Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath. Much of the content created and shared on Facebook related to these events has been in Persian - the native language of Iran - but the users have had to navigate the site in English or other languages.

Today Facebook will be making the entire site available in a test version of Persian, so Persian speakers inside of Iran and around the world can begin using it in their native language.

Persian was already in translation before worldwide attention turned to the Iranian elections, but because of the sudden increase in activity we decided to launch it sooner than planned. This means that the translation isn’t perfect, but we felt it was important to help more people communicate rather than wait.

If your browser is set to Persian, you should automatically see the Persian version of Facebook. If you’d like to change your language into Persian, go here: or click on the “Settings” link in the upper-right corner of any page and then go to the “Language” tab. You then can select the language you want from the drop-down menu.

We could not have made this happen so quickly without the more than 400 Persian speakers who submitted thousands of individual translations of the site. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far. If you speak Persian or any language not yet completely translated, you can help as well by using the Translations application:

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This is an event that I am producing. We have had 2 previous events at UCLA and Stanford that sold out and the feedback from attendees was phenomenal. We educate, inform and empower the attendees by having tier 1 presenters that share actual case studies, best practices and lessons learned.

This event is different from any “social media event” that you might have attended previously. This is why I created www.gravitysummit.com It is designed to address what I felt were the short comings of most social media conferences.

It is held at the faculty club of universities because our focus is education and bridging the gap for business professionals. We focus on helping you learn and not feel overwhelmed and you will walk away with ideas to implement immediately after the event. the pricing link is for early bird pricing. I encourage you to share with your peers or people that you feel would benefit from this very special event.

Tickets For Gravity Summit at UC Irvine

AGENDA

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR BUSINESS AT
University of California, Irvine Faculty Club
Monday, June 22, 2009

Special Thanks to our TITLE Sponsors: TurboTax and Quicken
Special Thanks to our Key Sponsors: Cisco Systems; Visible Technologies and TweetPhoto

8:30 AM — Registration - Prepare for the day (please be on time)
Join us for a scrumptious breakfast and lots of networking.

9:00 AM — Welcome and Introduction
Co—Hosts: Beverly Macy, Rodney Rumford
Setting the stage for a full day, we’ll introduce the core concepts of social media and review the speaker agenda.

9:15 AM — Social Media Marketing Overview
Beverly Macy
Beverly teaches Social Media Marketing at UCLA and works with clients at all levels to understand how social media tools fit into the traditional Integrated Marketing plan. She will discuss the social media marketing landscape, giving best practice examples of how major brands are using Social Media as a fast, efficient, and relatively low-cost way to get their message directly to an audience. Learn how companies from all industries are changing the ways in which they engage with their customers and associates.

9:45 AM — AM KEYNOTE: Marketing Your Way Out of the Recession: How Marketers Are Reconnecting With Their Customers Using Social Media
John Gerzema, Chief Insights Officer and Brand Economist for Young & Rubicam and the author of the bestselling book, “The Brand Bubble”
John will set the tone for the day and share how marketers are reconnecting with their customers using social media. Hear firsthand about the four cultural values shifts shaping new consumer strategies and brand behavior. To each behavior, John will demonstrate how marketers are reconnecting with their customers using social media, search, inventive pricing, distribution and ideas beyond traditional communications. Learn how John has guided brand strategies to global business and creative acclaim. Learn more about his thoughts and the book here.

10:30 AM — Networking Break

10:45 AM — Using Twitter and PhotoSharing to Drive Business Results
Rodney Rumford: Founder of Gravity Summit
Rodney is a major force in the social media world today, and is frequently quoted in the media and published on the subject. He will discuss Twitter as a Business Tool; how you choose to use that tool will be determined by what you want to use it for: ie. news distribution, customer service, sales, branding, extending product awareness, product launches, promotion, relationship building, etc. He is also the CEO of TweetPhoto, a new photo sharing service and will discuss the value of photo sharing in customer engagement.

