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With Facebook expected to go public this Friday, May 18, Mark Zuckerberg is already getting an earful from Wall Street about what he needs to do to boost earnings. Madison Avenue and the digital ad world are also having their say.

“At the highest level, they should definitely be thinking of investing in utilities that will [directly generate revenue], product features that they can offer consumers and that they can monetize at the same time,” said Jordan Bitterman, senior vice president and social marketing practice director at Digitas.

For Bitterman, the most attractive option would be to build out a full-blown search offering, as opposed to the circa-1996 experience embodied in its current search engine.
“Brands would love to leverage that search space on Facebook,” Bitterman said, adding that it would “instantly be one of the most used search engines in the world.”

Facebook already runs ads according to search results, but a robust search engine would refine the process—so that a query for “coke” would not, for example, return ads for the Facebook game DoubleDown Casino and Marquis Dental Spa (which was the case when Adweek checked last week). Beyond that, Bitterman added, a powerful search offering could crawl brand pages and surface purpose-driven data to inform how marketers use the platform—identifying, for example, which elements of a brand page are of most interest to users.

Not all agree that improving its search functionality should be Facebook’s top priority post-IPO.

Jill Fletcher, Virgin America’s social media director, said she would like to see more in-depth analytics from Facebook’s Insights dashboard, particularly those that enable better targeting by demographic.

Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i, also points to a need for better data. “Brands have one foot in the pool with Facebook, but they need better measurement to jump into the deep end of the pool, and what that means is affordable tracking to measure the impact of Facebook on offline behavior,” he said. “It’s going to be critical to get to the next level.”

Wiener would also like to see a mobile ad offering that drives consumers to visit brick-and-mortar businesses. Facebook continues to struggle with a rudimentary mobile ad strategy. It admitted as much in regulatory documents filed last Thursday. “We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products,” the company said.

Still, Facebook has shown movement toward linking social with mobile and local, buying social discovery app Glancee months after acquiring former Foursquare rival Gowalla. It has focused those teams on helping consumers find and share locations with friends.

Strengthening those ties could better position Facebook for the long haul. Said Forrester senior analyst Melissa Parrish: “If Facebook could figure out a way to be an integrated part of that engagement between people in places in a context-rich engagement, then they become an indelible part of people’s lives in a way that isn’t just about being the indelible social network.”

A new peer-to-peer ad test was discovered in the wild today that gave individual users the option to “highlight” an important post.  New Zealand’s Stuff uncovered this test that gives Facebookers the power to make sure that friends see their message: This ad type is very unusual…



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As Facebook inches ever closer to its IPO — which some are projecting may be the biggest-ever in U.S. corporate history — there have been some slightly conflicting stories zipping across the ether today involving another Facebook story line: its $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram and a rumored Federal Trade Commission investigation into the deal: The FT is reporting that an investigation could delay the acquisition. Betabeat is reporting that this could actually delay Facebook’s IPO.

Could it be both? Either? Neither? We reached out to the FTC to get some info straight from the horse’s mouth.

For starters, it should be pointed out that the FTC can’t say one way or the other whether it is investigating the Facebook/Instagram deal. “The commission does not comment on investigations,” Mitch Katz, a public affairs spokesperson, told us. “You would need to check directly with the company.”

However, he did also note that as a matter of course, the FTC investigates all deals with a value greater than $68.2 million. That puts this $1 billion deal firmly into the investigating pile, then.

What next? Once the FTC — or, for that matter, the Department of Justice, which also routinely investigates M&A deals — does initiate an investigation, it can last for up to 30 days and the merger cannot go ahead until that investigation is terminated. (By the way, although the FTC can’t say when it is investigating someone, it can publicly disclose when it has terminated that investigation. Go figure.)

If, when the preliminary investigation period of 30 days is up and the FTC has not yet come to a decision, it can ask for a second request. This doesn’t necessarily mean something suspicious is going on, Katz told me.

“A lot of people think, if we issue a second request, that means we have problems with a deal. But that’s not true,” he said. “It may be that we just need more information to determine whether there are any competitive concerns. Issuing a second request is not an indicator there is a problem; just that we need more information.”

That information can be about the markets — here, social networks, photo sharing, and mobile — what the companies do, what their operations are, and whether they are competitors in certain markets and how their merger could impact competition.

The investigation can involve other companies also providing feedback — and indeed the FT notes that “at least two” major competitors are providing information to the FTC for this (Twitter and Google perhaps?).

One thing that seems pretty clear is that the FTC’s investigation is squarely about the Facebook and Instagram merger — not Facebook’s IPO, which coincidentally Facebook is preparing for and is scheduled to take place on May 18.

