This morning, our Worldwide President and CEO, Mark Penn, announced the launch of a new Facebook application around his bestselling book, Microtrends. For the 70+ million users on Facebook, the Microtrends application presents an awesome opportunity to engage, interact and learn from your friends’ various niche interests. As Mark put it, “If you’ve read the book or heard me talk about Microtrends, you know that 1% of society can make or break a business, win an election or launch a social movement. But let’s get down to what’s really important: Which 1% are you?”

The application is in the form of a short quiz which allows you to discover which “Microtrend” you align with. Are you a Caffeine Crazy? High School Mogul? Numbers Junkie? 30-Winker? (I am!) What about your friends? Do they fall into similar or different groups? Take the quiz and find out.

As Erin has previously posted about the era of open and personal communication, Microtrends enables relevant microtargeting - the chance to offer different stakeholders messages and products that emotionally moves them. For Public Relations practitioners or Marketing professionals, the age of mass media and mass messaging is dead. Microtrends, and more specifically, this application represents a new and exciting way for us to listen to our clients, friends and family.

A special “Thank You” goes out to everyone who worked on the first iteration of the application: Zach Ambrose, David Brooks, Ryan Coogan, Matt Hersh, Dan Lazar, Stacey Lazar, Robyn Pearlstein and Kinney Zalesne (co-author of Microtrends). I’m really excited to see how the application plays out, particularly within the dynamic social ecosystem of Facebook.

“Besides the slowing user growth and declining time spent on these sites, users appear to be growing less responsive to ads, according to several advertisers and online placement firms. If advertisers can’t figure out how to reverse these trends, social networking could end up as a niche market in the online ad world, smashing hopes and valuations across Silicon Valley.” - BusinessWeek, February 7, 2008.

When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg came to Madison Avenue last November and proclaimed that “once every hundred years media changes,” he made sure to leave a lasting impression (whether positive or negative) on advertisers: Facebook plans to lead the way for social network advertising. Approximately four months have passed with the release of Facebook Pages and SocialAds and what do advertisers have to say? Well, there were some privacy concerns and laments over social network advertising effectiveness. In order to combat the less-than-expected reach of advertising on Facebook, the company released new case studies and photos yesterday about Pages and the corresponding integration to SocialAds and Beacon.

The Pages team have put together some helpful PDF’s available on their site, ranging from “How to Create a Page: Abbreviated Guide” to “Music: Dave Matthews Band Case Study“. For those who have never used Pages before, the abbreviated guide offers a lot of insightful tips: “Actions that can generate News Feed stories: Positive Associations (Becoming a fan), Wall Posts by user, Review by user, Photo Uploads by user, Video Uploads by user, Interactions with applications and Event RSVPs for attending (may attending.”

The team has also listed a succinct resource for best practices on Facebook Pages here. My favorite takeaway from that list is a note highlighted toward the end: “Facebook experts are all around you: in your family, on your staff, amongst your customers, at your competitors. Don’t hesitate to ask them for advice and to follow their lead when you see a successful strategy at work.”

Have you had success with your Pages?

P.S. You can also become a fan of Burson-Marsteller on our own Page.

A direct translation of Facebook in Spanish.

The social network launched its Español pages today. There are over 2.8 million Spanish speaking people on Facebook from Spain and Latin America making it the second most popular language. Facebook took a different approach from MySpace, who developed international sites and opened offices throughout various regions; Facebookers were asked to translate the content - over 1,500 FBers were recruited.

The Spanish pages will be populated if your IP address is “Latin” or you can choose the option in “My Account”, “Language” to change your primary language.

I wonder if Marcos Azucarcolina (Mark Zuckerberg) chose the right strategy in localizing or globalizing for that matter…I also hope the pages were not direct translations - as I did in this post

David A - what are your thoughts on this?