I’ve been a regular user of Facebook since it’s inception in 2004, when it was first marketed amongst collegians as an exclusive social network. When I heard about it from my randomly-assigned freshman roommate, I could barely grasp what she was talking about. “A face? Whose face? A book? What kind of book?” “No, no,” she said, exasperated. “F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K. Dot com!” Over the next four years, my relationship with Facebook mutated more often than Burger King’s marketing campaign; my peers and I generated online personas and expanded our networks exponentially, all under the semblance of control and ownership.

The rate of change in Facebook rivals its rate of integration into our lives. For hours on end, we update, like, share, chat and peruse the profiles of friends, bands, companies…of everything and nothing at all. This behavior makes Facebook the perfect vessel through which companies can reach their audiences. Given the time we spend on Facebook, the nature of what we share and the potential data available to advertisers, privacy is certainly important to users. But how important?

The general consensus is that consumers will continue to “sacrifice” their privacy because they value the experience so much. Maybe Facebook will continue to serve 400 million users because it’s made mistakes and innovations in a way that makes it seem like its growing up with its audience. We believe Facebook is listening and making every effort to protect us. Like parents who thrive on that semblance of control and ownership, millions of users, save for a fraction of outspoken and conscious ones (like, say, 35,000 people), won’t care about Open Graph and its ability to “target you on an even more granular level,” nor the Graph API, which “makes it much easier to parse, collate and thus search through user info.” More specifically, Open Graph allows website URLs to be part of the Facebook universe and advertisers are able to trace and track users who connect to those websites, much like Facebook Pages.

As an avid Facebook user and marketer, the big question after the ruckus dies down about things like “privacy” and “transparency” is whether or not most people care. And not only do I wonder how many people care, but who exactly cares?

We want to hear from you! Do you think a significant amount of users negatively react after companies adapt this new knowledge stream? How will Facebook resolve its liminal stance between connecting users and monetizing their participation?

In search, the Excel vlookup function is used on a daily basis to synthesize massive amounts of data. Like men with women, we usually take vlookup’s merits for granted. We’re entirely dependent on its speed and accuracy, but when things go awry we feel hopeless.

Around here, ‘vlookup’ is a verb. We eat, sleep and vlookup.

If you have a list of keywords, each with numerical identifiers, and you need to attribute them to the correct redirect URL, enter the vlookup function like this:

=vlookup(C8, Report!$E$7:$K$327, 7, 0)

which translates to:

=vlookup(cell containing your keyword’s identification number, a range on another spreadsheet containing your redirect URLs and the keyword to which they match, the number of rows to the right of the keyword, and 0)

Problems can occur during the matching process. For example, if your data sets are in different formats, Excel won’t be able to match one to another, and will leave “#N/A” behind. In the search world, this is likened to a pile of $%($*&%&#. Even if you change the column format to text or general or numbers, nothing changes!

What may help in this particular situation is this pretty little formula:

=IFERROR((VLOOKUP((J8*1), [Report_1271326324069.xls]Report!$E$7:$K$327, 7, 0)),0)

This iferror formula converts all #N/A’s to 0’s, and multiplies the reference cells containing the numerical identifiers (J8) by 1, forcing it to be a number.