Yesterday Facebook hosted this Marketing Conference in NYC.
Attending was available through, yup, you guessed it, Facebook.com
The hub is here: https://www.facebook.com/business/fmc
One of the reasons for the conference, as I understand it, was as a launch forum for a number of new features for marketers, some in the works and some rolling out in the next couple of months, including:

• revamping Pages to be more clearly branded
• packaging ad services using branded, purchase-able tools with names like Reach Generator and Premium

All the re-vamps are gathered on this handy page.

Beyond the straight facts of the Conference, these were some aspects that were neat to me. 

• essentially a free conference. The bulk of the conference was made available as a live video feed for free via Facebook. In the past we’d arrange to be sent to a conference. As it happens, I only found out about it yesterday and had video run in the background while I worked on other projects (amazing how many complaints there were on the Comments feed. Reminded me of this).
• social enterprise. In describing new Admin titles (there will be more than just Admin) the presenting geek (an engineer or a designer) described it as a response to user feedback. I recognize that user feedback is part of any design process, just feels like Facebook and others who do Social Media well understand it, weed through it and make it part of the end product really quickly and intelligently.
• philosophical insight came out of an interview, that seemed a bit arbitrary, with an engineer. He mentioned a few truisms that Facebook staff live by, one of which was “done is better than perfect”. Which is kinda nice.
• stories are becoming the major shift for Facebook (instead of simply Ads). And one of the stories within that story is from the Fireside Chat, which I thought would be just an afterthought and ended up being a warm (no put intended) conversation with American Express CEO Ken Chenault and their partnership with Facebook to champion small businesses (often without obligating people to use AmEx).

All this from a 7-year-old.
Can you believe that? Facebook just turned seven not too long ago, now it’s a verb, a fairly common one. Seven years ago it was just two words that we hadn’t put together like that yet. I was overall really impressed with Facebook, and in a context where I’m not sure any of us is really super-keen to be impressed.

I realize that, as Social Media reporting goes, I’m very much a latebird here (for those who know me, though, being a latebird shouldn’t come as much of a shock). However, posting this a little after the fact allows their video queue to catch up so the https://www.facebook.com/business/fmc link should patch you into to the main speakers and breakout sessions, either now or very soon.

Tomorrow’s post: a few words about the whole point of business.