On Tuesday I am going to Facebook.

There is quite a bit loaded into that statement.

I am going for actually a long list of reasons.

1. To make sure everything is smooth as silk for the Elite Reatreat “field trip” there on Thursday, with Magic Bus transportation provided by the ever cool Jim at We Build Pages.

2. To have some great food, and great meetings, with some truly first class people.

3. To become super educated on Facebook, so I can help them interface more smoothly with the internet marketing world.

4. To answer some questions they have for me on who the influencial internet business/marketing bloggers are, and whatever else they want to know from me.

5. To learn stuff to help with my own projects.

6. To stand in front of a tidal wave just before it hits.

I had a long talk with Michael Jenkins about this one morning last week. Michael is the Founder and CEO of Market Leverage Affiliate Network. Facebook reaches hundreds of millions of people each week. They also have more info about who each user is on a continental basis than any other site. They actually care more about the user experience than they do about making money. There was a lot more to this conversation that I am not at liberty to release, but boy oh boy is there a lot of opportunity here.

In no way would I imply that google has maxed out on their ability provide value to advertisers, but at the moment Facebook provides ridiculous value to advertisers if you can figure out how to utilize it properly. Jeremy, (Shoemoney) turned me onto this and we have been working on some early experiments on how to utilize facebook advertising for maximum value.

Recently I have been looking at what other medium has ever been able to be able to target demographically their users on such a wide scale. Answer? Nothing.

Google is cool that if you use adwords you can have a great understanding of their intent at that exact moment, but with Facebook you can find out if they like to dance, are 24 years old, live in Phoenix, and are in a relationship. Man if I had a romantic restaurant in Phoenix I would be spending everything I have on marketing to that group today for Valentines at my place.

The closest thing I have ever been to that had this type of detail is buying mailing lists and mailing to people, or e-mail lists. It is a huge difference because with those lists you are making assumptions about what the person is into, but with Facebook the person themselves has either said they are into that, or at least talked about it on their page.

The real future of facebook hasn’t even been unleashed yet. It will be when they fully develop their system for not only directing ads based on what the person is into, but also what their friends are into, and tying it in to whether their friends are allready users of a particular product or service or not.

Can you imagine if you were selling Zoomi Electric Bicycles and you could target a Facebook user who had 9 of his 45 friends allready riding Zoomi Electric Bicycles. Just imagine the ad saying something like,

John, C’mon allready!

All your friends are riding Zoomi Electrics to school,

why aren’t you!

And then it shows photos of his friends who allready ride them.

So maybe this is pushing it a bit too far, and impinging a bit on their personal privacy, but it really demonstrates the power that is available through their data.

Like I said in the beginning, one of the main reasons I am really excited to get to work closely with Facebook is that they actually put the users experience far ahead of their interest in making money. Long term this is going to put them I believe in a position that will be more powerful than even the mighty Google.

Shoemoney pointed my head to look in the right direction, and after my own studies and speaking with Michael, I can hear the rumbling. There are a few hundreds of millions of eyeballs, maybe billions? starting to look in this direction at our ads and we know more about each one of them than we ever have before.

I am putting myself right in front of that tidal wave right now, and looking forward to it breaking on me.

Stay posted next week, and you will hear more about what I learned at Facebook.

In case you haven’t heard of them, here is their site 😉