Last December, I was lucky enough to present on a panel at a Web Community Forum conference about marketing on Facebook. I just discovered some of my notes from that event that I never published.

• A Facebook sponsored group costs $100K/month
• Jeremiah Owyang coined the term “Microburst Entertainment” to refer to the increasingly distributed nature of Web content (and functionality).
• Jason Beckerman recommended Include a dynamic element on your canvas home page (like the countdown timer in The Lotto app).
• With The Lotto app, they had success with requiring users to invite in order to receive a lotto ticket. Update: in the last few months, I’ve had success with forced invites as well, I should blog in more detail about this.
• Be Santa app – better success with Amazon referrals once they included a separate add unit. Update: I tried a new Amazon ad unit in my Toy Chest app and saw no improvement.
• General social tip from either Mari Smith or Teresa Valdez Klein: use friend’s walls to congratulate them publicly.
• Teresa Valdez Klein suggested using Google Reader to aggregate and re-publish your own feeds. Update: I’m now using this technique on this blog (see How This Blog Works).
• Todd Sawicki suggested that tagging people in photos will rank high in the newsfeed. Update: I considered hacking this technique for my Hot Photos app. I was going to tag people as “Hot” or “Funny” but shied away from it after seeing warnings from Facebook in the developer forums.
• Also, watch your minifeed as an indication of how you appear to others
• Steve Broback demoed an interesting sentiment tracker (Google alerts that track positive/negative feedback).
• Brand marketers need a mechanism to aggregate groups of people by brand. Pages and Groups are not perfect tools. A common complaint is group messaging (from Pages, Groups, or Events)
• Dave McClure described designing apps to amplify the news feed “inductive loop” (see Andrew Chen’s blog).
• Dave McClure demoed the technique of using an image of a button in a newsfeed. Update: very good idea, I borrowed that for my Hot Photos app.
• Dave McClure said that one of the Stanford Facebook apps is projected to earn $1M this year. Update: would be interesting to go back and check this out. I’m not sure what app he was refering to, but I know “Send Hotness” has had a real decline in users.
• Mari Smith suggested outsourcing community admin work – start with deleting spam from Facebook groups
• Lee Lorenzen described his mission as looking for office apps for the social graph.
• To justify Facebook’s valuation, Lee Lorenzen listed a slew of present and prospective licensing and partnership deals. It was an interesting list that could be re-interpreted as ideas for building businesses on Facebook.