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.

1. Simple ad copy split testing by having a control ad and coming up with a new ad to beat the control in terms of conversions. Don't forget to use ad text with limited time special offers, this will really set you apart from the set and forgetters.
   
   
2. Pause or delete keywords that drive a lot of clicks (cost) but do not convert, or keywords with a ton of impressions but no clicks. This will help improve your cost/conversion, drive more targeted traffic, and increase your quality score.
   
   
3. Bid price optimization to achieve your target ad positioning - increase the bid price on keywords with a good conversion rate and low cost per conversion and decrease the bid prices on keywords with a very high cost/conversion.
   
   
4. Add additional negative keywords (For example, if you sell bicycles but do not rent or have reviews/comparisons then it would be a good idea to add "rent", "review" and all variations to your negative keyword list).
   
   
5. Exclude web sites on the content network (adsense ads matched to a sites content) that are driving clicks but not converting. There can be a lot of worthless sites out there, but trust me, you will find some hidden gems with excellent ROI. (Google and Yahoo offer this feature).
   
   
6. Refine geo-targeting by adding or excluding certain regions. Use your site analytics and determine where the highest quality traffic is coming from and target that traffic with specific offers and regional ad copy.
   
   
7. Enable ad scheduling and choose what days of the week and what hours of the day you want your ads to run. For example, a company like Victoria Secrets may find their ROI decrease significantly after 10pm due to a different type of "visitor".

So pick a few items weekly from the above list and make it happen. Leave set and forget for cruise control, auto-pilot and cooking.