World Wrestling Entertainment is gearing up for its WrestleMania 29 pay-per-view event Sunday, and social media management system HootSuite is entering the ring with The Rock and John Cena by launching the WWE WrestleMania 29 Social Media Command Center.
We're kicking off our upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp with a special keynote presentation by Ella Chick (left), the digital producer at Anderson Cooper 360°. She'll discuss how the network uses social media for breaking news and leverages social media to draw attention to organizations and causes. Learn more about our program and register here. 
Facebook recently launched a new conversion metric, making it easier for businesses to tell if users made purchases based on advertisements on the social network. Social media expert Jon Loomer illustrated how businesses can use this new practice to create offsite pixels, which signal events that happened while users browsed websites.
Insiders know that getting close to Facebook product teams is the best the way to take your business to the next level. Pitching Facebook as a startup is hard, though. New Facebook features create a virtual gold rush for platform developers. New Facebook application-programming-interface features enable new ways to monetize virtual goods in social games, for example. New Facebook ads features create new ways to target advertising to specific users — audience segments like “everyone who has purchased virtual goods on Facebook” — creating huge opportunities for those who move to monetize first.
The name Barbara C. Jacobs may not ring a bell for most readers, but the name of the assistant director for corporation finance at the Securities and Exchange Commission is definitely a familiar one in the offices of Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Ebersman and Fenwick & West, the social network’s law firm, as she and her staff were responsible for vetting the company’s initial public offering filing.
Mobile payment platform Bango announced that its integration with Facebook, first revealed in February, is live, and the social network’s users in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany can now purchase items such as virtual gifts and game credits and be billed via their mobile carriers.
Facebook gaming and genealogy are intertwined with Tuesday’s official launch of Family Village, a free Facebook game from Funium that had been in beta-testing since April 2011.
Facebook application users aren’t as anti-advertising as you might think, but standard online banner ads won’t cut it, as they want innovative, interactive units, according to the results of a recent study conducted by Harris Interactive for social and mobile advertising platform MediaBrix.
Have a snack, and acquire some virtual in-game items on Facebook while you’re at it, thanks to a new partnership between PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay North America division, Zynga and Walmart.
This afternoon I was having a discussion with a leading app developer about the future of virtual goods on the Facebook Platform. One thing that came up during the discussion was the idea of a centralized virtual goods system on Facebook. It’s something that I first described when Facebook announced that they were killing the gift shop next month, however it has increasingly become a center of focus for me personally. With all these applications selling virtual goods, why isn’t their an easier way to show off the goods that we’ve purchased?
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This evening Facebook announced that they will officially kill the company’s gift shop on August 1st of this year. Currently generating tens of millions of dollars for the company a year, one has to wonder why the company would take such dramatic steps. Facebook regularly touts how few developers run each segment of their business, but even if the company was generating tens of millions on a couple of developers, apparently more can be generated with the small gifts team working on other projects. So what does this really mean?
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