It’s finally official: Facebook is a publicly traded company, and investors in its newly listed stock now own some 421 million shares in the company that has come to define social networking in the online world.

Or, in Facebook jargon, the company has been “friended” by Wall Street.

Shares in the initial public offering (IPO) had an offering price of $38 per share. After trading at times above $42, the price closed at $38.23 Friday — a closing level buoyed by purchases coming from the IPO’s own Wall Street underwriters, according to news reports.

So this wasn’t the strong showing many analysts had expected, which raises the obvious question for investors: Where is this stock headed?

Skeptics argue the company’s staying power and profit potential have been overhyped, while fans see it as the world’s must-own social media stock. It may take a while to know which side is right.

On the “buy” side of this debate, Facebook has unrivaled clout in its market, with roughly 1 in 8 people on the planet using the site to swap photos and information. More keep signing up every day. That’s a platform of activity that the company can monetize through advertising revenue and add-on services.

The negative view is that all that may be true, but it may not justify the company’s current market value on Friday of close to $100 billion. After an extraordinary growth surge since its founding in 2004, Facebook is now gaining customers and revenue at a decelerating pace. If future growth doesn’t come in strong, the share price could easily go down rather than up.

The tug-and-pull between those views seemed evident Friday. There was enthusiasm enough to push the stock above its offering price, but skepticism was strong enough to keep it from soaring.

See on www.wnem.com

Facebook goes public Friday. It could be worth well over $100 billion dollars. Want to get a piece of that? It’s going to be very tricky for mere mortals to get Facebook stock in the IPO. If you want shares, here’s what you have to do.

Step 1… “First, get a ton of money. Like tons. I am talking gazillions.”

So says Peter Kupferberg, a principal at Chicago investment counseling firm Gofen and Glossberg. Most of the large online brokerage firms will at least take requests for Facebook shares, but they have rules. Some require existing balances of $500,000. Some will only consider people who already trade 30 times a day. Some even decide whether you’re worthy on a case-by-case basis.

Step 2… “Then open a brokerage account at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, but only open the account if they promise you Facebook stock.”

Kupferberg says the deal stock goes first to the preferred customers of the banks underwriting the deal. Then it goes to the people with brokerage accounts who pass all the tests in Step 1. The scarce remainder goes to small investors to whom we wish the best of luck. If you make it that far, don’t expect the current estimated share price of $40 to last long. Add scarcity of shares and stratospheric hype, stir, and you’ll get what Kupferberg expects to be “a frenzy like we haven’t seen in a while that will drive the price up to ridiculous levels.”

See on www.readwriteweb.com

Michael Friedman and Greg Augarten sell New York-style pizza in New Orleans. Their operation, Pizza Delicious, is a takeout window between Piety Street and Desire Street. They’re only open two nights a week. If you’re in the know, you can call them up and order a pie.

Listen to the FULL broadcast from NPR HERE

Business has been good, and they’re about to buy their own place. So for the first time they’re considering paid advertising. They’d been thinking about advertising on Facebook but didn’t know how to proceed.

Meanwhile, we were working on some stories about Facebook and wanted to get inside the Facebook ad campaign and see if it really worked.

So we hooked the Pizza Delicious guys up with Rob Leathern, a social media ad guru.

The key question they tried to answer: Which Facebook users should they target with their ad campaign?

Their first idea was to target the friends of people who already liked Pizza Delicious on Facebook. But that wound up targeting 74 percent of people in New Orleans on Facebook — 224,000 people. They needed something narrower.

The Pizza Delicious guys really wanted to find people jonesing for real New York pizza. So they tried to target people who had other New York likes — the Jets, the Knicks, Notorious B.I.G. Making the New York connection cut the reach of the ad down to 15,000.

Seemed perfect. But 12 hours later, Michael called us. “It was all zeroes across the board,” he said. Facebook doesn’t make money till people click on the ad. If nobody clicks, Facebook turns the ad off. They’d struck out.

So they changed the target to New Orleans fans of Italian food: mozzarella, gnocchi, espresso. This time they were targeting 30,000 people.

Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click-throughs, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice. Pizza Delicious got close to 20 times the number of Facebook fans it usually gets in two days. The guys were stoked.

The campaign cost them $240 — almost $1 for each new Facebook fan they got from the campaign.

“Is that feeling of exhilaration worth $240?” Michael said. “I don’t know — hopefully that translates into new business.”

It didn’t.

After a long night of asking every single customer where he found out about Pizza Delicious, not one said it was through Facebook.

But while Greg took the garbage out, he checked his phone. And there was a message:

“Just found out about you guys via a sponsored Facebook ad if you can believe it. Super excited about your new place — happy to toss in a few bones over the top.”

That guy kicked in $10 to support the new restaurant.

“And that was cool,” Michael said. “We got some return on our ad.”

That return — $10 on a $240 investment — isn’t much.

Maybe at some point, the new Pizza Delicious fans will show up and buy some pizza. But social advertising is so new that nobody knows for sure. It’s still unproven, untested and largely unstudied.

Some companies, like Ben and Jerry’s, say they have gotten a big return. Others say they haven’t. On Tuesday, GM said it was pulling its Facebook ads because the ads haven’t done enough to generate new business.

The funding from one of the largest internet companies in the world will be used to help Pinterest improve its service and expand the site’s community globally.

Pinterest and Rakuten’s partnership is set to help the company break into the Japanese market as well as 17 other global markets. Rakuten is owner of ecommerce giant Buy.com here in the US.

Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO of Pinterest says the partnership with Rakuten will help Pinterest move closer towards its business goals.

“Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests,” said Silbermann. “Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal.”

Other investors participating in the funding round include Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Captial and other angel investors.

Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten says the investment in Pinterest compliments Rakuten’s business model for e-commerce.

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining. We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world.”

Get our new Pinterest 101: Cheat Sheet from ColderICE right now at http://goingsocial.colderice.com  
See on www.cbronline.com

The Internet is such a wonderful thing, isn’t it? I mean, it’s brought us together today to talk …

The question isn’t whether social services on the Web influence how we spend money, but rather how they affect your habits. At the end of the day businesses can’t survive without making money, and that’s why we’re seeing a flood of social services that might push you over the ledge to buy that new shiny thing that you probably can’t afford. That’s how they’re going to make money, after all. 

See on thenextweb.com

For the first time ever The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Gala was streamed LIVE on Amazon with a hosted event. Amazon merges the live coverage with event inspired merchandise and clothing, plus an organized social campaign to engage the audience in real time over a real live event.

Oh and I try to train Brent to NOT call me “ColderICE” so we will see how well that works out, LOL

And do not forget, we are giving away a brand new BlackBerry Playbook so join in!