Facebook could always delay the IPO, but that would be its decision — not something related to the FTC.

“Any potential investigation would be done independently [of the IPO plans],” Katz said. “The decision whether [the investigation] would have any impact on the IPO would be up to the company.” Given that Facebook didn’t expect the Instagram deal to close before the end of the second quarter anyway — that is, the end of June — it might not see the FTC nosing around as reason enough to delay its listing plans.

We have also contacted Facebook and will update this post with any further information that we get from them.

Today Facebook begins rolling out file sharing to all Groups, and while it’s got many restrictions, it could be good enough to limit the long-term growth potential of cloud storage / file sharing services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive. Music and any copyright files aren’t allowed and file size is capped at 25mb, as Mashable first reported. But this is just the first version, and you can be sure Facebook will keep hacking away at it.

Last month, the social network started letting users share files within Groups for Schools, but now we confirmed with Facebook that within a few days all Facebook users should have the option to upload and share files from the Groups post composer.

Facebook users often talk about downloadable files, but now they’ll be able to share those Word docs, images, e-books, PDFs rather than having to upload them elsewhere. The addition of file sharing has been a long time coming, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had previously worked on a peer-to-peer service called WireHog, which was shut down due to concerns about copyright infringement. It also comes after Facebook’s acquisition of New York City-based file sharing Drop.io in 2010, which brought Sam Lessin on board.

File sharing could help Facebook fight its public image as a distraction from getting real work done. If you already have a Facebook Group to organize discussion about a class, work project, or vacation with friends, file sharing will fit right in.

You’re not going to be able to share huge home movies or zip files of photos, and sadly amateur musicians won’t be able to share their own creations with friends. But Facebook file sharing could be good enough for a lot of people, especially if it ups the file size limit, creates perma-URLs for files, and creates a tab in groups specifically showing shared files. Most important it would need extend file sharing to the general news feed to really become competitive. If it makes these improvements though, it could pull market share from other file sharing system by focusing on convenience.

There’s still plenty of use cases for the big cloud storage / file sharing services…such as sharing copyrighted files. Plus people might feel like their files will be more private on a dedicated service, even though Facebook Groups are quite secure. Products specifically for file sharing might always rule for business, but free personal usage that Facebook could chip away at has been a huge lead generator for enterprise sales. That’s why Facebook moving into the space could limit their long-term growth potential — something investors who sunk $257 million into Dropbox don’t want to see.

Let me be clear: this won’t kill Dropbox or reverse its stellar growth. We’re fans of the service and it won the TechCrunch Crunchie for overall startup of the year. But Facebook could make it hard for it become so popular that it could deliver to investors a serious multiple on the huge amount of funding its received.

The “good enough” approach is becoming a Facebook staple. It’s asymetrical, interest graph follow feature Subscribe was late to the game by years, but because it lives in the news feed where 900 million people already spend their time, it could stunt Twitter’s growth. The same thing could happen here. Facebook’s popularity and how deeply it’s ingrained our lives give it a big advantage. Power users may always crave specialized products, but for average joe, the option to send a file from the Facebook account they already have might be enough to stop them signing up somewhere else.

[Additional reporting by Ryan Lawler. Image Credit: How Stuff Works]

Facebook apps are are getting a new centralized, mobile-friendly destination for users.  The App Center has been officialy announced as the new home for all social apps.  Apps can be easily viewed, sorted, search, reviewed and previewed: Not only does the App Center look slicker, it will have a…



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It's no secret that moms are a tech-savvy bunch, but you might be surprised to learn exactly how they’re using their digital devices. According to a new survey from Meredith’s Parents Network, young moms are staying digitally connected everywhere no matter where they are—and we mean everywhere.

Meredith’s second Moms & Media survey, which questioned around 1,000 moms born between 1977 and 1994, found that 21 percent of mothers use their smartphones in the bathroom, while 12 percent admitted to using their phones during sex. Although there was (thankfully) no mention of how moms use their phones during those private moments, there’s a good chance that they were indulging in some retail therapy: 81 percent of moms said they mostly used their smartphones for shopping.

Speaking of TMI, when asked about their pet peeves on Facebook (of which eight in 10 moms are members), respondents said that their biggest annoyance was friends including too much personal information in their status updates. Other top peeves included friends sending too many status updates and too many requests to vote in contests or play games. Maybe that's because of their growing number of connections. A year ago, moms had an average of 151 Facebook friends. Now, they have 209. They're also getting fed up with the flood of information from companies’ Facebook accounts, with 55 percent saying they’ve defriended companies who sent too many messages and ads.

