After my presentation on Facebook Advertising ROI at the Stamford Business Networking group, I was asked to do a follow up on Facebook basics. So here it is. Enjoy!

We’ve been waiting for this to come along, Google’s answer to Facebook’s Like button but for search results pages. You will now start to see a tiny +1 icon next to the title of orgainic and paid (AdWords) search listings. Currently, it appears next to the Favorite star but this is expected to go away soon. The idea of this nifty little gadget is make search more social, allowing users to effectively vote up (recommend) their “favorite” listings. Okay, let’s see how long it takes the search scammers to spoof this one.

By now you’ve seen “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” TV ad campaign, featuring Isaiah Mustafa, that pulled the Old Spice brand back from the brink of irrelevance and effectively restoring it to the #1 spot in market share.

The campaign launched in February during Superbowl XLIV and by the time Procter & Gamble’s Global Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard described its success at the ANA Conference in October, Old Spice had generated 1.8 billion PR impressions (globally) and an incredible explosion of online engagement with a 2,700% increase in Twitter followers, 800% increase in Facebook fans, 300% increase in website traffic, and over 140 million YouTube views (collectively). All this translated into double digit sales.

When Cisco decided to introduce its new Aggregated Services Router (ASR) exclusively online to reach their target audience (network engineers), the news itself attracted a great deal of media attention. But when the official campaign numbers came out, there were plenty of latte spit-takes from all, even the “gurus” of social media-dom. Here are just some of the highlights:

• 9,000 people attended the social media product launch event (90 times more attendees than in the past)
• Nearly three times as many press articles than traditional outreach methods
• More than 1,000 blog posts and 40 million online impressions
• One-sixth the cost of a traditional launch (shaving over $100,000 off its launch expenses)

Cisco’s use of social media and gaming channels for its product launch is a shining example of online marketing done right. No newbie to social media, Cisco was not shy leveraging its 22 blogs, 300+ YouTube channels, 100,000+ Facebook fans, or 2 million Twitter followers. Cisco developed content specific to the launch, including a social media widget, a 3D game, and a virtual concert in Second Life featuring eight rock bands.

I was going to aggregate all the details of this case study here but then found Casey Hibbard’s superb post on Social Media Examiner. No point reinventing the wheel so here is the full monty on Cisco’s B2B Social Media Case Study. Enjoy!

Facebook’s privacy policy has gotten more than its share of media coverage (good and bad) so I don’t intend to sacrifice any more pixels to the subject other than to record the following Reuters (The New York Times) links here for posterity (this is one of the main reasons why I blog after all).

• Facebook to Undergo Judiciary Committee Probe
• Facebook Bows to Pressure Over Privacy
• Facebook’s Power, and Its Weakness
• Rivals Seize on Troubles of Facebook

And some of you might be interested in this previous blog post.