11:30 AM — DOMINO’S Case Study: Using Twitter, YouTube, Facebook to Drive Revenue in this Economy
Ramon De Leon (aka DPZRAMON), Operating Partner, Domino’s Pizza Chicago
As an owner of multiple Domino’s Pizza locations, DPZRamon will share how his stores are using social media platforms to THRIVE in this economy. –DPZRAMON will also discuss how social media has been a critical tool for communicating with customers during crisis situations, – we all recall the recent YouTube prank video - in addition to building brand awareness and increasing sales.
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12:00 PM — Networking Lunch

1:00 PM — PM KEYNOTE Building Passionate Communities Around Your Products
INTUIT, Christine Morrison Intuit Social Marketing Manager
Christine is a savvy brand marketer who has helped steer Intuit, one of America’s most admired companies with revenues topping $3 billion, to great success using social media to market its flagship tax software products. . What does Social Media have to do with taxes? Believe it or not, there are passionate users of TurboTax and Quicken and Christine’s keynote will outline how the company leveraged an integrated marketing and social media campaign, “FreeLoader Nation,” that included a new relationship with MySpace to build passionate communities around the products for the 2009 tax season Intuit’s hugely successful FreeLoader Nation campaign dished out access to the TurboTax Online Free Edition and other free stuff, including concerts with today’s hottest bands through MySpace Secret Shows, which boasts nearly 500,000 friends and offers members the ability to attend free performances by their favorite artists in small, intimate venues.

1:45 PM — SO CAL ACTION SPORTS NETWORK – How Online Collaboration is Helping Top Brands Capitalize on the Growing Action Sports Industry
Bryan Elliott, Chairman
Social media is more than just building brand awareness, it’s creating communities for businesses to collaborate, partner and generate cross-marketing and promotional opportunities. Learn from Bryan how members of SoCalAction Sports Network such as Boost Mobile, Best Buy and Microsoft are joining key influencers, experts and trend-setters in lifestyle marketing, Gen Y and the youth culture movement online to connect with one another and with their brand fans.

2:15 PM — VISIBLE TECHNOLOGIES – Ready to Join the Conversation Online? Tools for Reaching the Right Influencers
Blake Cahill, SVP of Marketing
Learn why companies such as DIRECTV are employing the TruCast(r) platform for social media analysis and participation in order to participate in the right conversations with the right influencers at the right time to bolster brands and grow revenue.

2:45 PM – Networking Break

3:00 PM — PANEL: Building and Managing Successful Online Communities
Moderator: Angie Swartz, Twitter Talk Radio
Lauren Kozak, SMM Manager for Britney Spears
Scott Gulbransen, SMM Manger for Intuit
Karen Sohl, Director Worldwide Corporate Marketing, Cisco Systems
Steve Patrizi, VP Sales and Marketing, LinkedIn
The emergence of social media has been happening for the last couple of years, but the importance of building communities online for brand awareness and increased revenue generation is just coming into focus. These new techniques are game-changing to every traditional discipline and strategy in marketing and public relations. This prestigious group of panelists have earned every scar they have through real world experience, and that has resulted in them becoming sharp practitioners in the largely uncharted territory of social media. This panel will explore the art of managing social communities and how this relates to media relations, branding management, employee interaction with social media, and executive, crisis, and internal communications.

4:00 PM – How to Get Started, Which Tools to Use.
Beverly Macy, Rodney Rumford
Discussion on how you can establish strategic objectives and ROI targets for successful social media campaigns. Find out how to get started in the Social Media world and move in the right direction to meet your business objectives.

4:15 PM – Expert Q&A

4:30 PM — Adjourn
Prepare to put your new knowledge into action! Your brain is going to feel very, very full.

5:30 –TWEETUP / MeetUp at Bistango’s in Irvine Sponsored by Visible Technologies, Inc.

