I am proud to announce that the Buddy Media Platform is the first major Facebook marketing platform to support the new technologies launched by Facebook at its annual developer conference in April.

Our launch comes less than two weeks after Facebook announced its series of platform-wide enhancements at F8, including the release of several Social Plugins that can be integrated into third-party websites. The new functionality launched by Buddy Media includes:

• Availability of Social Plugins – In addition to the 30+ social applets already available on the Buddy Media Platform, we’ve added the following Facebook Social Plugins: Like Button, Like Box, Recent Activity, and Recommendations. The full integration of these Plugins into Buddy Media’s social applet library lets clients manage their Facebook Pages and Facebook for Website functionality in one place.

• Expansion of Publishing Technology – Clients are now able to publish messages from the Buddy Media Platform to consumers who connect with clients on their websites.

• Analytics – Integrated, real-time analytics allows clients to view all social activity on a single dashboard.

Essentially, the Buddy Media Platform now makes it much easier for brands to link their social presence with their website to create an always-on flow of traffic between the two, turning each visitor into a viral engine of traffic growth. Any company – from a large global brand or media conglomerate, to retailer or hotel chain – can now use the Buddy Media Platform to create, manage, track, and optimize their branded viral loop to grow web traffic, reach new customers and increase revenues.

Several Buddy Media clients have already linked their Facebook presence with this new social functionality, and almost all have reported massive increases in traffic from Facebook to their sites. For example, our client the National Hockey League saw referral traffic to NHL.com increase by 353 percent within the first nine days of implementing the new Facebook functionality onto its website. This branded viral loop effect led to a 25 percent increase in NHL connections, or fans.

It is my strong belief that the concept of a branded viral loop is the most significant advance in web marketing since the launch of Google’s pay-per-click advertising system in October 2000.  I remember the launch vividly. My company at the time – GOLF.com – was not one of the initial 350 launch partners, but I knew it was going to take over the advertising world.
Website traffic is a currency every company values and understands. More traffic means more e-commerce sales for online retailers, more ad inventory for publishers to sell, more bookings for hotels and airlines, and more branded impressions that will create more potential customers for large brands.

Until now, the primary means for companies to significantly increase web traffic was to increase search and display ad budgets or other paid media efforts. With the launch of Facebook for Websites, brands like the NHL are now increasing traffic significantly by making it easy for current customers to promote the websites to their friends.

When a current visitor decides to like, comment, share, recommend and engage, that activity is shared with the visitor’s friends on Facebook. Some of those friends see the activity in their Newsfeed and click through to the website. Some of those friends engage with the brand, publish that information to their friends on Facebook, and the branded viral loop grows.

This is the same simple idea some of the largest social game developers have used to grow their player bases. Because social games live inside social platforms, companies like Zynga, Playfish and Playdom have been able to implement and optimize their viral loops ever since the Facebook Platform launched in May 2007. The primary product offering of these social gaming companies – their games – is native to the social environment – Facebook – so they have a direct way of connecting their product and the social graph.

Unlike social gaming companies, most brands have spent most of their resources building their own websites over the past 15 years. Until now, there has been no meaningful way of bridging a social presence on Facebook with a branded Website. Facebook Connect was difficult for many companies to implement, and it didn’t allow companies to insert their Website into the Facebook social graph as an object, or identity.

The icing on top of this amazingly delicious cake that Facebook just baked for our clients is the ability to re-engage people who connect.  Facebook is the largest and most effective two-way communication platform ever seen, and now, brands have a lightweight way to connect with and disseminate information to consumers. Anyone who “likes” a brand on their website is opting in to receive information from that company in the form of messages that appear in their Newsfeed and updates in their Facebook Inbox.

This combination of viral growth and ongoing communication should make figuring out Facebook the most important initiative for every major brand this year. The old model of paying to build and manage websites, driving traffic, building email lists and sending one-to-one messages will take on less importance. The new model of infusing brands with a social presence to unlock the branded viral loop is here.

The Buddy Media Platform has helped hundreds of brands make social work inside of Facebook. With this initial Open Graph offering (don’t worry, we have other tricks up our sleeve that will take more than 2 weeks to build!), Buddy Media has entered its next phase – to also make social work on brand websites, email programs, mobile campaigns and more.