SuperCoke! Application Adds Serious Fun to Facebook!

Think you’re plagued by Facebook friend requests from strangers now? Just you wait.

Facebook ushered in a new era of socially networked advertising this afternoon, announcing Facebook Ads, a new advertising program that allows businesses to use information about Facebook members to deliver targeted ads.

The new program is threefold: First, it allows advertisers to create profile pages for their brands and Facebook users to add them as friends, making themselves “fans” of companies (Think of it as ‘Zombies,’ but with Coca-Cola and Blockbuster …) . Second, it makes it possible for users to “share” marketing messages with friends via Social Ads – advertisements served up in concert with related actions users have taken on the site. Finally, it provides advertisers with data on the interests of the social-networking site’s millions of users. The system doesn’t yet allow for the display of advertising on other sites, but you can be sure that’s coming.

“Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online,” Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at the ad:tech marketing conference in New York. “For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people, but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation.”

The, ahem, “conversation” will begin with 12 major advertisers. Among them, Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, the Coca-Cola Co., Saturn, Sony Pictures, the New York Times Co. and Verizon.