Get Your Tickets For Gravity Summit at UC Irvine Now

SPEAKER BIOS

Beverly Macy
Seminar Co-Host

Beverly W. Macy is Managing Partner of Y&M Partners LLC, a strategic advisory company in Beverly Hills, CA. Y&M Partners offers services in business development, marketing, branding, and corporate finance. Clients have included Boeing, Qualcomm, Anthem, PacifiCare, ReachMD, and Inovus Solar. Macy spent 14 years at Xerox Corporation in global sales and marketing and began her career at Wang Laboratories in software development. She teaches Executive Marketing Courses, including Social Media and Global Branding, at UCLA and lectures at USC. She is a “biz dev diva”, a social media marketing specialist, a healthcare futurist, and a credentialed business author. Her newest course, Social Media Marketing, was launched in the Fall 2008 Semester. She is a published business writer, and speaks professionally. She has been active in community service for the past 20 years.

Rodney Rumford
Seminar Co-Host

Rodney has spent over 21 years in technology. He is a true visionary and has authored books on Social Media, Twitter, Business Blogging & Podcasting. He has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, Business 2.0 and numerous Associated Press & Reuters articles. His sites have also been featured in the acclaimed “For Dummies” series of books.
Rodney has been involved with the Facebook f8 platform since its launch. He is the founder & CEO Gravitational Media, a new media agency that has helped many Fortune 100 clients as well as hundreds of small businesses. His company www.GravitationalMedia.com provides Businesses Strategy, Marketing, Ideation and Technology Consulting to help Brands Engage in Social Networks. Clients include Vivendi, Mountain Dew, Pfizer, Simon & Schuster, Seth Godin and many more. He is also the Publisher of www.FaceReviews.com which rates & reviews Facebook applications, as well as provides news and strategy insights about social media trends. He currently resides in Solana Beach, CA

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Amigo for FriendFeed Rating:

I have been working with David Hinson who is an amazingly talented developer and i had the privilege of being one of the beta tester of his latest iPhone creation: Amigo for Friend Feed.

I did some of the testing of the app and watched it evolve into an amazingly full featured application that does virtually anything that you would want a Friend Feed app to do. I felt like i did not even have to go to the web site as the app is that robust. I really like the way it operates in the landscape mode too which is really slick.

It allows you to view the home stream, public stream, rooms, lists and subscriptions.
You can also easily search.
Quickly view comments and likes and the people attached to them.
Easily see users profiles.
Post messages and comments
like/unlike messages
subscribe/unsubscribe users
operate in landscape mode

There are even more features coming in future versions, but i have to say that this app is now my default iPhone app for Friend Feed.

Check out the overview video of Amigo for FriendFeed

You can go get your copy in the apple iTunes store here.

You can see another detailed screen shot of it here on Tweetphoto.com

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I can’t believe how fast time flies when you are having fun. It seems like only yesterday when I ran the first Facebook developers garage in San Diego right after the facebook platform launched. Happy Birthday Facebook Platform!

The number of applications on the platform is in the tens of thousands. The ROI and engagement opportunity that exists by creating compelling apps on the platform is where a large opportunity exists for business, companies and brands to reach people “where they are living”.

Facebook platform has created an eco-system that truly allows companies and brands to create unique branded experiences within facebook. Watch this facebook video to see the story behind platform. I really like this video and the way that they team tells the story.

Cheers to the Team!

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Facebook has frequently been criticized for not allowing info out of the facebook eco-system for developers. Well it now looks like Facebook is going to change that starting today. You can see what they are saying below in 2 different blog posts from the facebook team. It will be interesting to see how websites & services incorporate this new data portability. To say that the facebook stream is going to become a raging river and flow across tens of thousands of websites and services is an understatement.

Interact with Your Stream Anywhere by Justin Bishop
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=79988352130

When you want to stay updated with your friends and other connections on Facebook, you can log into your home page to see a running timeline, or stream, of the information they’re sharing. The more they share, the more you see in the stream and the more you learn about your connections. Starting today, you have the option to access that same stream outside of Facebook.com.

