i make names (ideas included)

I recently read a great article by Justin Smith at InsideFacebook.com that talks about NFO (News Feed Optimization) for Facebook. He thinks it is the single most important thing you can do as a marketer on Facebook. Below is the first part of his post (click the link above to read the full article).

“Everybody with a website knows that Google owns two of their most important marketing channels: organic search (SEO) and paid search (SEM). In fact, entire cottage industries have developed around them:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) - gaming Google (and the other search engines) into thinking you’re authoritative on a given topic and deserve to be listed highly in its search results.
• SEM (Search Engine Marketing) - paying Google (and the others) to put you next to sites it thinks it is authoritative on a given topic.

Inside Facebook, however, Google is irrelevant. Instead, Facebook owns your most important marketing channels: the News Feed, Notifications, and Messages. And marketers and application developers have analagous marketing options with Facebook as with Google on the open web:

1. NFO (News Feed Optimization) - convincing Facebook to display the Feed items that your application publishes in your users’ friends’ News Feeds.
2. NFM (News Feed Marketing) - paying Facebook to insert your ad next to Feed items that it thinks are important enough to be shown.

News Feed Marketing is fairly easy for marketers to understand: give Facebook your credit card number, and they’ll stick you in the News Feeds and guarantee a certain quantity of targeted traffic to your Facebook application or sponsored group.

News Feed Optimization, on the other hand, is a bit trickier:

• Like Google’s PageRank algorithms, Facebook’s proprietary “FeedRank” (my term) algorithms determine which Feed items are shown to whom and which items are not.
• Like Google’s undisclosed PageRank algorithm, the variables that contribute to your Feed item’s FeedRank are unknown to you (and everyone except Facebook).
• Like companies dependent on their SEO’d Google PageRank, companies dependent on their NFO’d Facebook FeedRank will experience similar trauma when the algorithm unpredictably or inexplicably changes.

Welcome to the new world of NFO–the new SEO for Facebook marketers. Optimizing your product’s News Feed items is the single most important thing you can do as a marketer on Facebook. Not only should Feed items be designed for optimal conversion, but they should also be invoked by your application in ways that will maximize their distribution.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. I believe that there will be a need for experts that know how to leverage the news feeds on Facebook to get apps in front of the right people. I just registered the domains below on speculation of the future growth of this practice:

NFOblog.com
NFObook.com
NFOconsultant.com
NFOexpert.com
NFOforum.com
NFOservices.com
NFOtactics.com
NFOtalk.com
NFOtips.com
NFOtools.com

We’ll see if this was a worthwhile investment in the coming months.