socialmediocrity

Following what is probably the most sensational, or at least most expensive week in football transfer history, you’re unlikely to have escaped the fact that Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo have both moved to Real Madrid.

With Kaka’s fee at an estimated £56m , Ronaldo’s a reported £80m many have been wondering where the money is coming from. Real Madrid have a reported 300m euro transfer kitty this year alone. And the rationale for the excessive spending all seems to boil down to shirt sales. As if those million fans that bought the Beckham shirt are going to chuck it in the pile alongside their Zidane shirt, and buy not just a Kaka edition, but also a Ronaldo shirt.

“Ronaldo can be viewed in the same bracket as Beckham when it comes to global commercial impact, if their image is controlled right and Real Madrid improve their results in the UEFA Champions League as a result of their arrival”, said Professor Simon Chadwick, Director of the Center for the International Business of Sport (CIBS) at Coventry University in England.

But a quick look of their respective popularities on Facebook paints an interesting picture. Whilst Kaka looks to be good value, even at £56m, with over half-a-million fans on the social network on a single page, Cristiano Ronaldo barely registers 23,000 on the most popular page for him at the time of writing. And he, of course, cost about £25m more than the half-million-fans Kaka.

If Real’s return on Ronaldo is destined to be in Shirt Sales then they better charge more for them. A lot more.

Facebook have announced the launch of a publicly accessible Vanity url facility – meaning users and Fan Page owners will be able to get themselves a vanity url in the form of www.facebook.com/firstname.lastname, or variations thereof.

A lot of noise is being created about the SEO value in securing yours, although in truth, despite the PageRank, surely Google is smart enough to counter this when their bots come back to report thousands of new urls pointing at strangely similar content? With so many pages pointing out of the domain, the positive PageRank impact will be diluted by several thousand if not millions of links.

What’s more Facebook themselves have taken steps to avoid abuse, such as only being available to pages with 1000 or more fans.

Perhaps the real value of this will be, ironically, in “old” media. How long before we see the first social campaign to incorporate a Facebook vanity url the way we used to see AOL Keyword terms, to drive co-ordinated activity across media? In fact this could be the cutest move Facebook have made so far to drive ad revenue.

Large and fully integrated media agencies don’t seem to “get” the ad opportunities on social environments yet – or at least they’re not particularly great exponents of the environment. But if they can be introduced to it through the medium of familiarity; the subline on a poster, or the closing frame of the TV ad, then perhaps we’ll see more of them understanding how rich an environment it can be when executed properly.

And once they “get it”, Facebook will reap the rewards through advertising dollars.

It appears that some new testing or new ad formats are bing made available on Facebook.

Following the “launch” of Event Ads and Fan Page Ads, and making them available in the ASU position, Facebook appear to have started to run recommendations. Our sources confirm there are currently no plans to make them available as a buyable ad format, although as a format it does become a compelling proposition if the recommendation is for a brand or product as have been developed for user home pages.

Are men less likely to declare their marrital status than women?

There are 1.58m Male UK Facebook users either “engaged” or “married”, but 2.37m Females with the same status. That’s 19.75% of UK Males, and 25.76% of Females, before the pedants chime up.

Meaning there’s (probably) about 800k engaged or married UK men out there that don’t want you to know.

Or someone’s taking more than their share of wives.