Going viral is the aim of any marketing campaign. Getting people all over the planet to talk about your product for as little expenditure as possible is the dream of any marketing company. Sometimes, to quote a phrase, ‘if the product is good it will sell itself’. In social media circles, good products are easy to come by. Generating a buzz about the latest enhancements, plugins or apps is fairly painless. Tying an existing social media site to another mass market site engenders great interest in both companies and in what they are trying to achieve. Take the music industry; there has been a significant shift in how consumers have chosen to acquire their favourite tunes. The CD is out, downloads are in. Quick and easy access to the latest tracks is exciting and comes with an immediate retail therapy hit. If you are on a legitimate downloading site how rewarding is to read some music reviews then, with your mind made up, purchase the tracks?

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It seems that Facebook may be trying to pull off such a music downloading facility. It was on July 7th when Facebook launched its video messaging service that Jeff Rose decided to have a tinker with its Java Archive (.jar) file. Apart from coming out with the program call to the Skype powered video service referenced as ‘peep’:

if (paramString.equals(“com.facebook.peep”))return this.window.getMember(“VideoChatPlugin”);

It also carried a couple of lines for an, as yet, unknown facility referenced as ‘vibes’:

if (paramString.equals(“com.facebook.vibes”)) {return this.window.getMember(“MusicDownloadDialog”);

Just as the video service isn’t called ‘peep’ it is unlikely that any music downloading service will be called ‘Vibes’. In keeping with the Facebook brand I would assume if such a service was to be launched it would be simply called ‘Facebook Music’. Personally I think ‘Vibes’ sounds cool.

Read more from Jeff’s blog.

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Only a couple of short months prior, an article was published on the Forbes web site. It confirmed FB’s collaboration with Spotify and their service would be installed when users click ‘on the Spotify icon’. Users would then be able ‘to play from Spotify’s library of millions of songs through Facebook.’

This is a notable advance in the companies’ integration when only a year previously there was a Spotify program setting that allowed you to connect to Facebook which instantly added all your Facebook friends with Spotify.

The Swedish company was the victim of leaked promotional literature that answered the self-posed question of, ‘Why will Spotify be a success in the US’ with the reply ‘150m Facebook users will start to see music on their feeds. One click and they can have Spotify’.

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A report on the Gigaom website has a list of the features that the proposed music features that FB would be able to provide. According to them, one of these will be the ‘music dashboard’ which would include:

‘Music Notifications: here you have notifications that show if your friends have listened to songs recommended by you or on your profile.

Recommended Songs: You can get a list of songs heard and recommended by your friends. You can also play them back by clicking the play icon.

Top Songs from friends.

Top Albums from friends, with cover art.

Recent listens from your friends.

In the upper-right corner there will be a ‘happening now’ ticker that shows what is happening in your social and musical universe, including songs that your friends are playing.’ Read more.

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Guest blogger,Greg Coltman, writes prolifically for innovation and technology blogs and hope that this Facebook/Spotify integration will also be included as a smartphone app.