Now, you’ll be able to view your stream and publish information into it from places you never could before — like your desktop computer or your mobile phone. Your stream will appear just as it does on Facebook.com and maintain the same privacy settings. We believe that the ability to see more and more of what is happening around you will lead to greater openness and transparency.

To make this work, we released new technology for developers so they can offer this option to you on other websites and applications. We work closely with third-party developers to enable intriguing and meaningful experiences both on and off Facebook.com. Since we launched Facebook Platform in 2007, developers have created 10s of thousands of applications to help you connect and share with your friends in interesting ways — whether by playing a social game, discovering new books or creating group greeting cards.

Last year, we announced Facebook Connect to make it easy for you to take your online identity with you across the Web and share what you do online with your friends back on Facebook by publishing your actions to the stream. Today’s announcement is an extension of that by making it easy for you to interact with your stream from anywhere.

We’ve already worked with a few developers to build some of these new experiences for you to try out, and we’ve created one ourselves, as well. Beginning later today, you’ll be able to find these and future implementations in the Facebook Application Directory under “For Your Desktop.”

For instance, you’ll be able to install Facebook Desktop for AIR and connect using your Facebook account.

Then, you’ll receive two prompts: the first to give permission for the application to access your News Feed and Wall and the second to give permission to publish posts and comments.

>From there, you’ll be able to interact with your stream just as you would on Facebook but directly from your desktop rather than through a browser. You’ll be able to do all the same things you would normally do on Facebook, including view your friends’ content and publish information through the Composer. You can even “Like” and comment on your friends’ stories directly from your desktop.

Be sure to also check out Seesmic’s desktop application, which includes your stream from Facebook and adds feeds from other websites, too.

In the coming months, you’ll be able to interact with your stream on even more websites and through more applications, in ways we’re only beginning to imagine.

Facebooks Developer blog post:

The Facebook Open Stream API By Ray C. He
http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=225

Today we are excited to announce an unprecedented step toward greater openness through Facebook Platform. For the first time, we’re opening the core Facebook product experience — the stream — with the new Facebook Open Stream API.

The home page design centralizes the stream of information that tells you what’s going on right now in the world around you. With the Facebook Open Stream API users will be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream. As a Facebook developer you’ll also be able to access the posts you’ve published into the stream and display them in your application, whether it’s on a mobile device, Web site or desktop.

To enable developers to access the stream, we’ve built the Facebook Open Stream API to include the emerging Activity Streams standard. Over the last several months, we’ve been collaborating with the community, hosting meetups at Facebook headquarters, and speaking at industry events about Activity Streams and the open stack. We think that working alongside our peers to create an open standard for accessing and consuming streams is the future. We’ll continue to make contributions to the standards community and related technologies and are happy to be one of the first companies to implement Activity Streams at scale.

In addition to the Activity Streams interface, the Open Stream API includes robust new APIs called stream.get and stream.publish and new FQL tables that enable you to directly access the stream. With these new methods, you can access the stream on behalf of a user and then filter, remix, and display the stream back to that user however you choose, wherever you choose, in the manner most relevant for the user experience. Other new API methods will allow users to both publish into the stream and to add comments and “likes” to posts in the stream.

Consistent with our previous steps toward greater openness, we believe users must have full control and choice and that’s exactly how we’ve designed Facebook Platform and the Open Stream API. All Facebook Platform terms governing data use apply and an application or Facebook Connect site can only access a user’s view of the stream if the user gives the application permission.

To get things started we’ve worked alongside a few beta partners to test the Facebook Open Stream API. For example, Seesmic Desktop is now a full-featured client for the stream and Adobe has created a simple stream Notifier using the AIR development framework.

In addition, we’ve created a sample client application which includes all of the APIs we’ve released today on top of Adobe’s AIR development platform. The code is available in our public repository.

