*supercollider

In Part I, we discovered that fans have put brands themselves to shame in their effectiveness of propagating brands via Facebook apps.

In Part II, we reviewed five of the biggest successes brands have had so far.

Now here’s a look at a few of the most creative and interesting uses of the platform by brands so far.

Cause Marketing: Timberland Earthkeepers

Earthkeepers is a Timberland initiative to improve the way that businesses impact the environment. They’ve got a blog, a YouTube channel, a Changents page, and a their Earthkeepers Facebook app.

The application encourages users to plant virtual seedlings, which Timberland will turn into real trees to aid the fight against deforestation and desertification.

Their goal is one million virtual trees by April 30th, and looks like they may actually hit it. The total as of April 11th was 920,703 trees planted.

April 12th MAU: 50,210
90-day high: 71,854

Social entertainment: CBS Sports Brackets

CBS Sports has developed six Facebook applications. Five of them currently have less than 200 people using them. But the sixth is a smash hit, with close to 460,000 monthly users.

CBS Sports Brackets lets you create your own private NCAA bracket competitions with friends, as well as compete against all of Facebook for a chance to win $10,000, as well as access NCAA March Madness on Demand. At least that’s what it says, as I couldn’t actually view the app. But the high MAU says that they are doing something right.

April 12th MAU: 462,312
90-day high: 497,081

Media platform: Kyte

Kyte is one of the most interesting services out there right now, helping bring musicians and other celebrities closer to their fans via an easy to use publishing platform.

How successful is it? 50 Cent has had a staggering 77 milion views of his Kyte channel. Lady GaGa has racked up over 6 million, and All American Rejects is closing in on 4 million.

Kyte has since brought their channels to Facebook with an interesting platform play that includes a total of 133 published apps. In an extension of their existing channels, 50 Cent’s Facebook app is powered by Kyte, as is Lady GaGa’s.

Interestingly though, the success doesn’t seem to be translating. 50 Cent’s app has fallen from a high of 27k MAU down to 7k, and Wyclef Jean has just 67 people with his app installed.

Still, it’s interesting to see the trends of content syndication and platform plays converging here, and again it’s musicians leading the way.

And if you want your own Kyte channel, there’s a Facebook app for that as well.

April 12th MAU: 31,361
90-day high: 92,324

Content syndication: Electronic Arts - Spore

I’ve talked previously about Spore as one of the first major game releases to really integrate web 2.0 functionality, and the Spore Facebook app is one of the many extensions, allowing users to see the latest creature creations and share their own.

Current MAU: 41,444
90-day high: 41,444

Social utility: Coca-Cola’s CokeTag

Coca-Cola launched CokeTag back in June of 2008 as part of it’s Olympic partnership, but it had loftier long-term ambitions as a social bookmarking widget for Facebook.

A year later it remains one of the more innovative and functional branded utilities on Facebook. As the description puts it:
Use CokeTags to promote yourself — your blog, work, interests, team, band or whatever you like or care about — and then track how influential you are!

The CokeTag editor lets you package your links into a personal widget that you can immediately send to friends in just about a minute. Then sit back and use the CokeTag click counter to track who’s looking at your CokeTag, see where they click and find out how popular your links are!

It’s a great idea, but never took off the way it might’ve. Although in the last three months it was still as high as 55k users, it’s now slipped down to just over 2k. Still, it remains an interesting and innovative use of the platform.

April 12th MAU: 2,293
90-day high: 56,136

Brand-extension gaming: eBay - StyleSlam

StyleSlam is a virtual fashion wars game by eBay that allows players to create and dress avatars, rate your friends, send gifts, and trade your way to new wardrobes.

The game has had some modest success, and it’s a decent idea for building engagement around the brand that might lead to more consideration and usage of the service.

However the comments for the game reveal one of the hard truths about building apps: people expect them to work. And want to see them updated. It’s not good enough to build something without fully testing it, and then let it go without updates. And you’d think even if your standard consumer brands used to allocating budgets by quarters and campaigns don’t get this, as a software developer eBay at least would.

Current MAU: 7,671
90-day high: 10,749