Readers, how likely do you think it is that Weiner’s accounts on Facebook and Twitter really got hacked

Sometimes, having a higher profile than Twitter has its disadvantages, as Facebook found itself mentioned in a scandal it had absolutely nothing to do with over the weekend that went by the chuckle-inducing name of Weinergate.

Weinergate reared its ugly head Saturday, when Big Government reported that a photo of a man’s erection, concealed by underwear, appeared in the official Twitter account of Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), included in a Tweet directed to Gennette Cordova, a graduate student in Bellingham, Wash.
So what does this have to do with Facebook? Not much, except that Weiner apparently doesn’t know the difference between the U.S.’s largest social network and the 140-character microblogging site, as he replied in a Tweet, “FB hacked.”
Weiner told Politico in an email that he thought it was “obvious” that his account had been hacked, and his spokesman, Dave Arnold, told the New York Post, “Anthony’s accounts on both Facebook and Twitter were hacked.”
For her part, Cordova never mentioned Facebook, telling the New York Daily News:

Friday evening, I logged onto Twitter to find that I had about one-dozen new mentions in less than an hour, which is a rare occurrence. When I checked one of the posts that I had been tagged in, I saw that it was a picture that had supposedly been Tweeted to me by Weiner. The account that these Tweets were sent from was familiar to me; this person had harassed me many times after the congressman followed me on Twitter a month or so ago. Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts before, I assumed that the Tweet and the picture were their latest attempts at defaming the congressman and harassing his supporters.

And as for the hacking itself, RedState blogger Caleb Howe Tweeted, “Haven’t seen it mentioned, but wouldn’t have to hack twitter/facebook to post from yfrog. Only have to hack yfrog. It’s authorized to tweet.”
And Photoshop expert Philip Bump went one step further for Mediate, reporting that the photo doesn’t match previous images uploaded by Weiner, that the type of camera is different, and that in his opinion, the photo did not come from Weiner.
Readers, how likely do you think it is that Weiner’s accounts on Facebook and Twitter really got hacked?

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ShopIgniter CEO Matt Compton on Raising $8M and the Growth of Ecommerce on Facebook

Founded back in 2008, when social shopping was an exciting but unproven idea, ShopIgniter has been building its business among clients who have real-world goods to sell online, with a focus on Facebook. And like some of its rivals have recently, the Portland, Ore. company has raised more funding, an $8 million second round led by Silicon Valley venture firm Trinity Ventures with existing investor Madrona Venture Group participating.

The new interest is because brands that had been focused on gaining Facebook fans in past years are now looking for what do next, as chief executive Matt Compton tells us in an interview today. For many Page owners, that means selling direct. ShopIgniter has a set of interlocking products aimed at meeting this emerging need.

One is a customizable white-label application for Pages, with ways to adjust the look and feel to match the page, tools for easily sort through product offerings, and other features seen social commerce apps. The Portland TrailBlazers basketball team, for example, has been using it to sell team merchandise on its Page. Compton tells us that in a recent test between on and off Facebook sales for a brand, conversions were twice as high on Facebook.

A ShopIgniter product called the "Social Promotions Engine" reaches further into Facebook, helping Page managers create custom campaigns designed to get users sharing content about the brand on their Walls and news feeds in order to generate sales. In an example detailed by Ryan Spoon, Nike promoted a limited set of collectible golf balls to fans of its Page. The contest winners got free golf balls, and Nike was able to increase fan awareness of and interaction with the store. Finally, participants were also encouraged to share a news feed story about their winnings with friends.

For the Blazers, Compton wrote last month, promotions like these resulted in the Page fan count growing by 25% and, perhaps more importantly, transactions conversions originating with Facebook friends growing by 16%.

Beyond the application and promotions, ShopIgniter also provides a white-label ecommerce product for web sites. The point of it is to go beyond more general online ecommerce management products, instead capturing commerce around social interactions wherever they happen. For example, one customer may go to a web site, find a product they're thinking about buying, click the Facebook Like button, and generate a story about it in their news feed. Their friend might then click to look at the product, be taken to the Page of a company with a ShopIgniter store, and buy the product there. Meanwhile, the person who Liked the product on the site might still go to the site when they decide to complete their purchase.

A variety of competitors in the business provide their own variations on social commerce applications — some we've looked at include 8thBridge (formerly Alvenda), which announced a $10 million second round in late May, and Payvment, which added a $6 million second round in December.

With client lists growing and venture capital firms doubling down, the non-virtual goods part of the platform appears to be coming of age. We just kicked off a series on social commerce in our Facebook Marketing Bible subscription service. Stay tuned for more.

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Facebook Announces PayPal Payouts to Developers for Credits Revenue

Facebook announced this morning that developers signing up for Facebook Credits now have PayPal as a payout option, increasing the flexibility developers have for monetzing apps through Facebook Credits.

This is of particular importance to developers in countries where PayPal is really the only trusted payout option for developers. Payout is the means by which a developer converts in-app currency exchanges to real money that the developer can then deposit into its bank accounts. Facebook says that the PayPal option now doubles the number of countries where developers can begin integrating Facebook Credits to 22 countries total, including Turkey, India and Japan.

