebook]

The Open Graph

With its development of the Open Graph API, Facebook is giving publishers a toolset for connecting content on their sites with Facebook in a more integrated fashion.  In general, the social plug-ins are extremely useful but almost completely un-customizable; for now they’ll look exactly like they look on the preview page.

The Graph API looks like it has much of the same functionality as Facebook Connect, but all the API calls can happen on the PHP side instead of the Javascript side, which gives us more flexibility and makes it faster for the end user.  What that means in English:  the new API works like Facebook connect, but is a lot more elegant.

Some of these new tools are drag-and-drop and don’t need any backend integration and the rest require some backend work on the same level of work as implementing Facebook Connect. We’ve separated the reviews by type.

Like Button & Like Box

Instead of becoming Fans, users on Facebook will now “Like”Pages on Facebook, as well as sites and sub-pages elsewhere on the web.  Off-Facebook “Likes” will permanently link the liked web page to the user’s profile.

Activity feed

This shows the five (or so) most recent Facebook actions that occur on a site (i.e. people liking or sharing sub-pages of a website). It’s pretty useful and easy to set up, it also reports all activity on your domain.  This is a great tool for sidebars and homepages and other places with a site-wide context. Each entry is what a person does, as opposed to…

Recommendations

This shows the top 5 or so pages on a domain, ranked by how many people like or share each. Again, this is a good tool for sidebars or homepages.

Comments

This brings a comment board to any page. It’s especially useful because Facebook introduced an API call that lets you see all the comment boards you used, so we have more options for administering the boards. There’s no spam protection though, which makes it less useful than a  Wordpress as a commenting system, which blocks spam.

Live stream box

This is the same live stream box and has not changed.

Login with Faces

This just pretties up the FB Connect login button with friends who are also on the site. This creates a social incentive for users to sign up if their friend’s already have. Using this unit means implementing Facebook Connect.

Facepile

This is just Login with Faces without the Login button.

As we discussed here, The age of the Community page is upon us. Around 3:30 today, Mashable posted three important clarifications:

Community pages will aggregate user content:These community pages aren’t run by individuals, so they don’t have a wall and don’t send updates to users’ feeds. Instead, they import streams of related, public content from user status messages.

Status text is split into updates from friends and updates from all Facebook users. E.g., if I write in a status update to everyone, “I love this new hip hop album,” Facebook recognizes the term “hip hop” and imports my public update to the hip hop community page. Community Pages also include relevant information from Wikipedia under a Wikipedia tab.

User profiles connections to pages will be more prominent…oh, and Facebook will recommend pages based on your profile.

With today’s changes, “liked” pages and community pages can be linked to user profiles in categories of the “Likes and Interests” section of the profile. Instead of being merely static text, the profiles can display links to active community or brand-owned pages. Each page’s link will open up a hovercard with more information on the page. The pages you already like will be linked to your profile in the appropriate category, such as music or movies, and interests you’ve stated can be linked to related community pages.

Also, users will be given additional privacy controls.

Of course, since information around pages is public, privacy and sharing settings for these new settings are editable. In a new profile editing workflow, users will be given page suggestions when they add text to their profiles. Pages can be dragged and dropped from the profile, or even hidden if the user doesn’t want his profile to be a billboard for that particular page.And privacy settings will be changed, as well, for “friends, tags and connections” so users have more control over who sees what areas of their profiles, including friends lists, cities and pages.

• F8, the big Facebok developer conference is happening this Wednesday in San Franscisco

• Expect big announcements – primarily having to do with a universal “Like” button similar to the “Share” button.

• We expect this to make it easier for brands to build valuable social media connections with Facebook users across all of their digital media initiatives.