Translation: the new privacy settings are unlikely to jeopardize the efforts of brand marketers and managers using Facebook to promote their products.

The singular objective of the Facebook security enhancements has been to protect the consumer, not to impede the efforts of marketing users. Consequently, brand marketers shouldn’t be alarmed by the new privacy settings: expect little net change to your marketing operations.

According to All Facebook, five major security enhancements were announced:

1. A new button has been introduced that users can use to opt out of applications from the entire Facebook platform.

Marketing Impact: Tune your marketing activities to prevent end-user frustration. Over-solicit, and you could wind up pushing your target market to opt out of all applications. Further, it’s now imperative to deliver value in every interaction. Do so, and a frustrated user may remember that the connection to your brand is worth preserving.

2. Users can now hide their lists of friends, likely impeding fan and friend recruiting.

Marketing Impact: If you’ve been sifting through the lists of fans and friends to find more targets, it’s time for a new strategy. Brand marketers using this approach to recruit audiences, though, were overdue for a change anyway! The goal of your Facebook marketing efforts should be to trigger this behavior among your fans and friends. Design applications and develop content that users will want to spread for you.

3. Users can hide their interests, making it more difficult for you to ascertain which people would be most receptive to your brand.

Marketing Impact: There’s virtually no change as a result of this. Since interests were only released when community pages were rolled out in April, it’s unlikely that any transformative social media marketing practices had time to emerge.

4. Past status updates can be hidden, constraining brand marketer research.

Marketing Impact: This development looks more significant than it really is. Unless you’re working with a small number of highly targeted Facebook users, it’s unlikely that you’d sift through this much content. Past information is concealed from searches, which can be limiting, but it should have no impact on a referral/viral growth strategy.

5. With only one click needed, privacy is getting much easier for users.

Marketing Impact: Again, there’s virtually no impact. Facebook users can easily restrict access to “Friends Only,” “Friends of Friends,” “Recommended” or “Everyone.” Unless you’re sifting through users to find targets, which is inefficient and time- and resource-consuming, this shouldn’t change your on-platform marketing activities.

Despite the magnitude of the changes, particularly in regards to personal privacy control, brand marketers shouldn’t be impacted too severely … as long as you’re using well-planned, properly executed social media marketing practices. If you suspect the privacy changes could disrupt your Facebook marketing efforts, contact us now.

[Thanks, All Facebook]

Just when more and more marketers were getting into a groove promoting their “become a fan” message, Facebook goes and announces a shift away from this terminology in favor of the existing “like” feature. While many were quick to panic at first, most are seeing this semantic shift as a way to make it easier for users to build lasting connections to brands in the future. Yet, rather than taking pressure off marketers looking to increase their impact in social media, this shift places even more emphasis on the need to be “likeable” – i.e., deliver valued content on an ongoing basis that users will like, share and recommend.

One of the keys to this new approach is its ability to sidestep the mental hurdle involved when users are asked to overtly declare they are a “fan” of a particular brand. Soon they will simply need to “like” a brand’s ad, content or activity on Facebook in order to establish an equivalent connection. With Facebook users currently using the “like” feature over “become a fan” by a ratio of nearly 2:1, the implications in brand reach on the platform could be seismic.

According to an internal memo within Facebook, which has already been widely reported:

“‘Like’ offers a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in.” It continues, “These lighter-weight actions mean people will make more connections across the site, including with your branded Facebook Pages.”

Currently, Facebook users “fan” pages they value and “like” content they value. As Facebook moves to phase out the “become a fan” terminology, it appears that the biggest winners will be brands that can provide the most likeable content that gets shared and promoted across the platform.

In the new paradigm, social media content creation will have to go far beyond intern-authored status updates. Content planning across text, photography, video, and interactive experiences will continue its rise as an increasing imperative in the growth of valued brand communities.

What great social media content will you be rolling out this quarter?

Ahh, but there is a catch: monthly licensing fees. Many who have built their Facebook presence on proprietary development platforms are now stuck paying monthly fees, simply for the right to continue to use their own Facebook presence.

We see things a different way.

We too are big believers in the value of social media platforms. In fact, we offer one of the richest set of tools and capabilities available. However, instead of asking our clients to continue to pay for these customized tools, we focus on delivering the professional social media services needed to build and manage community and drive measurable results. These services include community management, digital PR, content production, and promotional marketing.

Don’t let a good idea like social media platform lead you down a dead end street. Avoid licensing fees and put that your budget to work to create an end-to-end social media program.

For Comedy Central and The Colbert Report, sponsor of this year’s U.S. Olympic Speed Skating Team, the trek of the torch to Whistler, British Columbia brings an opportunity to engage more deeply with their fans.

Colbert and Comedy Central teamed with enter:new media to create a custom Facebook tab to act as the social media headquarters for the show’s “Skate Expectations” campaign.

This custom, updatable application, provides fans access to a curated selection of videos and articles related to the U.S. Speed Skating team, the Winter Olympics and ColbertNation.com. Colbert’s Twitter feed, @StephenAtHome, is woven into the application, affording fans the chance to expand their relationship with the show across social media platforms.

But like all good social platforms, this tab does more than just provide cool content. Fans can show their support for the U.S. Speed Skating team by posting to the page as well as their own profile. Fans can even take their commitment a step further by donating to the team.

Finally the custom tab is designed to easily resize to the new Facebook tab standards being rolled out before the end of the month.

UPDATE: Facebook decided to feature this tab on their “Celebs on Facebook,”  page.