If any marketer or brand manager doubts the power of facebook marketing and advertising; they should read this quick little informal case study (happening as we write this).

Today at noon I saw an advertisement for a facebook Event in the Sponsored position on the facebook home page: FREE Ben & Jerry’s on Election Day! So I went and joined.

It had ~10,000 users confirmed to attend and get their free scoop of Ice Cream. As I write this post it is closing in on 20,000 people confirmed. This is continuing to gain user velocity as it gets pushed further into the Social Graph. Hey who doesn’t love free Ice Cream? The election is the hottest topic on the top of everyone’s minds so the event is very relevant to the audience.

There are over 1000 wall posts as of this writing and they are coming at a rate of about ~2 per minute; which is pretty darn fast for a facebook event.

It is also important to note that I could see several of my friends also planned to attend, so the advertisement immediately felt very personalized and thus more compelling.

My behavior within the facebook eco-system: Invited 10 people, added event which pushed to my news feed and nearly 2000 contacts, wrote on the event wall: which pushed to my mini feed, uploaded a picture to facebook of Ben and Jerry’s, etc.

My behavior outside of the facebook ecosystem? I tweeted a link to the group. Uploaded a picture of Ben and Jerry’s to twitter, pushed it to friendfeed, etc… You get the idea. The point is consumers effectively, easily and willingly become messengers of the brand and redistribute with very fast velocity and ease inside and outside of the eco-system where they were exposed to the message initially.

My exposure and choosing willingly to share put this message in front of no less than a network 5000k connections is by no means unique. It should make brand managers heads spin. I am not unique. I might be on the front edge, but this is a trend.

So all the naysayers that say that advertising does not work on social networks should chew on this story for a while. Mark my words, this event will easily top 60K users within 24-48 hours.

p.s. I also wrote this blog post; thus moving the messaging untold amounts further.

UPDATE: Here is just a small sampling of the conversations that got started around Ben & Jerry’s on Twitter after my initial twitter post (tweet).

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