Van Dyck, who worked at Apple and Wieden+Kennedy before Levi’s, will bring important branding experience to Facebook. An initial public offering this year will put more pressure on the company to improve its image. Although it has in eight years become one of the most well-known brands in the world, it ranks among the lowest in consumer satisfaction. With Google heavily promoting an alternative social network, Facebook will need to be strategic in coming years.

Facebook significantly increased its marketing and advertising efforts in 2011. It spent $28 million in advertising last year — up from $8 million in 2010, according to IPO documents. The social network runs Google AdWords and Facebook ad campaigns. (We have reached out to Facebook to clarify how its house ads are billed.) The company has recently formed a number of partnerships with media companies like NBC, the New York Times, USA Today and Politico to build its brand.

Facebook mentioned in its IPO filing that unfavorable press coverage could negatively affect its business. This is true for any company, but it is notable that Facebook included it in the risk factors section of its prospectus. Google and LinkedIn did not.

Google ran a number of television commercials last year promoting its social network and other products. Facebook could follow suit, but since CEO Mark Zuckerberg is known to be skeptical of traditional advertising, the company could be looking to try other types of campaigns.

Van Dyck was recently involved in Levi’s “Go Forth” initiative, in which the company donated more than $1 million to renovate a community center and aid an urban farming program in Braddock, Pa. Facebook was likely most interested in Van Dyck’s experience with Apple where she worked for seven years and helped with launches of the iPhone, iPad, iPod and iTunes.

Image credit: Rebecca Van Dyck’s LinkedIn profile

A lot of the actions users take in Open Graph apps are going to involve commercial products or entities. People will be able to “watch” movies, “wear” designer items, “drink” beverages and so on. Most of these actions will not be taken within brand-specific apps. Instead they’ll be made via Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Foodspotting and other third-party platforms. As a result, we may start to see more brands directing people to these apps. For example, a movie page on Facebook could link to the Rotten Tomatoes page after opening weekend and tell fans to rate the movie, knowing this will generate additional impressions among a user’s friends. Brands will also be more likely to partner with apps to offer promotions or be featured in some way now that their reach will be much greater. This is because instead of waiting for users to actively share things on Facebook, Open Graph apps can continuously publish lightweight stories about users’ activity. As a result, formerly niche communities like the aforementioned Pose or Foodspotting could become more viable marketing avenues.

Marketers might be tempted to create their own Open Graph apps, but they will need to think more long term than they previously have with Facebook. Timeline apps provide value through use over time, helping users share part of their identity or learn something about their own habits. These apps are not ideal for one-off promotions. If marketers create them solely to take advantage of “frictionless sharing,” users are likely to recognize them as spam.

Another important point about Open Graph apps is that since they benefit from users taking repeated action, they work well as mobile and web integrations not page tab apps. A few of Facebook’s more than 60 Open Graph partners developed canvas applications, but none were using page tabs. We suspect this is in part because tabs apps are unavailable on mobile and pages could be converted to the Timeline format sometime this year. Marketers should be mindful of how much they invest in page tab apps moving forward and instead consider what kind of Open Graph integration or partnerships would be most relevant for their consumers.

See our breakdown of Open Graph apps by category here.

Image credit: Facebook

A lot of the actions users take in Open Graph apps are going to involve commercial products or entities. People will be able to “watch” movies, “wear” designer items, “drink” beverages and so on. Most of these actions will not be taken within brand-specific apps. Instead they’ll be made via Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Foodspotting and other third-party platforms. As a result, we may start to see more brands directing people to these apps. For example, a movie page on Facebook could link to the Rotten Tomatoes page after opening weekend and tell fans to rate the movie, knowing this will generate additional impressions among a user’s friends. Brands will also be more likely to partner with apps to offer promotions or be featured in some way now that their reach will be much greater. This is because instead of waiting for users to actively share things on Facebook, Open Graph apps can continuously publish lightweight stories about users’ activity. As a result, formerly niche communities like the aforementioned Pose or Foodspotting could become more viable marketing avenues.

Marketers might be tempted to create their own Open Graph apps, but they will need to think more long term than they previously have with Facebook. Timeline apps provide value through use over time, helping users share part of their identity or learn something about their own habits. These apps are not ideal for one-off promotions. If marketers create them solely to take advantage of “frictionless sharing,” users are likely to recognize them as spam.

Another important point about Open Graph apps is that since they benefit from users taking repeated action, they work well as mobile and web integrations not page tab apps. A few of Facebook’s more than 60 Open Graph partners developed canvas applications, but none were using page tabs. We suspect this is in part because tabs apps are unavailable on mobile and pages could be converted to the Timeline format sometime this year. Marketers should be mindful of how much they invest in page tab apps moving forward and instead consider what kind of Open Graph integration or partnerships would be most relevant for their consumers.

See our breakdown of Open Graph apps by category here.

Image credit: Facebook

Small business owners in the U.S. that manage pages on the social network can enter the contest through an app on the Facebook Marketing Solutions page. Entrants with 50 Likes on their page when they sign up for the contest will receive a $50 ad credit for the site. Pages that gain 100 new Likes during the contest period will earn another $100 ad credit. The ten pages with the most new fans will win $10,000 in Facebook ads. In September, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg announced the company would give $50 advertising credits to up to 200,000 small businesses but did not explain how. This appears to be part of that program, but we have not gotten a response yet from Facebook.

Although the contest materials encourage page owners to increase their Likes, they do not offer practical tips about how to do so. This oversight could lead small business owners to try to grow their pages in ways that devalue the Like — for instance, getting distant friends to Like a business they do not frequent. Contest rules prohibit page owners from obtaining Likes by setting up fake accounts and incentivizing users to Like the page in ways that violate Facebook page terms. However, these guidelines are written as legal documents that might be confusing for many page owners.

The company is hosting events, also called Small Business Boost, around the country to provide tips about how to use the social network to increase business. These events are put on in partnership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business.

The contest, oddly, has not been mentioned in a post on the Facebook Marketing Solutions page, though the app to enter is there. Some page owners, however, have received emails directing them to the site.

CEO and co-founder Sheldon Owen said Unified takes an enterprise approach to social advertising to give companies one system to manage campaigns from creative and planning stages to reporting and analytics. As businesses try campaigns on a number of new platforms, they can find themselves struggling to put things in perspective and understand how social media makes an impact. Unified’s Social Operating Platform calculates earned media and ROI by automating what many advertisers do manually through spreadsheets.

For example, a companies might use the Social Operating Platform to run Facebook ads to bring new fans to a page. In addition to setting a cost per action goal for the campaign, advertisers can assign values to other relevant metrics that are not otherwise included in an ad report. An advertiser paying $1 per fan might believe wall posts and comments are engagements with viral reach worth $0.20 each. The Social Operating Platform uses the Facebook API to display all of an advertiser’s performance indicators in one dashboard and calculate earned media value.

One problem might be that advertisers might not know what sort of value to place on a YouTube share or Twitter @ reply, for instance. Besides offering some strategy consulting, Unified aims to help advertisers through its Unified University training program. The web-based program provides information about a number of social advertising platforms and allows people to get certified on its system.

The Social Operating Platform is available for an undisclosed per user license fee, and the company offers other services and ways to integrate additional data that are negotiated on a case by case basis.

Users can purchase 48-hour access to the movie that will stream from a Facebook canvas app, Lionsgate Social Cinema. The app accepts credit cards and PayPal, but does not include Facebook Credits as an option, even though it does so for a number of older titles. Facebook takes 30 percent of transactions with Credits.

Warner Bros. was first to bring movie rentals to Facebook in March 2011, when it made The Dark Knight available for 30 Credits, or $3. It later offered “Inception,” two “Harry Potter” titles and other films for streaming. Lionsgate has made popular films like “The Blair Witch Project” and “Saw” available for Facebook rental, but no studio has offered a release as new as “Abduction” on the social network.

The action movie had weak box office performance and was widely panned by critics. Lionsgate is probably hoping to capitalize on star Taylor Lautner’s large online following. As of this writing, though, there was no mention of the rental on Lautner’s official Facebook page. The Abduction page has made two posts today to its more than 991,000 fans, but getting a mention on Lautner’s page with more than 12 million fans could give the effort a huge boost.

Like other Facebook rental plans, “Abduction” is available to users for 48 hours, during which time they can pause, rewind and play as many times as they wish. Users can leave Facebook and come back to the movie, but they have to do so using the same account. People who rent the film will also get access to trivia and an exclusive interview with Lautner.

For now, coupon posts are only available to select companies working directly with Facebook. If these tests show promise, it is likely the social network will make offers self-serve for page owners, as it did with check-in deals in November 2010. Providing an organized way for pages to give out coupons is a good move for Facebook. Studies have found many people come to Facebook pages for exclusive offers and discounts. A number of third-party app developers offer coupon tabs for pages, but the process of receiving a coupon often takes multiple steps and these apps cannot provide the same viral reach as a native Facebook feature would. Nor have these apps made coupons available for download from mobile pages.

As we suggested last month, coupons could be huge for Facebook when it begins showing Sponsored Stories in the mobile News Feed. The company hasn’t announced plans to do so yet, but it is easy to imagine how coupon ads could function just as well on mobile devices. As on the website, one click sends an offer directly to your email inbox.

For Facebook, maintaining quality offers and ensuring businesses honor them could be a challenge as the feature scales. Check-in deals are approved by Facebook before going live, but few merchants seem to be taking advantage of this service. The social network should consider why that is as it experiments with another coupon program. The company also tried to build a daily deals service on top of its platform last year, but ended the effort after four months.

The new coupon feature has promise because unlike check-in deals, these coupons can be claimed without visiting a location, making them more likely to be shared across the network. Plus, the ability to post an offer to a page and promote it with Sponsored Stories could lead more businesses to try it out. Check-in deals never had these these additional means of discovery.