Never mind all the economic doom and gloom; the New York Times is thrilled with how its venture into social networking has gone.  A new memo notes some numbers that beat internal expectations, and should sound pretty impressive to outsiders, too.

The NYT’s relationship with Facebook goes back a ways; in September, we reported that a news quiz app was gathering quite a crowd.  This new memo, written by Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy and provided by Zachary M. Seward, focuses on a more recent and even bigger push.

 One Of Over 400,000 NYT Gifts

"On November 5, we ran what Facebook says is one of the most successful campaigns in its history," states Heekin-Canedy.  "From our perspective, the home page roadblock campaign was a great success, garnering us 4.3 times the value of our spend.  We reached 68.3 million individuals with our brand message.  We increased our number of fans more than three times in just 24 hours – from 49,000 to 164,000 – and in the process far exceeded our 2008 goal of 100,000 fans."

Heekin-Canedy also points out, "More than 400,000 New York Times ‘gifts’ were given by Facebook users to their friends.  Possibly the greatest success of this campaign, however, is that our fans continue to rapidly grow (181,000+ fans as of November 19 ) into a powerful, free word-of-mouth network that we will leverage for future marketing messages."

Now, Heekin-Canedy may be acting overly optimistic; it’s hard to say what sort of role the NYT brand name played compared to Facebook or the presidential election.  His paper’s success is hard to deny, however, and it may well drive more companies to give Facebook campaigns a shot in the quarter ahead.