Just heard about an interesting new beta test from our friends/foes at Google AdWords. They are calling it Automatic Matching.

The gist is this: Google “analyzes” your landing page copy, ad creative and keywords and then makes a determination about what other keywords it should show your ads for. These will be words that are not in your current campaign, but that Google feels you missed (and didn’t take their campaign optimization recommendations about). Ads will be shown based on probable higher clickthrough (some of us out there prefer to maximize our clients’ conversion over clickthrough, but high conversion is not how Google gets paid.)

The glaring issue is what if your ads are being shown for terms that you do not want them to be shown for? Will they tell you what additional terms they are showing your ads for? I don’t know the answer to that, nothing was indicated to that effect in the info I received.

Will this end up serving us as managers at least equally to how it serves Google? Only time and testing will tell. For now, I am opting out of this “service.” If you want to opt out as well, you have until June 3rd before it is automatically implemented on all your campaigns.

Google is making this a default setting. You can opt out through your campaign settings in Adwords. If you are going to test it, I would be interested in knowing what you find out. Please let me know.

After a very fast and fun year, I can only be thankful to all of you who have given me such great support, advice, and friendship. 2007 has truly been spectacular and I owe it to all of you who have believed in me and put your trust in me.

I look forward to another great year in 2008, and hope that it doesn’t blow by as quickly as this one did. May this holiday season bring warmth and gratitude into your home and may the New Year be plenty and prosperous. Take care and see you in ‘08.

So last night, November 14, 2007 a group of developers and marketers came together at the new Tempe Center for the Arts to discuss Facebook.

Here are a few key takeaways from me as a marketing (not a developer):

1. Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook delivered a few stats and new features.
Become of fan of Dave’s, I just did: http://www.facebook.com/davemorin

50 million users
250,000 new users per day
majority of users are 25+
47% of users are in the Unites States, 20% are in Canada, the rest are in Norway, Australia, Sweden, UK
50% of users return every day

Facebook just rolled out their Pages functionality. This allows entities to have their own profile pages, so where this differenitiates from individual profiles is when a group or company wants to have a presence on Facebook to leverage the social graph for awareness of products, services, brand, etc. Link to Pages coming soon.

Facebook Events (like eVite) does more events in one month than eVite does in one year. First developed as a method for college students to know where all the parties were.

Two words News Feed. Leverage this.

Multiple opportunities to advertise.

Chris Johnson, of Terralever, delivered a step by step process on how to go about developing a successful application. What to do, what not to do and the many models of successful and unsuccessful app promotion.

You don’t have to be a social networking junky, but you should at least know about it so start your own profile and fool around at http://www.facebook.com/.

Oh, and for the developers out there, just visit: http://developers.facebook.com/ or http://facebook.com/platform.