The front page of today’s Washington Post states, “the merging of social networking and online advertising combines two of the most powerful forces on the Internet today”.  Facebook -- with its eye popping $15 billion valuation -- is at the epicenter of this nascent, yet massive, opportunity.

Every major company in the world should be playing close attention – especially incumbent telecom carriers whose core business is supposedly about “connecting people” and whose legacy leadership in “directory advertising” has almost completely vanished.

At least one global telecom carrier, British Telecom, is paying attention and has already taken steps with BT Tradespace to elegantly blend “socially networked groups of people” with “small business advertisers looking for customers”.

As important as it is to learn from the positive lessons taught by FaceBook – it is equally important to learn from the negative lessons as well. This is especially true as Facebook continues to struggle with personal privacy issues associated with its recent Beacon Service, a core element of the Facebook advertising system. In one case, Facebook Beacon accidentally ruined Christmas for Sean and Shannon Lane when the service automatically revealed Sean’s purchase of a diamond ring to his wife Shannon – which was intended to be a surprise…ooops!

Like all things which have the potential to be massively disruptive, “getting it absolutely right” will take patience and investment. I am confident Facebook will be focused enough to fix the privacy issues associated with Beacon. I also suspect that innovative carriers such as BT who exercise the same patience and investment will also eventually get things right, thereby creating significant value for themselves and their customers at the intersection between social networks and business advertising.  Time will tell if i am right or wrong.