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As the popularity of Facebook skyrockets among individuals, it has also become popular for businesses. “Find us on Facebook” is now found within nearly every website, business card, advertisement and email.

But, by placing that tagline on all of our marketing materials and emails, there’s no telling how many people will actually find us on their own. If you look at various pages, the bigger brands such as Starbucks and Wal-Mart obtain hundreds of thousands of fans just by being who they are. But what about the smaller fish in the Facebook sea?  What can we learn from the Facebook pages of these giants that are reasonably applicable to the smaller business?

Many small businesses may not have the resources or the desires to create their own apps or to hire a sole employee for social media. So, to figure out what we can learn from the big guys on Facebook, let’s start with a list of reasons for a Fan Page.

1)     Engage Fans

2)     Provide Value

3)     Obtain Feedback

4)     Interact with customers

5)     Support a good cause

Engage – get customers to participate within your Facebook page. This is probably the easiest way to get creative on your page as there are many contests and promotions you can hold to encourage participation.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Dunkin’ Donuts is asking fans to post a “couples’ pic” and many have included how DD impacts their relationship by posting stories on Dunkin’s wall. This promotion is exclusive to their Facebook page and is not listed on their website. The best part of this idea is that the winner is posted as “CupiDD’s pick” and there is no monetary prize – which makes it easy for a small business on a budget to reenact.

Provide Value – offer relevant content that provides your customers with beneficial information with products or services you offer.

Blackberry’s page is doing an amazing job of providing value by creating a forum directly within their Facebook page. If that’s too detailed for your small business, you can mimic Cooking Light magazine’s method of providing content. They regularly post recipes from their website for all fans to see.

Obtain Feedback – give your customers the opportunity to comment on products or services that your company offers.

Ben and Jerry’s offers this option on their Facebook page with an option to write reviews on their ice cream. If you want something a little more daring than reviews, take notes from Forever 21. They showcase pictures of clothing and accessories with a “Like It” or “Dislike It” button next to each. Both of these options provide great opportunities to find what your customers are thinking.

Interact with customers – respond to customers comments on your Facebook page lays out a quick and casual way of communicating.

The wall on Facebook pages and profiles makes it easier than ever to leave a quick message. On many company pages, consumers utilize the wall to complain or compliment the product One company that does a great job of responding quickly to all of the comments left on their wall is Best Buy. They address issues, answer questions, and give thanks all through their Facebook Wall. Your small business can easily replicate this process by assigning a person to monitor messages that come in and responding accordingly.

Support a good cause – ask your fans to participate on your Facebook page in an activity that results in a donation to a charity of your choice.

Both Target and Coca-Cola are using this method on their Facebook pages. Target asks you to send a card to a friend and pick one of five charities to win a portion of $1 million. On Coca-Cola’s fan page, they offer to donate $1 to the Boys and Girls Club of America for every gift a fan sends to their friends.

To do something like this on a smaller scale, you can ask fans to take part in a poll or write a review on a product. For each poll result or review you see, your company will make a donation of X amount to a charity. Be sure to contact your lawyer before doing this promotion, just to be sure there are no rules in your state you need to know about!

So, these are the companies we’ve taken notes on – what companies have you found doing good on Facebook?

What makes a top Super Bowl commercial in the perspective of the advertiser?…Certainly increasing brand awareness is a goal, but  for others the goal could be to create an informative commercial. Maybe for another advertiser,  the primary metric is how controversial the ad is and or, how much viral buzz is generated from that controversial commercial. Two things that all advertisers do care about are the  Super Bowl commercial’s return on ad spend (ROAS) – they need to recoup the cost of their 30 second, $3M ad spend and the Super Bowl’s audience reach and life-time value. Nielsen has recently announced that Super Bowl 44 is the most watched Super Bowl ever with 106.6M views on television alone.

When determining an ad’s reach and life-time value, analysts must now factor internet activity into this data, on top of television viewership. This data can include query search volume, standard web analytics & e-commerce measures, and now even social media metrics such as blog posts, comments, retweets, status mentions, sentiment, video views, bookmarks, diggs, etc. etc. Taking this into consideration we thought it may be interesting to compare the five brands who created the top Super Bowl commercials of 2010 across a few of these metrics. We considered these brands to be (in no order); Denny’s (Free Grand Slam Breakfast campaign), Dockers (Free Pants campaign), Doritos (Get Yo Hands Off My Mamma et al.) Bud Light (Bud Light House et al.) and GoDaddy (Danica Patrick & the GoDaddy Girls campaign).