Clearly, millennial moms have pretty mixed feelings about the site—57 percent even called it a waste of  time—but their Facebook love affair is far from over. Not only are eight out of 10 on the social network, a whopping 89 percent considered their time spent Facebooking to be their “me time.” (No word on whether that “me time” involves using a smartphone in the bathroom.)

Facebook dropped jaws in February when the company announced during its first marketing conference that the average news feed post is only seen by 16 percent of the eligible users. Then Facebook announced its Reach Generator product as a way for brands to make sure their Facebook messages can reach up to 75 percent of their fans within a month, but that product has only been available to a small number of marketers.

Now social advertising company Adaptly says it has an alternative product available to all brands right away: Evergreen.

Adaptly is one of a handful of companies to have emerged in recent years promising brands a more efficient way to advertise on social media sites without buying from the Facebooks and Twitters of the world directly. With Evergreen, the company is taking a different approach from Facebook's Reach Generator. Rather than repromote content within the Facebook News Feed, it takes content posted to a brand’s page and spins it into a paid ad on Facebook.

But not any brand post can be recycled as an ad; instead it will have to have generated a certain level of earned engagement. “If a piece of content is below the threshold of organic reach, we won’t let the advertiser put money behind it,” explained Nikhil Sethi, CEO and co-founder of Adaptly.

A study released by online ad management platform Marin Software earlier this week showed that advertisers’ Facebook budgets are shifting toward social ads (units that use the social graph to incorporate interactions such as likes and comments) over old-school display ads. Within the last 12 months, the share of Facebook ad budgets spent on social ads has grown from 5 percent to 23 percent, per Marin, and the company expects that share to hit almost 50 percent by the end of this year. As social ads such as Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and now Adaptly’s Evergreen grow in popularity, expect brands to put even more resources toward the way they use their Facebook pages.

“Social ads are for amplifying the organic engagement that you have with your page today,” said Matt Lawson, vp of marketing at Marin Software. “To get there you really need to drive engagement on your own page, so that means investing in more than advertising.”

Rather than pricing the unit on a CPM basis, Adaptly is tiering the price of Evergreen ads based on a brand’s fan count and the percentage of those fans reached. Sethi said the pricing structure is part of a migration away from “cost-per-something” and borrows from TV’s gross ratings points model.

Adaptly is rolling out Evergreen at first for Facebook with Kraft Foods signed on as the exclusive launch partner. But the company plans to extend the product to Twitter where organic reach for a tweet is less than 1 percent, Sethi said.

Coupled with the Evergreen launch, Adaptly also announced on Wednesday it’s secured $10.5 million in funding from Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments and Vivi Nevo as well as existing investors such as First Round Capital. Adaptly employs 50 people but only one salesperson, so Sethi said the new dollars will be put toward growing the sales team and expanding the firm’s footprint beyond its New York, San Francisco and London offices into Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

Facebook has redesigned the Ad Creation tool adding a more streamlined, intuitive approach to creating ads.  The biggest changes are layout based and give users a simpler path to creating their ads. The biggest change is the first step, the destination.  Users can choose an external URL, page,…



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Internet Week, a slate of showcases, conferences and workshops around New York City spanning the depth and breadth of the tech industry, kicks off May 14.

The annual gathering this year will include keynotes from such industry notables as Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation; Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp; and The New York Times journalist Brian Stelter. Additional speakers include Anomaly creative director Suzana Apelbaum; Hayley Barna, founder and co-CEO of Birchbox; Federated Media executive chairman John Battelle; Mashable founder and CEO Pete Cashmore; Jessica Coen, editor in chief of Jezebel;  Machinima CEO and chairman Allen DeBevoise; Jane Hu, head of programming strategy at YouTube Next Lab; Andrew Madden, Google's head of magazines and news partnerships; and Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed.

Beyond the headliners, there are a number of shorter- and longer-term programming options at this year's Internet Week. There's the OMMA Mobile Conference, which will be held all day May 14 at the Internet Week Theater on Mercer Street, the Streaming Media East summit will be held concurrently at the Hilton New York and The Digiday Conference will take place the same day at the W New York. 

Other sessions of note include "the newsstand 2.0," online dating, game design, customer acquisition in emerging markets like China, the digital music industry, business blogging, mobile apps and women in tech.

Internet Week is also home to the CLIO Awards, which will be held from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. May 15 at the American Museum of Natural History.

Instagram—a company whose acquisition by Facebook made major headlines recently—is partnering with Times Square for Internet Week to spotlight photographers in a first-ever Instagram photo exhibition.

For the full list of sessions and locations, check out the Internet Week calendar.