You can get started by reading the documentation. Please share your comments and feedback in the Developer Forum.

We can’t wait to see the amazing new experiences you build for the more than 200 million Facebook users. You can see what they are also saying over on Techcrunch

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SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FOR BUSINESS
AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Tuesday, May 5, 2009 Stanford Faculty Club

8:30 – Registration

9:00 AM — Welcome and Introduction
Co—Hosts: Beverly Macy, Rodney Rumford

Setting the stage for a full day, Beverly and Rodney will introduce the core concepts of social media, review the speaker agenda and anticipated takeaways for the day.

9:15 AM — Social Media Marketing Overview, Beverly Macy

Beverly teaches Social Media Marketing at UCLA and works with clients at all levels to understand how social media tools fit into the traditional Integrated Marketing plan. To kick off the day, she will discuss the state of the social media marketing landscape today, giving best practice examples of how major brands are using Social Media as a fast, efficient, and relatively low-cost way to get their message directly to an audience. Learn how companies from all industries are changing the ways in which they engage with their customers and associates.

9:45 AM — KEYNOTE: “How Social Media Will Transform the Fortune 500”
Bob Pearson, President, Blog Council, formerly VP, Communities & Conversations, Dell Inc.
Based on his experience as the architect of Dell’s social media efforts and innovative partnerships with technology partners, such as Microsoft and Salesforce.com, Bob Pearson will describe the capabilities of social media to transform how a company interacts with its employees, learns from customers and, ultimately, how ecommerce will evolve. He’ll share the real world applications and business case studies of using Twitter and other social media tools at Dell, as well as discussing the benefits and lessons learned from these efforts. Join Bob as he shares his thoughts and insights on where the industry is going, the role conversational marketing will play and how this impacts your business today.

10:30 AM — Networking Break

10:45 AM — “Twitter as a Business Tool” Rodney Rumford

Rodney is a major force in the Social Media world today. He will discuss Twitter as a Business Tool; how you choose to use that tool will be determined by what you want to use it for: ie. news distribution, customer service, sales, branding, extending product awareness, product launches, promotion, relationship building, etc. Hear directly how Twitter is impacting businesses and marketing campaigns in real time from a visionary social media strategist. He is also the Co-Founder of www.tweetphoto.com

11:30 AM — “Social media: The bridge from print to…”
Alasdair Stewart, City Editor of the Walla Walla, WA Union-Bulletin
Alasdair is a social media pioneer and is leading a traditional print journalism staff into a multimedia future. Old-school media groups have yet to unlock the power of social media. They focus on how tools like Facebook and Twitter can be used to gather and disseminate news but ignore the power of these tools to “sell” people on the news. At the same time, these organizations are for many reasons notoriously averse to marketing. Learn how social media is changing this at a price

12:00 PM — Networking Lunch

1:00 PM — “Using Social Media Tools to Drive Customer Loyalty and Retention” Charles E. Miller, Director, Social Media Strategy, DIRECTV
Charles will discuss how and why DIRECTV chose to use Social Media to drive customer loyalty and retention. Learn how putting social media in your employees’ hands promotes open communications and equips them with the best possible story to tell about your brand. Hear first hand why DIRECTV believes that if you’re not joining the online conversations about your brand, you’re ignoring your customers and potential brand advocates.

1:45 - “How Social Media is Changing the Public Relations Ecosystem”
Jason Kintzler, Founder and CEO, PITCHENGINE
Jason is a former print and broadcast journalist turned PR expert and now, savvy entrepreneur. Media delivery methods have changed dramatically in recent years, but the PR industry has had trouble keeping pace, until now. With new social web tools and tactics, PR professionals have the opportunity to take their share of the corporate marketing pie by being the champions of social media. By reaching consumers, investors and media directly, brands don’t have to rely solely on print ad campaigns to tell their story — They can tell it themselves. It’s public relations in it’s purest form.