Top Super Bowl Commercials: Google Search Volume

Using Google Insights we determined that Doritos and Dockers were the brands that saw the biggest spike in search volume over after their Super Bowl commercials were aired. GoDaddy, Denny’s and Bud Light closed out the top five. One interesting point to note is that on Tuesday February 8th while Doritos, Dockers, GoDaddy and Bud Light traffic began to trough, Denny’s was still on the rise. It is important to note that Tuesday, February 8th was also the day that Denny’s was offering their free grand slam breakfast.

Top Super Bowl Commercials: Domain Traffic

A metric that our  advertisers were certainly looking at were the impact of the Super Bowl commercials on direct load sessions and unique visitors to their own domains. Using Alexa.com as our source it is clear that Dockers.com experienced the highest increase in terms of reach from their Super Bowl commercial and free pants campaign.  Dockers.com saw a 7-day traffic spike of 1,350%, that is incredible! Now the only questions that remains are did that traffic convert and how many new customers were generated?

Dennys.com also saw a 400% increase in reach over the past 7-days and keeping with the trend of Google Searches and Twitter mentions, that number has continued to grow after the few days following the Super Bowl.

Doritos in collaboration with the NFL had launched a site called CrashTheSuperBowl.com back in 2006 as a user-generated commercial voting site. The site has seen a 90% increase in reach over the past 7-days.  GoDaddy.com also showed a marginal 7% increase in its 7-day reach as according to Alexa.

Top Super Bowl Commercials on YouTube

So we know 106.6 million people watched Super Bowl 44, but how many tuned in after the Super Bowl to check out their favorite 2010 Super Bowl commercials? The short answer is, a lot. Doritos Super Bowl Commercial Channel, CrashTheSuperBowl, is the fourth most watched channel on YouTube this week with over 3.675 million views. Their channel also has 3,818 subscribers and the most watched video (Get Yo Hands Off My Mamma), alone has 1.718 million views, 2,805 comments, and 4,454 ratings (5-star overall) as of writing this post. The Bud Light Channel, OfficialBudLight, was the fifteenth most watched channel on YouTube this week with 1.385 million views. Not surprisingly, GoDaddy.com has also seen a increase in their GoDaddyTV channel views as it is currently the seventy-third most watched channel on YouTube this week. An un-official Denny’s channel, Denny’s SuperBowl, has generated over 1.148 million views since it’s creation on January 29th, 2009.

Top Super Bowl Commercials on Twitter

So just what commercial generated the most interest to users on Twitter? According to Trendistic, Doritos was the champion in terms of the amount of mentions in a given time. In the 6 pm EST hour during the Super Bowl, “Doritos” was mentioned in 1.2% of the all tracked tweets.

Dockers and Denny’s each maxed out at .23% and .16%. Again in the graphs below, you will see that Denny’s appeared to of had the larger life-span but that is skewed because of their Grand Slam offering on February 8th.

In recent years, Microsoft Office applications have ruled the small to medium size business market when it came to activities like word processing, data analysis, and presentation preparation and delivery. Although Microsoft still has a very strong hold on this market, companies no longer have to completely rely on Microsoft for these type of computer applications and also don’t have to shell out hundreds of dollars per license.

If you are running a small to medium size business on a tight budget, here are a few “office suites” that are completely free and also allow you to view and edit Microsoft Office files such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentation files, and more.

#1 – OPENOFFICE

OpenOffice 3 is an open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages, such as Microsoft Office. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

The various applications that OpenOffice provide include: Writer (comparable to MS Word), Calc (comparable to MS Excel), Impress (comparable to MS Powerpoint), Base (comparable to MS Access).

#2 – Google Docs

Google Docs is a set of online “office” web applications that allow you to do most of the things you do with your regular office applications. You can create and store documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online in an easy to use interface. These documents can then be shared with other employees or clients from anywhere in the world. You can also allow these documents to be edited by certain individuals and you can see the edits on your screen as they happen.

#3 – Softmaker Office 2006

Similar to OPENOFFICE, Softmaker offers a free word processor (TextMaker) and a free spreadsheet program (PlanMaker) that is compatible with MS programs. Softmaker Office is commercial office productivity suite developed by software company in Nuremberg, Germany, and is flagship application product of the company. Softmaker Office is targeted to home, small business and educational users.

#4 – Thunderbird

Looking for a free, full featured alternative to Microsoft Outlook? Try Thunderbird from Mozilla. Although Thunderbird may not have every feature that you can find in the most recent release of Outlook, it has the most used features covered. With a price of $0, how can you complain?