Having just got back from my round the world, (well, Vietnam and Cambodia) charity travels. I arrived back at work and like any good employee, headed straight for Facebook. I am really excited about Facebook this year (especially now I’ve posted the video blogs from my trip.) Actually it’s the advertising on Facebook that’s really caught my eye. I’ve been checking out Facebook’s advertising interface and the list of targeting parameters is endless,

2007 showed phenomenal growth for “Facebook”, by the end of the year it had 7.6M active UK users, that’s 12.5% of the population. With so many active users participating on the social networking site some form of advertising system to target these users was inevitable.

Does anyone recall those childhood Christmassy charity drives? You know, those ‘Sponsor me to eat 10 mince pies’ type of things. You were cajoled into walking around in the bleak mid winter weather, knocking door to door with a soggy piece of paper asking for sponsorship – only to have to go through the same dreary saga after the event itself just to collect the money? – All that, and I don’t even like mince pies!! Well, what with the latest in internet trends, social networking and fancy applications, fundraising has never been so easy – or fun for that matter! You no longer have to brave the extremes (until the event itself that is!) You can do all your fundraising and collecting online from the comfort of which ever festive environment you prefer.

I thought it'd be worth outlining three particular areas discussed in conversations at breaks and during the Q&A slots at the end of each session at the recent seminar.

In short: Creating a corporate Facebook; AdSense - useful or not; Allowing and handling negative UGC.

Just a quick thank you to all who attended the latest in our series of free educational seminars on Thursday 11th October at The Groucho Club in Soho.

The event was titled: Debunking New Web Myths - The Realities of Commercial Success with Web 2.0

Apparently they can. But what about the old tricks?

At a dinner out on Friday with a friend I hadn’t seen in a few years, the conversation got around to Facebook. One of the questions we considered was whether it serves to reconnect you with friends you should’ve kept in touch with, or whether we are all in touch with the people we want to be and that Facebook is a good tool to help manage those relationships.