2:15 -”Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds to Further Engage Target Markets and Garner Brand Intelligence”
Michael Agnich, Co-Founder, CT0, PREDICTIFY
Is crowd wisdom hype or reality? Can it be monetized and, if so, how? From polls to prediction markets to user-generated content sites, the space is littered with consumer successes and business failures. Find out how ‘ wisdom-of-crowds’ platforms and sponsored prediction challenges can help maximize customer engagement. Mike will use the John Grisham/Doubleday Publishing case study to illustrate how crowd wisdom can affect the bottom line.

2:45 Break

3:00 – 4:00 PM — “Integrating Social Media into the Marketing Mix”
INDUSTRY PANEL – Cisco, Facebook, DIGG, SixApart
Moderator: Steve Farnsworth, Silicon Valley Brand Forum
Social Media is continuing to evolve – 3 out of every 4 US adults online now are using social tools to connect and network. New, easy-to-use social web tools are empowering anyone and everyone to communicate. The communication channels are rapidly changing for corporations. This disruption is causing some significant changes in how companies will communicate with their employees and the market. This panel focuses on how companies are integrating social media into their marketing activities, what lessons they’ve learned, and how these efforts have made them better able to serve their employees and consumers.

4:00 PM – WRAP UP “You’ve Learned A lot Today. How To Go Back To the Office and Impress Your Boss”
Beverly Macy, Rodney Rumford
Discussion on how you can establish strategic objectives and ROI targets for successful social media campaigns. Find out how to get started in the Social Media world and move in the right direction to meet your business objectives, plus for those companies with social media strategies in play, how to further enhance your efforts and increase results.

4:15 PM – Expert Q&A

4:30 PM — Adjourn

Don’t miss the groundbreaking event. Get your Tickets For Gravity Summit at Stanford

5:30 - FREE Cinco de Mayo TWEETUP
Zibibbo’s, 430 Kipling St., Palo Alto
Phone: 650/328-6722

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There has been quite a stir in the past few days about facebook changing their terms and conditions. Many facebook users, bloggers and the media have hopped on the bandwagon and decided to give facebook some push back on their new restrictive terms and conditions that effectively gave facebook ownership of all content uploaded to their site. I expected many facebook users to become vocal about this issue and I actually chose not to blog about the issue for a day or 2 until the dust had settled and to offer some candid insights on to my feelings on this.

Well, just a few minutes ago Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a blog post (his second in as many days; which he has never done before) to elaborate more on this highly sensitive issue. “Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.”

It will take facebook most likely at least a month to get this document crafted properly after soliciting feedback from the community of 175 million Facebook users. Mark also elaborated by saying “You have my commitment that we’ll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.”

I seriously hope that they take some time to get their heads around this issue as well as the associated issues of allowing people to have more portability of their social graph outside of facebook. This is an important issue for Facebook to get right. It is my belief that the more open they are;the better it is for everyone.

Facebook has decided to be more open and solicit feedback on this very sensitive and complicated issue. They have created the Facebook Bill of Rights Group. Check out the group and give them your feedback.

You can read Mark’s 2 complete blog post on these issues here:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54746167130
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130

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Ahhh. Facebook is such a baby; it is just 5 years old and continues on it’s path for world domination. It is hard to believe that the site is only 5 years old tomorrow. In internet years that make it in its mid 20’s. The evolution of facebook and the rate of innovation and velocity at which they implement changes has been quite mind numbing. From the launch of the facebook F8 application platform which was just under 2 years ago; to the growth of over 220 million members worldwide which has been unprecedented from any other membership website online.

So I say to all the naysayers “220 Million People Can’t Be Wrong”. I remember when people said (some still say) Facebook was fad.

