• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 7, 2011

Rocket Fuel will release technology Monday that helps marketers understand the value of Facebook ad campaigns as a stand-alone strategy or when integrating the medium with mobile, display and search. Social Booster for Facebook automates creation, monitoring and management through intelligent bidding, multivariate creative testing, segmentation, automated optimization, and cross-channel analytics. The data includes first- and third-party, social, Web, weather, search, retargeting, and more. 

The platform optimizes campaigns every 10 minutes. It can build mass-scale audiences by understanding how the smaller segments -- micro-segments -- operate, according to Richard Frankel, Rocket Fuel president and cofounder. "If you build lots of them, you can build super-scalable media for major brands to better understand in greater amount of detail how consumers interact with brands," he said.

The age of audience buying is over, replaced by micro-segments, Frankel said. Rather than treating 20 million people as men ages 25 to 34, break down the massive segment into smaller bits -- for example, 26-year-old single men who live in Wichita and buy electronics. The challenge is that to make it work for a big marketer you need many, he said.

Traditionally that has been challenging, because marketers historically managed these segments with spreadsheets. Managing 100,000 micro-segments manually becomes impossible. Building an audience in Facebook becomes managing consumers in micro-segments. This segmentation approach aims to make targeting in Facebook more successful and profitable.

Social media and the expectation that consumer data will explode in the coming year remain the two technology areas that CMOs worldwide are least prepared for, but most committed to invest in, according to eMarketer. The research firm points to a study from IBM that shows marketers will continue to use customer data to help them better reach unique audience segments.

The IBM research states that 61% of CMOs said they use customer data for segmentation and targeting. In the next three to five years, 82% of CMOs surveyed worldwide will increase their technology investment in social media, and 81% plan to focus on customer analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.