The Social Media Insider smells Herbal Essences

Too busy yesterday to link to my Social Media Insider column, which this week focuses on the concept of advertiser Facebook page as CRM database. C'mon geeks, you know you love it. You can be a passive observer and just read the thing, or join the discussion, here.

The Facebook advertiser fans scoreboard!*

Facebook wouldn't let me into its press conference about the reinvention of advertising, but I remain undaunted. Therefore, I'm debuting, the first, and maybe last, edition of the Facebook advertiser fans scoreboard, in which we see which advertiser—among those who have already built a profile page on the site—has gotten the most fans. (Advertisers don't get friends on Facebook like the rest of us, apparently. They get fans.) OK, here's the rundown, as of last night:

Sprite Sips: 39 friends (Mr. Sips, who for some reason appears to be holding a spatula, is pictured above)
Blockbuster: 41 friends
CBS' The Amazing Race: 73 fans, including Patrick Keane
Epicurious and Verizon: tied at 74 fans.

And the winner, by a landslide, is ...

The New York Times with 582 fans!

Congrats NYT! Keep up the good work!

*Study completely unscientific and subject to radical change.

The Facebook doldrums—or dot-com bust 2.0

You'd think that Facebook getting a $240 million investment from Microsoft would be a good thing, but—if the posts I've been reading the past week or so are any indication—we've reached the beginning of the end, with Facebook cast as the canary in the coal mine for dot-com bust 2.0. Take this post by Micro Persuasion's Steve Rubel, who has gone and gotten all morose about the entire Web 2.0 phenomenon. He doesn't mention Facebook by name, but take an I'm-about-to-jump-off-the-cliff sentence like this one and try to think of anything besides Facebook: "Let's face it, we're skunk drunk and it's because of money. It's almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together." Let me go get some Kleenex and then do a CGM commercial of me crying and post it to YouTube! Then there's John Battelle, who says that the recent revelation that Facebook employees can see who is looking at any Facebook member's profile constitutes a lack of respect for privacy laws that might not make the company worth as much as the Microsoft investment would have you believe. "The privacy issues is [sic] a very real one for Facebook, because, well, it's the heart of how the company intends to make good on that $15bb valuation," he explains. Man, you folks are bumming me out. I think I'll go on Facebook and update my status to: "Boo-hoo."

So, who are Julie Roehm's Facebook friends?

Yesterday's story about Facebook in Ad Age, not to mention yesterday's cover story about Facebook in Newsweek, begs the question of not only who has profiles on Facebook, but who those people's friends are. Thus, we'll begin studying this topic by taking a closer look at Julie Roehm (her Facebook photo is at right), followed, in later additions of this special investigative Adverganza series, by whomever else pops into our heads. (One proviso, of course, is that a "friend" on Facebook is not the same as a friend in the real world. Unless you can't stand someone, it's pretty bad form to turn down a request to be somebody's friend.) OK. Sorry. Back to Julie. Here are the friends of hers we recognized: Stewart Alsop, Microsoft's Joanne Bradford, Internet gal-about-town Susan Bratton, Ad Age's Matt Creamer, who, BTW was the writer on Ad Age's Facebook story this week, Avi Dan, JWT's Colleen DeCourcy, The New York Times' Stuart Elliott, Mediapost's Joe Mandese and Nick Friese, Joseph Jaffe, Jed Savage (who, last I knew, was at eBay), and Organic's Chad Stoller. It also shows you the limitations of Facebook that people you might suspect are friends of Julie Roehm's are not listed, such as Sean Womack, and don't hold your breath for Howard Draft, either.