Here is the one-hundred-and-thirty-first edition of Tom Nob’s Thursday Notes. TN2 serves as a brief summary of what good humor we have found during the past week plus some suggestions for the upcoming weekend.

New Stand-Up

John Mulaney:  New In Town

Chris Killian: The Not Black Album

Doug Loves Movies: Live in Sacramento

New TV Show

Key & Peele

New TV Season

Tosh.0 – season four

And Finally

Yesterday Facebook finally filed a preliminary prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in preparation for its long-awaited initial public offering.  Following in the footsteps of other so-called Web 2.0 companies like Linkedin, Groupon, and Zynga who have opened their respective kimonos in order to provide some liquidity for founders, early investors and employees alike, Facebook is not modest in the self-assessment of its value which it reportedly places somewhere between $75-$100 billion.   With over 800 million users and revenues of greater than $3.7 billion for 2011, there is no doubt that Facebook is worth a lot of money but Zuck & Co. have their work cut out for them to grow into this valuation.  What they and other social media companies need is to successfully transition from a free, user-oriented service to a platform conducive for the marketing and advertising of corporate brands and products.  The holy grail known as monetization.

However, when corporate customers shift their spend on branding activities to the social media sphere,  they leave behind the safety of carefully scripted one-way messages and become exposed to the ugly underbelly of the user base.  A recent example of this comes courtesy of McDonald’s (another company worth $100 billion) whose brand mission is “to be our customers’ favorite place and way to eat.”  Forgetting momentarily that this describes the typical 5-year-old, McDonald’s launched a promoted tweets campaign on Twitter encouraging its legion of customers to share their “McDStories”.  To paraphrase the McDonald’s social media director, the conversation did not go as planned with tweets from individuals whose meals were not so happy quickly swamping the campaign which was cancelled within hours of launch.   Thus, while putting the Egg McMuffin on Facebook would seem to be something that both companies would like, it is far too easy for an exercise in monetization to morph into digital defacement and simply end up with egg on the face.  And what’s the value of that?