A few crowning statistics to put onto the Facebook Birthday Cake:
• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 3.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
• More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month
• More than 24 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month

Here is a bit of a trip down memory lane of what facebook used to look like to what it has evolved into today. Here is the evolution of the facebook profile page

Here is a comparison of the facebook homepage circa 2005 vs. 2009

According to facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg “The culture of the Internet has also changed pretty dramatically over the past five years. Before, most people wouldn’t consider sharing their real identities online. But Facebook has offered a safe and trusted environment for people to interact online, which has made millions of people comfortable expressing more about themselves.” You can read Mark’s full blog post here. Facebook will also have a free gift tomorrow to share the birthday love http://www.facebook.com/giftshop.php?

Happy Birthday Facebook! Cheers!

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Don’t you hate being late for friends’ birthdays? Well, as of today (in a limited rollout fashion) facebook is helping to put an end to “belated” birthdays on Facebook. Now, on your friend’s profiles, you’ll be able to schedule the delivery of a gift up to seven days in advance of a birthday. This will make it much easier if you don’t happen to log into facebook everyday. Happy Gifting!

There are two ways to do this:

1. When your friends have upcoming birthdays, you’ll now receive a reminder when you visit their profiles. Here’s how: under the Profile Publisher—which allows you to post content directly onto someone’s Wall—you’ll see a new option in the “Give Gift” tab to hide your gift until it becomes your friend’s birthday.

2. If you subscribe to e-mail birthday reminders, you’ll see a link in the email that will take you directly to your friend’s profile to give your gift in advance. Your friends will be able to see that you are giving a birthday gift, but the recipients will only be able to see the gift when the clock strikes midnight on their birthday.

If you don’t see these new features just yet, it is because Facebook is just starting to roll them out today, and they will be available to everyone in the coming weeks.

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I wanted to share this information with all of my readers of this great event that is coming Feb. 25, 2009 to Los Angeles. Full Disclosure: This is an event that I am producing with Beverly Macy who is an instructor (of the social media class) at UCLA. You can follow the event on Twitter and you can see more details as well as the full speakers list at www.gravitysummit.com

Announcing the Social Media Summit at UCLA by Gravity Summit. We are very happy to bring this classroom style event for learning to marketing practitioners.

Gravity Summit is pleased to bring forward this world class training event that will give practical advice and insight to marketing professionals. We will be publishing the full agenda details in the coming days. Understanding the impact and how to create and execute with the right tool sets in the social media space to attain positive ROI and marketing objectives can be overwhelming.

We will distill the required information down to actionable items, best practices and proper engagement techniques for your business.

We will be covering in detail social media topics and tool sets including, but not limited to: Twitter, Facebook, Listening Engines, Business Blogs, Social Media Press Releases, and much more.

What do big brands like Dell, Sprint, Southwest, Comcast, H&R Block, Sony, Yahoo and others know about Social Media that you don’t? Social Media is a fast, efficient, and relatively low-cost way to get your message directly to an audience. There are millions of blogs and millions of profiles on social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Is this just hype or has marketing, advertising and corporate communication changed forever.

These new tools - blogs, wikis, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, online video and social networks - all present intriguing opportunities for customer engagement, but can be intimidating.

Join top social media experts & practitioners Beverly Macy and Rodney Rumford for a full day of information, case studies, special guest speakers, and networking. In this classroom-like setting, you will learn how to establish strategic objectives and ROI targets for successful social media campaigns. You will leave knowing how to get started in the Social Media world and move in the right direction to meet your business objectives.

Attendees will walk away with:

• Best Practices
• Action Items
• Unique Insights
• Case Studies
• Unique Trends Data
• Clearly Defined Objectives
• Access to a Peer Network
• Opportunity to Gain Knowledge with a Private Marketing Mastermind Group

EVENT DATE: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 9:00 – 4:30

REGISTRATION: Full Day, Includes Lunch: Standard Price $349, Early Bird Price $279

LOCATION: University Of California, Los Angeles: UCLA Faculty Center, California Room.
Register Now

p.s. Readers of my blog get an extra 10% off of the early bird pricing by going here and using this discount code: facereviews
This link will only work until Monday Feb. 2

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