In case you didn’t already know by now, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his Director of Products, Brett Taylor (former Co-Founder and CEO of Friendfeed) introduced the next iteration of the Facebook Platform called the Open Graph to the web developer community, and it was generally well received by the public at large—at least on the content provider side.

Despite this announcement coming a mere two weeks ago on April 21, 2010 at the company’s third annual f8 conference, the Facebook Like Button was already implemented on over 50,000 websites and was seen tens of billions of times globally. In fact, the Like Button instantly exceeded 1 billion impressions in less than 24 hours with only 75 major websites using it at launch.

But what exactly does this mean for the sports marketing world, and what about you Joe fan?

Let’s get one thing straight upfront—social media is not as easy as “if you build it, they will come” for any athlete, team, league, or sponsor looking to establish or enhance brand equity.  Social media marketing is no different than traditional off-line marketing in that it requires a well thought out strategy, devoted resources, and a budget targeted at a reaching a measurable goal for the individual or organization.

With that said, social media’s major advantages—the cost-to-creativity ratio and the ability to expand reach via an engaged audience (key word here is “engaged” but I’ll explain more)—make this form of marketing so powerful that most athletes looking to enhance their salaries with fat endorsement checks should be asking their agency, management team, or friends and family why social media isn’t a part of their overall marketing strategy.

Facebook recently introduced an opt-in list of “Suggested Pages” as another step in the new user registration process. In stride with the recent decision to replace the “Become a Fan” button with “Like”, this appears to be an attempt by Facebook to encourage new users to express their interests and become active.

The phrase, “Connect with your favorite celebrities, businesses and brands to hear the latest news from them”, is displayed above the list.

Yesterday’s 2010 NFL Draft was one of the most anticipated and hotly debated in recent history, both off- and online. Rightfully so, the NFL has made a concerted effort to facilitate and capture fan conversations that are taking place across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and blogging networks.

The key to the NFL’s online social media draft strategy was recognizing that “conversations are happening in a lot of different places,” NFL.com’s General Manager Laura Goldberg said. “We want to make sure we’re aggregating comments no matter where they are.”

Jimmy “J-Roll” Rollins has always been known for his blazing speed and affinity for two-baggers.  On Tuesday, April 13th, Rollins will look to add homerun king to an already impressive baseball resume.

While his Philadelphia Phillies teammates are resting after their Citizens Bank Park home opener against the Washington Nationals, Rollins will spend his afternoon launching baseballs in excess of 550 feet over a closed-down Philadelphia highway in an attempt to break a Guinness World Record.

Who’s the top athlete on Facebook? Is it an international phenom like Cristiano Ronaldo or Roger Federer with millions of fans? Or maybe an engaging personality like Shaun White or Steve Nash with creative, authentic content?

That’s a question Activ8Social set out to answer early in the new year and in the process, we decided to rank the Top 30 professional athlete Facebook Pages as of February 2010. Top caliber athletes from all over the world and from a variety of sports made the grade. Read our full blog entry for more details.

Activ8Social invites you to network with sports professionals in the Washington, DC area at our first event of the year. This will be a great opportunity to meet new people, exchange ideas, and talk sports.

It is FREE to attend and all are welcome, whether industry veteran or just starting out.

Where: Greene Turtle (Verizon Center), 601 F Street NW, Washington, DC (map)

When: Thursday, February 25, 2010 (6:00 pm – 9:00 pm)

In the first installment of our “Facebook Fan Page Tips” series, we showed you how to create a new Page. Now I will walk you through steps to help set up your Page before publishing it to the world.

In this post, I will be focusing on the basic settings, but keep in mind that these seemingly simple instructions are absolutely critical to the success of your Page. Remember you have to crawl before you can walk, and we’ll have you sprinting like Usain Bolt in no time. Click for more to read a step-by-step breakdown of the process.

A few weeks ago, I contributed to an e-book put together by fellow sports and social media enthusiast Jason Peck. The focus of my post was industry predictions for 2010 and given the nature of our work at Activ8Social, I decide to focus on individual athletes. I came up with three primary growth areas to keep an eye on: Promotions, Live Video, and Mobile.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a few examples and decided to point them out to better demonstrate my predictions. Here’s my original post, coupled with a recent example of each primary growth area. Drop me a line and let me know how you see sports and social media growing in 2010 (hopefully by leaps and bounds).

As promised in the initial post last month, all of us here at Activ8Social will be sharing our knowledge on the basics of setting-up, navigating, and managing Facebook Pages—one of the most effective tools capable of developing your brand online.

In this installment of the series, I will show those of you who are unfamiliar with Facebook Pages how to create a new Page from scratch and how to move around the main control panels. Here’s a breakdown of the step-by-step process.