Instead, Facebook hopes to build the same sort of success with businesses that they have had with people’s personal pages. They want to be the one place where people go to look for, learn about, and engage with businesses. To accomplish this goal they need to encourage businesses to join Facebook, and that is why they created the Fan Page.

Facebook doesn’t even call them Fan Pages anymore. Instead, they are simply called Pages. Your page lets you build a presence on Facebook, engage with your audience, spread your message, connect with Facebook users on your website, and encourage conversations. Custom tabs can be created to feature coupons, promote specials, share videos, and set up events. It’s a full palette of features, and it’s just for businesses, brands, and non-profit agencies.

The dangerous side of your business presence comes in the way customers perceive your presence. When they are connecting with your business, they may think they are connecting with you. If they have a bad experience with one of your representatives, they may take their complaints to your Facebook Page because they expect this to be the online equivalent of asking to speak to the owner.

To add another complication, what if the person they are complaining about also happens to be one of your Facebook page administrators? That complaint could be deleted and you wouldn’t know about it unless there was an even bigger backlash because of it. Large businesses have marketing, public relations, or customer care groups to handle these situations. But for smaller businesses, there are only two courses I see to this situation. You either need to be your own Facebook Page administrator, or you need to bring in help from outside. This is where the social marketing experts come in.

Social marketing experts can set up your page for you, develop guidelines for Facebook engagement, monitor your presence, promote your brand, and provide a direct channel of communication to the top when there is a problem that needs your attention. This service isn’t free, but in the context of a marketing budget, you should be able to identify a level of service that suits any business.

How is Facebook going to make money with Pages? Nobody knows at this point, but you can be certain that once businesses are engaging with their customers on Facebook, they will not want to stop. In the future, a Facebook Page will likely come with a price tag. But for now, the time is right to add your business to the mix and start connecting with your customers.

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In the midst of outlining an internet brand ambassador program for one of our clients, I was contacted by Izea, the social media marketing cannon started by Ted Murphy. Izea ran the Kmart blogger campaign that included some big media guns like Seth Godin and Wendy Piersall as well as a small army of other bloggers peppered across the internet.

I was really interested to learn what Izea could do for our clients, and since I followed some of the twitter heat that Seth Godin was getting for his paid participation, I was really curious about how they felt about it, and what they learned from the experience and might do differently. Our sales rep was good. I grilled him pretty hard and he responded gracefully. In other words, he didn’t wince when I started asking about the problems with paid blogging and reputation. Of course, I didn’t really get a straight answer either.

Blogging with ad sponsorship is nothing new to me, nor is blogging for pay. But a crowdsourcing pay-per-post blogging marketplace with customer feedback ratings is a bit of a personal discovery. It’s one of those ideas that makes perfect sense when you see it. The opportunity appeals to the mercenary in every internet content creator, and the product appeals to the “budget-mindedness” in every brand manager. Share of audience is the capital that the bloggers trade on and marketers pay for reach.

Our conversation seemed to stumble around the basic questions of how does one compare a crowd-sourced blog campaign with viral potential to other campaigns that have viral potential. Our sales rep didn’t want to give straight answers because he was working to impress us on the upside of the campaign going viral. But blog campaigns in themselves do not translate into viral campaigns. I know how to make a viral campaign, and I don’t have to pay Izea to do it for me. What matters to me is how many bloggers am I going to engage, and what is their direct audience share.

I’m still waiting for some numbers, but looking around at the Izea site and making a few random assumptions, I think I can place a value on an izea campaign. If I’m paying Izea for bloggers and they’ve got a 40% markup on their part of the campaign, I’m actually pretty fine with that because they can engage immediately and it would take me several weeks to build a blogger network. The service has value. But in apples to apples comparison, what’s it worth? If I engage 150 bloggers with an average audience of 2,500 readers, I’m reaching 375,000 people. If it costs me $4,200 to reach those people ($20 per post, 40% markup) I arrive at a CPM of around $11.20. That puts it on par with some premium internet advertising networks. I could live with that. When I find out what the real cost and reach is, I’ll readjust my numbers. If my assumptions are close or high, we’ll probably be doing business. if my assumptions are way too low (much higher cost, much higher CPM) then I’m pretty sure we can do better on our own.

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Any prominent news source’s big story is going to ripple throughout the blog community as the story is picked up, reflected, commented on, and discussed. Rather than worrying about how NYTimes.com didn’t mention your brand, it’s time to dig deep into the blogosphere. Search on the article title and you’ll start finding the places where the story is reflected, and where there are fruitful opportunities to comment on the article, giving your own brand a plug in the process.

This is a job that could be handled by your internet brand ambassadors, but anyone can legitimately participate in these conversations. Just follow the social media rules. Don’t hide behind an alias. Don’t be afraid to say who you are and that you have a vested interest. If anything, the community will appreciate that they’ve made a direct connection with your brand and might engage you in a conversation. Just be prepared to take up the discussion, should one ensue. Nobody likes it when somebody drops by, makes a proclamation and then splits before there is an opportunity to respond to questions.

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