Last friday night A week ago friday, at midnight hundreds of thousands of you around the world rushed to grab the vanity url (http://facebook.com/username) of your dreams. Within minutes millions of names had been snatched up, leaving many frustrated that they couldn’t be the numero uno Mike or Steve on facebook, but it also meant a lot of fake accounts were setup to snatch generic names as well.

Apparently Facebook had thought of making it an auction, or charging for names, but ultimately decided against it because of the server load issues that would have ensued.  Personally I think they should have charged for fan pages to get custom urls if they are going to be used for commercial purposes, that’s only fair.  Those of us that didn’t secure names for our fan pages will have to wait until the 28th when they open it up to the rest of the world (i.e. the 99% of pages with under 1000 fans).

One thing though that was really silly was all the people who snatched up names thinking they were going to be able to sell them later. The thing is these people were getting the names/keywords for personal profiles, not fan pages. Its a collosal waste to build a brand or product offering on facebook using a personal profile and not a fan page. I’ll get into the whys later, but just know that you are seriously wasting opportunity by using a personal profile account for a business.

What’s going to happen to these names like /whiskey (i REALLY wanted that one, got stuck with /drinkwhiskey instead) that were pinned to user profiles? Well ultimately its going to come down to facebook yanking them, or they go to waste. Will a secondary market arise? Sure, but only for fan pages, not for personal profiles. Those who buy great keywords with hopes of turning these minor personal profiles into commercial landing pages will be sad when they realize they’ve wasted what could be hundreds of dollars on something useless.

So my advice, create a valuable page with content on it, promote it, and then see if you can grab your desired name on June 28. If you want to give yourself a clever personal username, make it something representative of you/your personality, or better yet: protect your personal brand name.

After having organized the second Facebook Developer Garage in Miami this past weekend, it got me thinking about the other developer platforms out there, and why some are successful and some not. One of the key examples that came to mind was that of LinkedIn. You would think that LinkedIn would have a thriving developer community because LinkedIn has millions of users, all validated to some degree, a strong social graph, and its oriented around making $.

Well to date (after almost a year of having a developer platform) there are only 10 applications in their directory. TEN APPLICATIONS. So why are there only 10 apps serving a community of some 30 Million+ users? Basically LinkedIN didn’t take their community seriously. They seem to have rushed their platform announcement out and pushed it to a handful of elite/select developers whom they knew, and then never bothered to get around to the rest. They saw everyone else jumping on the OpenSocial/platform craze and I’m sure their investors told them they better be on that train as well.

So why do I think LinkedIN has been dragging their feet on their platform while everyone else is welcoming developers in with open arms? I think its about money. They see the facebook economy surpassing $500 Million a year and don’t want to have that go on in their site and miss out on taking a large cut. The other thing they fear is that they charge for services on their site and they could all easily be replicated through apps and again they would lose out on the revenue from those functions. Why would you pay for job postings if I could build a free jobs app and get you just as much exposure, or email contacts or crm, etc.

So what has LinkedIN done so far? Just link to the OpenSocial documentation and suggest you email them if you have an app you want included. No sandbox to test, no documentation on which LinkedIn specific calls you can make, what data you have available to you, nothing. Way to build a garden, then throw up a gate around it and not let anyone in.

What should they be doing though, is build or partner for their own transaction engine, require that app developers who charge use their engine (its only fair), then open the flood gates. That $50M they made last year from their own small set of services would explode to making $200-$300M from shares of other transactions throughout the system. Just build out their own set of tools in partnership with sites like Monster.com or others to supplement their own existing toolset, and let the community fill in the thousands of holes that will surely arise. Its not like your own internal team can build all those tools and monetizing apps on its own. So focus on building the platform + payments and you’ll have a killer role.

So you’re sitting at your desk at your traditional ad agency, marketing firm, or public relations agency and you notice that every day there are more and more empty desks around you. Hmmm I wonder why? Well there is a simple way to keep your desk from being the next empty one: adapt.

So before we dive into me teaching you how to adapt, I am going to assume you are smart enough to know that you need to learn about online marketing (u know that lil thing the kids call the “internets” has been around for over a decade now). I am also going to assume you have a background in traditional marketing, PR, or advertising.

So everything you learned in your marketing classes isn’t completely useless, actually, it is still quite useful, it just needs to be adapted. You have to start somewhere though, so lets start with some basic terminology.

Blogs - A self published journal, newsletter, etc. Usually supports visitor comments/feedback, rss, and trackbacks. Do you need one? Only if you have customers whom you want to talk to, and value their opinion (these opinion things, are pretty important these days). If you are writing an email or physical newsletter you send out everymonth, you should be re-publishing this as a blog on your domain/site. Also things you find too minute for newsletter publishing, but are still useful or valuable to your users/customers, should be posted on your corporate or client’s blog.

Microblogging - think blogging or SMS, but limited to 140-160 characters in length. see Twitter.

SEM - Search Engine Marketing - This is the all encompassing term for everything that deals with buying ads alongside search results on web search engines. Think more off-site work than on-site (your website).

