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Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled a new metric for evaluating advertising campaigns on Facebook, called "cost per action" (CPA). Now, advertisers can pay not just for impressions or click-throughs, but for specific actions they want consumers to perform once they've seen an ad — including becoming a fan of a Page. For example, an advertiser could specify it is willing to pay $2.00 for a "Like" — that is, for a new fan on its company or product Page — and only pay when the Page gets a new fan. Other actions include Offer claims and clicks on links to third-party sites.

a fan is worth an average of $174 to a company. But as the chart below shows, the value of a fan can differ widely across companies:

"Marketers should define the value of a fan based on how it impacts the key criteria that determines the success or failure of their business," says Kalehoff. Specifically, marketers should measure the spending habits of fans versus non-fans, to see if fans are more likely to make a purchase, make purchases at great amounts and/or purchase repeatedly. Advocacy — the probability of a customer recommending a product to others, and the probability of that recommendation to affect sales — is another key metric. Another area that is more difficult to measure is brand affinity — that is, the emotional draw that a customer feels towards a brand because of the relationship that develops between brands and fans over Facebook. If positive brand affinity tends to be a powerful sales indicator on other channels, it may be worth cultivating on Facebook, too.

When brands come to agencies for agile content development, the main criteria is usually that the content must be high quality, compelling, low-cost, high frequency, and quick-turnaround. But often their internal structure and processes aren’t yet optimized to embrace this type of approach. In agile content development, timing and efficiency is everything. Without it, there is no liftoff.

Brands can optimize themselves for agile content development by making internal adjustments that improve communication, the first of which should be to empower a small team to manage the process. This team should have the authority to secure and approve budgets, as well as weigh in creatively and strategically on content as it goes to market. Creating a nimble group that has real ownership of the process will make things more efficient and reduce the chances of unnecessary stress being put on your brand marketing team as a whole.

When strategy, creative, and production teams can sit side by side and collaborate fluidly, agile content is the by-product.

In China, he said, online branded content is "the only thing that makes sense in advertising." 

DiIanni said Chinese audiences want stories and "want to engage with content and social media." But he cautioned that "brands need to be flexible and open to new ideas" in content. Too often in his experience, he said, brands do not see the opportunity in some roles offered in content. 

Sirena Liu, founder and president of Filmworks China, an agency that also specializes in assembling content for brands, doesn't think the branded content in its most recent form will necessarily last forever. "The trend of mini-movies will continue to be popular for a while, but probably not for too long," Liu told brandchannel.

You click. You buy. An advertiser pays. In an over-simplified sense, that’s how desktop digital advertising works. That system doesn’t work as well on mobile, however, where an estimated 40% of clicks are accidents (or fraudulent) and advertisers are still wary of their value. Research firm eMarketer projects that advertisers will dedicate just 2% of their budgets to mobile advertising this year--even though customers are increasingly logging in through their mobile devices.

At Google and other companies that sell advertising, the golden question has become not how to get consumers to simply click more mobile ads, but how to measure effectiveness beyond the click--even if that means tracking offline actions or purchases made on another screen.

“There’s this incredibly new, incremental engagement point called ‘out and about’ or called ‘sitting on public transportation’ or called ‘at home on the couch in front of the TV' and these are places where we didn’t used to be connected,” Jason Spero, Google's head of mobile ads for the Americas, tells Fast Company.

Facebook's practice of scanning messages and counting links as likes isn’t a privacy issue. It's common knowledge that what users do online - even in so-called private messaging - is potentially public. Rather, Facebook's activity raises a credibility issue. It shows that the company is fudging the numbers when it comes to advertising.

“It's not in Facebook's best interest to proactively solve this problem," said Tom Corson-Knowles, an online marketer who consults with small-business owners on ways to promote products on social networks. "Facebook's revenue is directly proportionate to the number of pageviews the site gets, and banning one percent of [pageviews] will cost the company a lot of missed ad impressions."

brands invest $44 billion in content every year.

The modern-day marketer balances left- and right-brain thinking. They use SEO and technology as an enabler and distributor, using content marketing creativity to build holistic content and SEO programs that result in measurable business outcomes.

SEO and content strategies need to be aligned for optimal marketing performance, yet the costs and time associated with training and development can negatively impact productivity, scale and revenue. This catch 22 makes it difficult to achieve such levels of collaboration, and divergence remains.