• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, July 8, 2010 1:05 PM

Forget about click-through rates or even engagement levels. Facebook wants Madison Avenue to know that the only marketing metric that matters is friendship. "The social-networking site is aggressively pitching to big advertisers like Ford Motor Co. and PepsiCo Inc. the latest in a series of ad formats that tell users which of their Facebook friends have expressed interest in the brand or product featured in the ad," reports The Wall Street Journal.

"The so-called social-context ads, which Facebook started rolling out over a year ago, are based on data it collects on the likes and friends of its users." The ads appear on the right side of a user's homepage, with an image and headline from the advertiser. Accompanying the ads are the names of your friends who have clicked on a button indicating they like the brand or ad. "Marketers have always known that the best way to sell something is to get your friends to sell it," Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, tells The Journal. "That is what people do all day on Facebook ... We enable effective word-of-mouth advertising at scale for the first time."

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »