BusinessWeek announced today the public launch of Business Exchange, an innovative online offering that aims to better serve the evolving information needs of business professionals. Users can create, find and track business topics that are relevant and meaningful to them, as well as access, share, save and add links to articles, white papers and videos from all available content on the Web. In addition, visitors can connect with industry leaders, BusinessWeek editors and writers, and other professionals around business issues that matter the most to them.

Read More: MarketWatch

Case Study:

The 2008 Essence Music Festival advertising on RealBlack.com (based on the Fatvine platform) generated 30 million impressions and 15,000 unique visitors. That’s not all though, influential publishers also wrote positive pre- and post- event coverage and attended pre-festival  events  that  helped to  drive record attendance of 275,000 people in a challenging economic environment.

Advertisers can track their advertising performance and fine-tune their advertising portfolio in real-time. The point here is that the rules of the game are changing and what use to be called relationship marketing is now extended to Internet adverting.  We have already seen this leads to results that far exceed simple display advertising.

Glam: Glam Makes Big Cuts in Publisher Payments

A brave move from the Glam Advertising Network. It will be interesting to see how this plays out but we believe in a next-generation Network Model that enables publishers to increase the revenue from all of their Advertising Networks.

Yahoo: Shine Launches

Yahoo launched a woman’s site called Shine, aimed at women between the ages 25 and 54 with content in nine specific categories: Fashion & Beauty, Food, Healthy Living, Work & Money, Love and Relationships, Parenting, At Home, Entertainment & Culture, and Astrology. Given all of the bad press that Yahoo has had recently, I think this site has been very well conceived and executed. The team deserves a lot of credit as it must have been difficult given all of the distractions and we all know how difficult it is to execute well even without any distractions!

Bottom line. Two sites focused on the same demographic. Glam innovated in the category two years ago and received the rewards for that innovation. Yahoo has now done the same and should receive similar rewards…

Once again, Facebook is refining a controversial program that overstepped privacy bounds and drew negative reaction from tens of thousands of users. The social net provided opt-outs for ‘Beacon’ a program that turned users who shopped at certain outlets or used certain services into barkers, but the ways to avoid participating were about as obvious as the double-secret probation in Animal House. Facebook now promises users will have to opt in before any private info is divulged. Even then, the program doesn’t give user an option to completely opt out of the service altogether, a move that is likely to disappoint some critics.

News.com: The pop-up window that informs a user that a third-party site action will be sent to Beacon has been changed; users need to click an “OK” button before the information is delivered and posted to Facebook. If the user does not act, the notification will go away until a future Beacon pop-up appears…also, Facebook has expanded the user help section that deals with Beacon, and links to it on every pop-up notification for the program.

AP: “The backlash against Beacon illustrated the delicate balancing act that Facebook must negotiate as the company tries to cash in on its popularity without alienating the users fueling its success.”

Facebook Overhauls Controversial Beacon Ad System

My prediction is that users will require all ‘beaconing’ to be opt-in and not opt out. The ease of use around social content has been solved but at the cost of user privacy. I think users win every time here.

New Technology - Customerforce’s patent-pending technology platform, (Fatvine®) - creates social content from your existing web site and connects it to the fastest growing social networks.

New York, New York – November 15th, 2007 – Customerforce Inc. today announced the launch Fatvine — the first Social Content Engine TM. The Fatvine Social Content Engine (SCE) creates social content from your existing media or e-commerce web site. Thus This now enables brands to extending the reach and depth of your their target consumers interaction with theiyour brand in the context of a social experience. The Fatvine SCE will significantly increase unique users, page views, traffic and e-commerce conversion.

Customerforce was founded with the vision that Social Content and the Content Sharing Communities that they create will be the world’s new knowledge sharing platform. In the same way that social networks replicate and extend the real life social relationship we make and maintain, social content will replicate the way we create, maintain and share content.

“We believe that social content will be the critical component of e-commerce and media companies strategies in 2008,” stated Gordon Ebanks, CEO of Customerforce, Inc. Gordon went on to add, “Fatvine is an innovative way for companies to leverage their existing web content and then extend this to the fastest growing social networks. We look forward to partnering with leading- edge companies who are committed to winning in this important market space.”

Fatvine’s patent pending technology platform is integrated with the fastest growing social networks and linked to your web site through a simple API. The SCE can be run as Software as a Service or hosted on your web site.

Implementing a Social Content Engine will be one of the single most important marketing assets your business could can launch and will outperform your most optimistic revenue projections. To get started, simply add the Fatvine Social Content Engine to your new or existing web site. Businesses can learn more at: www.customerforce.com.

About Customerforce.com, Inc.

Headquartered in New York City, Customerforce is privately owned and was established in 2005 to help manage user convergence in social media, search engines and social networks.

For further information about Customerforce, please contact:

Gordon Ebanks, Chief Executive Officer
gordon@customerforce.com / Tel: 646.240.4182

For responses to this press release please contact:

Liz Cuccinello, EVP Business Development and In-House Counsel
liz@customerforce.com / Tel: 646.419.4263

Facebook’s much-anticipated plan — which the company calls ‘’social advertising” — was revealed yesterday at a gathering of advertising executives and reporters in New York. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, spoke in grand terms about of the death of mass advertising and said that in the future, ad messages would increasingly be conveyed from friend to friend through online networks.

”Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.

Facebook users will not be able to avoid these personally recommended ads if they are friends with participating people. Participation can involve joining a fan club for a brand, recommending a product or sharing information about their purchases from external Web sites.

Mr. Zuckerberg said he thought this system would make the site feel ”less commercial,” because the marketing messages will be accompanied by comments from friends. When asked about people who might not like ads, Mr. Zuckerberg shrugged and said, ”I mean, it’s an ad-supported business.” [Full story at nytimes.com]

Well I love the last line. That’s a classic and you can’t really argue with Mark. Or can you? Fatvine supports ‘trusted search’ and we agree that ‘nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a ‘trusted friend.” The question is whether people will want more control than simple opt in / opt out and will the clutter of all of these messages minimize their effectiveness? Ultimately, people are going to want easy tools to share, manage and maintain their own social content. It could certainly come in the form of Facebook messaging but it is much more likely to be a personal database that is user-centric and available to all applications. Hence the launch of Fatvine…and just in time it seems.