In an excellent blog post this week, Brian Solis outlined his predictions for the role of a marketer in 2010. Out of eight high-level points, he made four that seemed particularly relevant to the building of strategy in a campaign:

- Listen to and engage customers one to one

- Build relationships and not campaigns

- Create experiences not impressions

- Earn media and not buy it

What he's talking about here is a set of things I hear often. Listening. Engagement. Relationships. Experiences. I'd lump these under "feelings", something that doesn't mesh well with the traditional concept of measurement and ROI.

Measuring Intangibles

Just yesterday, Facebook rolled out some changes to Fan Pages that give a helpful boost to our effort to measure these intangible feelings. Fan Page administrators will now be able to get numbers on impressions for status updates. This means that we can gauge how many people see the information placed on a page through their own news stream; it no longer requires a user to come directly to the page.

Facebook also gives us a handy impressions-to-interactions ratio which shows up as a feedback percentage.

What does this mean?

As astutely noted by our own Wendy Hofstetter, this relatively simple change could have some big impact:

- Reporting numbers on Facebook will be more accurate than the standard "pageviews" statistics previously provided.

- We can more easily compare the return on Facebook versus other more traditional media by calculating a CPM (cost-per-thousand). Most companies use CPM as a way to gauge how expensive their advertising is (that's how TV, outdoor, Radio, Magazines, etc. are purchased).

- We can begin testing what time of day is best for Facebook engagement.

- We can understand what kinds of posts (videos, quotes, etc.) get the most engagement.

Why is this important?

Brian Solis had another point in that list: Look beyond the quantity of friends, page visits, eyeballs, readers, and viewers to measure changes in consumer attitude and intent.

Facebook allows brands to create meaningful interactions with consumers. At Room 214, Facebook allows us to keep our clients' fans updated with relevant information and content that the fans wouldn't necessarily find otherwise. We can solicit feedback, engage in direct conversation and create content that, if worthy, can be shared over and over again by interested parties.

That being said, a bottom line is a bottom line. Our clients need to understand how their money is being used. And we need to continue to interact with consumers in ways that produce repeat engagement, support, sharing, and evangelism. This new feature from Facebook gets us closer to creating relationships that we can quantify. It also helps us better understand what content isn't interesting; we can then refine our strategy and provide our loyal fans with things they'd prefer to hear, see and discuss.

In this podcast, we discuss:

1. Mainstream media's need to adopt social media, and Daniel Honigman's recognition of the touch points missing from traditional media and news organizations.

2. The Chicago Tribune's successful use of "Colonel Tribune" as the social media persona used to better reach people in the online social space.

3. The need for reporters to think of themselves as publishers as bloggers do, why news organizations who blog need to link to other bloggers and show thanks for links.

4. Success and strategy considerations with Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and social bookmarking in general (reference made to Brett Boarders from Copy Brighter.com)

5. A brief mention of top tools used to build reputation, including Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin (reference The Conversation diagram created by Brian Solis)

6. Daniel Honigman's new blog, OldMediaNewTricks.com

Note: Kudos to Tribune Interactive for employing a forward thinker in the social media space like Daniel Honigman. Check out Daniel's new blog or follow him on Twitter at dan360man