Eager to expand use of the Web to advertise their products, pharmaceutical giants, including Eli Lilly (LLY) and Pfizer (PFE), are heading to Washington this week to call on the Food and Drug Administration to provide guidelines for marketing prescription drugs online.

Wayne Gattinella, CEO of WebMD, is among the drug-industry leaders expected to attend Thursday’s FDA hearing on online advertising.

Drug companies are dabbling with Internet advertising, but their efforts have been minimal. Most of the ads promote broader health or corporate initiatives, rather than individual medicines. That’s chiefly due to industry fears of running afoul of regulators.

Seeking a bigger piece of one of the country’s largest ad categories, Web companies including Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and WebMD Health (WBMD) are also planning to attend Thursday’s hearing at the FDA, which has been scrutinizing drug makers’ digital marketing efforts.

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The smart-phone wars are heating up. Handset makers are releasing a wave of new devices backed by a flood of advertisements, as some fight for survival in the fast-growing but increasingly crowded market.

Companies such as Motorola Inc. (MOT), Palm Inc. (PALM) and HTC Corp. are hoping new phones will help them reclaim market share from the reigning iPhone and BlackBerry. To do that, they will need a mix of impressive devices, shrewd pricing and aggressive marketing, analysts say.

Motorola has bet its future on a lineup of new phones that run Google Inc. (GOOG) software. On Wednesday, it is expected to unveil a highly anticipated device dubbed the Droid on the Verizon Wireless network. Verizon (VZ) has been touting the phone in TV ads attacking the iPhone.

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Despite growing concerns about online privacy on social networks such as Facebook, marketers at the Social Data Summit in New York on Thursday professed enthusiasm for social media marketing.

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After decades of wrestling for dominance in the U.S. shipping industry, United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS) and FedEx Corp. (FDX) are squaring off on another front: the growing world of online printing.

UPS is rolling out marketing Monday to highlight a push into Web-based printing, in which clients can send documents such as business presentations to UPS retail stores via the Internet to have printed copies made. FedEx already offers online printing at its FedEx Office/Kinko’s locations.

The competing retail chains, acquired by the two shipping companies earlier this decade, serve small businesses and executives who frequently travel. In addition to shipping packages and documents, the more than 6,000 stores combined offer services such as packaging, photocopying, printing business cards and notarizing signatures.

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Nonprofit organizations seeking to harness Facebook can get the most bang for their buck by using fan pages in addition to groups, streamlining their app usage and livening things up, one of its marketing execs said Friday.

Pages operate like profiles for organizations or businesses, can only be created by official representatives and can add applications, while groups are unofficial and can be created by any user. Relying on groups, which have been available longer, is one of the biggest mistakes nonprofits make, said Randi Zuckerberg, who works on marketing and nonprofit initiatives and is co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister. “You lose a lot of the incredible viral power.”

Because fan pages are official, it’s also easier for Facebook to take down fake ones, she said, as opposed to groups, which can be run by enthusiasts.

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Apple’s (AAPL) control issues have been a key ingredient in its success. CEO Steve Jobs is fond of pointing out that Apple’s hands-on approach to crafting both hardware and software has led to such breakthrough products as the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone–and it’s fair to say the attention to detail hasn’t hurt Apple’s marketing, either.

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Social media may seem, at times, to be a flurry of meaningless updates and marketing schemes, but researchers are figuring out how the interaction it spurs can stimulate brain activity.

“We’ve evolved to interact with the world,” said Patricia Kuhl, a University of Washington professor and co-author of a recent study on social learning. “We did not evolve to lie in front of a flat screen and just watch it,” even if what it’s spewing at us is informative or entertaining. One reason for this is that the social part of the brain affects which computational skills a person picks up.

Take a recent study, which showed how social interaction plays into learning languages. Japanese-speaking students took English lessons through an interactive and self-monitored computer program.

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TiVo (TIVO) this morning announced a multi-part deal with Best Buy (BBY) that includes the development of a special version of the TiVo player that would include specialized content–oh, okay, advertising–from the electronics retailer.

Or as the release puts it: “Best Buy intends to utilize TiVo’s robust platform to deliver educational and marketing messages directly to consumers.”

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Comedian Jim Gaffigan has a suggestion for preparing a Hot Pockets frozen entrée: “Take out of package. Place directly in toilet.” Gaffigan is not a big fan of Hot Pockets.

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While Twitter can be about the mundane details of people’s lives, for the most part, it’s about people connecting with others who have similar interests. Since I tend to follow people who are also interested in marketing and social media, it is a great way to share information on topics relevant to us.

It has also allowed me to make more meaningful connections.

With traditional networking, someone I know introduces me to someone they think I should talk to. I then email or call that person and set up a time to get together for coffee. We meet, and talk about their work, what I’m looking for, any opportunities they know of, other people they think I should talk to and any advice they have for me. I get home and send them a thank you note, and usually connect with them on LinkedIn. And, that’s it. We go our separate ways. They go back into their life, and may remember me, but within a couple of months, I have most likely slipped into the depths of their memory.

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First, a bit of a prelude. Probably 15 years ago, I was talking to someone who did marketing for a high-end bike manufacturer. He was telling me about the amount of money the company was spending to really understand what their core customers (and their competitors’ core customers) were looking for in a bike…what did they really, really want? I pointed him to a USENET group formed and populated by people passionate about bikes. “They are doing your research for you,” I said. My point was that technology now allowed people who were passionate about a product or category to form communities to explore and communicate about that love–and that smart companies should be looking to technology to better understand that bleeding-edge customer.

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The path from engineering to marketing is usually not a straight line. Often there can be many stops along the way, as a product goes from idea to a spec to prototype release build, through the quality assurance process, and eventually general availability to the marketplace.

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After a decade of experimentation, companies have yet to find a reliable way to burnish their brands online. Research shows barely more than one in 1,000 people click on banner ads. What’s more, they rarely hang around long enough to absorb a brand message.

Former Madison Avenue hotshot Matt Freeman aims to change all that. Freeman’s company, Betawave, is developing ways to boost visitor “engagement” and plans to charge advertisers not just by each click or view but also by people’s attentiveness. The concept is untested, but it has generated excitement. Several venture capital shops in December put $22.5 million into Betawave. “Matt’s ahead of the curve,” says Sean Finnegan, chief digital officer at Starcom MediaVest, which buys ads for Coca-Cola (KO), Procter & Gamble (PG), Nintendo, and others.

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Anyone can create a Facebook group and make it appear to be something it’s not. Brad J. Ward reminded admissions officials about that simple fact on Thursday after examining hundreds of “Class of 2013” groups that have popped up on the popular social-networking site. Typically, students who plan to enroll at a particular college create such groups to start communicating with their future classmates. Some colleges establish the groups or encourage admitted students to do so. But Mr. Ward, coordinator for electronic communication in Butler University’s admissions office, found that dozens of the 2013 Facebook groups had been created–or were being maintained–by the same handful of people. Who were they?

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Online advertisers are not lacking in choices: They can display their ads in any color, on any site, with any message, to any audience, with any image. Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients’ online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.

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