SEO - Search Engine Optimization - This is all about on-site work, and turning your site into something the search engines will love, will understand, and then in turn reward you with higher placement in RELEVANT searches. This is can also be tied heavily into link building. The key is to turn all those years of copywriting experience you have, into something a search engine will understand. So basic things include writing clear and concise content, and avoiding hiding your content from searchers (i.e. inside pretty flash files).

PPC - Pay Per Click aka CPC (cost per click)- A form of online advertising whereby you only pay for leads (clicks) to your website. Google popularized this (but did NOT invent it). If you are on a fixed budget, and want to drive an exact amount of hits to your site, this might be your best bet. Important to note, most PPC systems are designed as auctions, with bidders buying up exposure and demand dictating the prices dynamically.

CTR - Click-through rate: The average number of clicks per 100 views of your ad. Think of this as the number of people who responded to your ad as a percentage of the entire audience. These numbers can tell you how your creative, your copy, or your overall ad are performing.

A/B Testing - Sometimes referred to as multi-variate testing, the idea is that you are comparing several similar creatives, or copies, of a single ad, and trying to determine what is most effective in getting conversions or click-throughs. Because its so easy to create a number of different variations, you can in theory analyze and optimize your message on the fly. Think of it as using the web as your global focus group, and your sites/ads/creatives as the product they are testing and voting on (by either clicking or not clicking).

CPM - Cost Per Mil (Thousand): The amount an ad run costs to be shown in front of 1000 hopefully distinct visitors. There are a number of factors that play into the pricing on this (audience, content of site, site reputation, etc.). This was one of the first models popularized in online banner ads.

CPA - Cost Per Action: Think of this as the easiest form of advertising to measure your ROI on. You only pay when someone completes the desired goal (be it filling out a form, purchasing something, whatever). Lots of affiliate marketing campaigns are built around this idea.

SMO - Social Media Optimization: The idea that you can optimize your content for distribution on social media sites. Effectively fancy way of saying writing interesting copy. Be careful with people selling this service, some are legit and trustworthy, others are snake oil salesmen.

Social Media - Content created by people, not by traditional publishers. Often referred to as user generated content or consumer generated media. Really encompasses everything from social networks to individually created content. The idea being that media/content creation is being democratized and no longer exclusively the realm of traditional mass media creators.

Social Network - A site/service whereby people can create and maintain relationships between themselves and other individuals. The most popular in the US at the moment are Facebook and Myspace. If you are creating any type of product with brand affinity of any kind, you’d be well advised to take notice of social networks, which are fast becoming the top traffic destinations on the web.

Twitter - A revolutionary new (to you) form of communication. Often referred to as micro-blogging, it is really a new means of speaking to and listening to your community (you’ve got a community whether you realize it or not). There will be a follow up post in a few weeks on Twitter for non techies.

Affiliate Marketing - This wasn’t in the original list, but I was reminded of its importance. Affiliate marketing is essentially the idea of enlisting independent third parties to promote your products or services in exchange for a sales commission. Amazon was one of the first companies to start this online (not the first though). The idea being that it allows any individual marketer to come in and start selling thousands of products without owning any physical inventory, or handling any transactions, but still making money.

So remember this list is for those of you who have experience working in traditional advertising, and just need a quick glossary of online keywords.

A LOT of fuss has been made over the transition to the facebook design in the last 60 days, and understandably it is a big change to make to over 100 million people. However, most of those complaining really don’t understand why they are complaining, they just want an excuse to create a group and get a million people on it (so they can possibly spam you or use it to promote other things).

So let me break it down for you in simple terms.

As a facebook user:
The new design means your apps will be able to have better experiences (more screen space for them to fill for you) on the canvas area (the space inside http://apps.facebook.com/whatever ).  The redesign also means your profile will be faster (not a billion boxes loading at once), which will make checking out your friends profiles less time consuming (less time = more profiles you can check out while at work).  It also means applications will be forced to engage with you, not just reward your friends for spamming you (sorry if that was your favorite aspect of apps).  So you should eventually get a richer experience out of the apps (the good ones at least).

As a marketer:
You now get more options on types of ads you can display to facebook users, you also get more engagement metrics to boot. But really the goldmine is in creating branding opportunities with the smart applications and application developers. Gone are the soft-touch applications that had a touch once and ignore forever relationship with their audience, you have to build truly engaging experiences to leverage the brand potential available to you.  The tabs on the user profiles are a perfect place for self-expression and brand affinity, you just have to grab it.

As a developer:
You unfortunately have the most work cut out for you, but who knows, maybe you can get renewed business out of reworking the apps you built before.  To a developer though, the changes are the most dramatic shift in the platform we’ve seen so far. You have to re-work the interactions and demands you are making of your users to build up something that has a more valid value proposition.  What incentive does your app have to bring its users back? What activities or enhancements are you offering them? Realistically good application design hasn’t changed much from the previous platform iteration to now, you just have less incentive to use BAD app design to promote yourself.  It also means this isn’t a real-estate grab as it once was, its an attention land rush. Attention we are going to learn is an incredibly valuable asset to possess in this new economy.

So what next? Where is this all heading? Well I think this all plays into my original theory of a multi-pronged approach, which I discussed a year ago. You need to use facebook as a net you are casting to engage users and drive their activities from wherever they are (in facebook our out) and figure out how to benefit from that traffic regardless of where it comes from.