Word of mouth is one of the most powerful tools of marketing, and Facebook surely knows it.  Facebook did some research on this matter and found out that each time a Facebook user purchases a ticket from TicketMaster, the associated Facebook friends spent an additional $5.30 on TicketMaster. E-commerce sites that use Facebook tools for their businesses are making nice money due to the power of word of mouth, without being charged by Facebook for their successful marketing magic.

“We now have a direct link between sharing on Facebook and revenue generation at e-commerce sites,” said Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook. Our most successful advertisers are marketing Web sites or applications that have already integrated the Facebook platform,” Mr. Rose said. “If TicketMaster does well on Facebook, they will spend money on Facebook.”

The latest smart tool for advertising on the Facebook platform is Social Research Platform, developed by Adknowledge in partnership with Techenlightment, that will help businesses gather market intelligence from the largest social media platform at the moment. The program layers opt-in social data of a consumer’s likes, dislikes and demographics on top of survey responses, so that brands can design their promotion activities more accurately. Participants in the study will be rewarded with virtual currency and in-game points for Facebook games.

“What brands, advertising and research agencies can get out of this is to get a quick response to questions that they decide. When first testing this, we were slightly worried that users were only doing this because they’re being rewarded, and maybe going ‘click click click click’ through the questions, and the data would be useless,” John Cole – managing director of Adknowledge, Europe tells us.

“What we found, however, is the data was quite excellent. We would decide ten questions, put them online and watch the data come in. The powerful thing about it is you get the answers from users, which were quite honest. Then you get demographics, their Likes, Dislikes, etc. layered on top of it. So you know you’re getting good, quality data.’’

A few days ago we covered a similar service offered by SugarCRM in collaboration with InsideView, the social media aggregator for businesses, out of which SugarCRM customers will have access to InsideView’s platform free of charge; and mblast as well, which delivered mPact, a tool for managing online (social) media information and delivering reports. ClickFox also specializes in offering customer experience analytics, a speciality that is regarded as profitable, considering that ClickFox raised $18 million in funding from Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners as a part of its third round of funding.