Facebook Credits has been a slow road for certain social game developers in the last nine months between apparent reluctance and technical issues. The mandatory integration deadline for Facebook Credits within social  games is July 1. It is not clear if Facebook will extend the deadline for remaining countries that are experiencing difficulties with integration tied to payout complications. PayPal currently serves over 190 countries.

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Why Facebook Ads Are Undervalued By 800%

Facebook advertising is even more powerful than previously thought.

Advertising efficacy is usually assessed using the “last click,” meaning that the point of interaction right before the conversion is considered.  But this methodology has become outmoded in the context on Facebook advertising because people simply aren’t in buying phase when playing around on the social network, making it highly unlikely that a brand advertising on the site will get an immediate conversion.
Most Facebook ad clicks lead to a conversion at a later time and through a different channel. But last click analysis would have inaccurately attributed these conversions to last channel in the purchase path.
Quite often this shows search as the beneficiary because when people are ready to buy something online, what lazier way is there to navigate to your chosen brand website than by quickly searching for the site?
My experience of analyzing advertisers’ Facebook advertising conversions shows that between five and eight times as many sales from Facebook happen on a first click basis rather than last click.
Last click valuation refers to focusing on the advertising channel that a customer most recently interacted with before converting to a sale. Let’s instead consider Facebook to be the first click in a sequence of interactions that ultimately leads to a conversion on any channel.
For higher consideration purchases, where the length of time to conversion can be several days or weeks, this type of analysis is particularly important.
A typical example is the travel industry where we are seeing more than 30 percent of conversions take longer than 7 days from the first visit to final conversion. This has a big impact on measurement.
The result for travel is that awareness creating forms of advertising such as Facebook are often either the first click in this process or an assisting click. In the samples we analysed Facebook was the first click in the transaction over 3.5 times more than when it was the last click. This ratio increases up to six for assists.
When compared to other channels this is one of the highest ratios — showing the power of Facebook’s influence on other channels. The main beneficiary being paid search where more than 40 percent of transactions converted on price per click where Facebook was an assisting click.
Another interesting statistic we uncovered was that the average order value increased with the longer paths to conversion. This makes sense since the bigger the purchase, the more
thought goes into it. This adds another dimension to the importance of accurate tracking andattribution, particularly if last click (as a method) is undervaluing the order values as well as the transactions.
Grant Muckle is the managing director of I Spy Labs.

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Google Leads Investment In Facebook Gamer Kabam

If you play Facebook games, then you are familiar with Kabam games. The company is the maker of Kingdoms of Camelot, Dragon of Atlantis and Glory of Rome. The company receives $85 million in a financing round led by Google’s venture arm, helping the startup expand in Asia, hire developers and make acquisitions.

The investment is also being co-led by Pinnacle Ventures, and now values Kabam at about $500 million. The Bay Area company has raised $125 million since it started five years ago as a sports and social media group, but transformed into creator of social games. Kabam was formerly called Watercooler, and changed name last year. The size of its personnel has shot from 25 to 400 since 2010.
Click here to read more on Social Times.

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PastPost Recalls What You Did On Facebook Last Year

Can’t remember what you did yesterday? Yeah, we can’t either. Well, a new application intends to fix that.
PastPosts, created by tech veterans Jonathan Wegener, Matt Raoul and Benny Wong, sends users a daily email — if you didn’t log in every day last year, you only get messages on days that correspond to when you’d used Facebook in the prior year.
The daily missive comes in an easy-to-read format showing wall comments, posted photos, status updates, and more from your personal Facebook archives.
Wegener said the idea came from an app the guys created for Foursquare a few months ago called 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo that does pretty much the same thing.
“The response to that product has been really positive and thousands of people have signed up and told us they love it,” he said in an interview. “PastPosts is the next logical extension, bringing that same proven concept to the largest personal data creation platform, Facebook.”
“More philosophically, the interesting trend here is personal data exhaust — as we use web services, we’re constantly leaving behind a trail of digital information. We’re helping people re-experience that content as a daily email a year after the fact,” Wegener said.
He brings up a good point. This service is not only a cool idea that can help remind you of what your life was like a year ago, it serves as a reminder that just because an old post isn’t showing up on your wall anymore doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

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SURVEY: 2 In 3 Small Businesses Are On Facebook

Roughly than two-thirds of small business owners have a presence on Facebook.

That comes from a survey of 1,132 small business owners by Webs.com.
Webs.com found that 68.6 percent, or 591 respondents, use Facebook the most for their business.
Over three quarters of the survey respondents plan to increase their use of social media this year, while almost one in five plan to maintain the same amount of effort they did in 2010.
And 25.3 percent said they update social media several times a day, while 16.7 percent said they posted once a day.
When asked whether they see social media as a viable way to communicate with their customers, 62.1 percent responded “definitely,” while 34.3 percent said “sometimes,” and 3.7 percent said “not at all.”
However, 40.5 percent of the surveyed small business owners said that social media has either met or exceeded their expectations; some 42.8 percent said that it only somewhat met their expectations, while 16.6 said the experience hasn’t lived up to their expectations at all.
It seems like small businesses are only just beginning to hit their stride on Facebook. Readers, what insights do you have based on these numbers?

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