Facebook has begun a roll-out of ads to the news feed today, but the units are not called Sponsored Stories – as some anticipated. Instead, they will labeled “Featured” to distinguish them from earned media messaging that users sometimes see.

Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson, explains the terminology.

“Since people can see marketing messages from both Pages they have and have not Liked elsewhere on Facebook, we want to make it clear that marketers can only pay for stories to be featured in your News Feed if you have explicitly liked the Page,” Ta said. “And because you are always connected to your friends, we are also labeling stories from your friends that have been paid to be featured in your News Feed as ‘featured’ to keep things consistent.”

You can see an example of the new Ads above. For the above ad to appear in your News Feed, two things need to happen. First, you must have already Liked the Ben & Jerry’s Facebook Page, or one of your friends must have interacted with the Ben & Jerry’s Page. Second, Ben & Jerry must have chosen to have the ad promoted to users who have Liked its Page.

Facebook has updated its Help Center with information about the new featured stories. Facebook also lets users know they can click “hide” to remove individual stories, limit the volume of stories by subscribing to “only important posts” or unfriend the person or unlike the page that generated the story.

Carolyn Everson, vice president of global advertising sales and trade marketing for Microsoft, is leaving the company after just seven months. Everson was responsible for the multibillion dollar ad campaign for the launch of the Bing search engine.

Facebook confirmed Everson’s hiring yesterday, and noted that she will report to a former Google employee, David Fischer, Facebook’s vice president of advertising and global operations.

This move may make things a little awkward since Microsoft invested over 240 Million in Facbook back in 2007. Facebook released the following statement:

“Microsoft was one of our earliest partners and is still one of our most valued. We have a long and strong relationship that includes search ads on our site, a social layer on Bing search results, and a deep and popular integration with Xbox. They are a leader when it comes to unlocking the power of social for their already popular products and services. We look forward to continuing to expand our relationship with them.”