Just over a week ago during lunch at the New Communication Forum, I had a great conversation with Tim Tozer from Radian6 (a social media monitoring service) about the real metrics that marketers are looking for and the increasingly common difficulty of finding metrics that are actually useful and offer actionable insights. Many people who have to contend with web analytics tools today will tell you that it is no longer an issue of having the technology available to measure things online, but rather the analytical ability to hone in on the metrics that really matter.

Some guy named Bob probably hates me. I don't know him and he doesn't know me ... but he's the unfortunate registrant of Bob.com and has used his first name for his email address. Yup, you guessed it - that makes his email address bob@bob.com. That also happens to be the email address that I have used for the past ten years to fill out forms that require an email address that I don't want to give. For more than a decade, Bob has been getting my junk email and to tell you a truth, I feel bad about it.

As someone passionate about travel and the travel industry, I pay a lot of attention to sites that are out there. Travel has long been an active industry online, whether you talk about people's behaviour with increasingly booking travel online, or the slate of review and opinion sites that let people share their opinions about travel destinations. From Yelp to Driftr to Dopplr there are new travel sites that let you do just about anything you want and they are all great ... yet none have quite found the right formula to harness the one thing that travel enthusiasts like me all have in common: a passion for talking about travel and sharing my experiences.

If last year's SXSW was Twitter's coming out party, this year it achieved utility status. A utility is something that is always on, and essential. To lose it would be to thrust yourself into the dark ages. Water, electricity, gas ... and Twitter. Sound like an exaggeration? Not for anyone who has spent the last few days watching the incessant live twittering at SXSW. Because not every reader is as tricked out in extreme geekdom as those at SXSW, here's a brief description of Twitter:

Last Thursday, I spent the day at my first event of 2008 called the Social Networking Conference (SNC) in Miami to present a session called "Secrets of Creating Talkability." The event kicks of a string of speaking appearances I will be making over the next few months as I start to get ready for my book launch in March.

Not everyone is a content creator. Open up any report of statistics on social media, and you will usually see some standard ratio of content consumers to content creators that typically ranges from 1 in 10, or less. This means, on average, that in most communities less than 10% of the individuals in that community are creating content. This post is about the biggest myth many people believe about the other 90%.

For those who are fans of Guy Kawasaki, there is a phenomenon he is fond of calling "Guy's golden touch." It is his own trademark reversal of a well known saying, where he likes to note that "everything that turns to gold is what Guy touches." One site that is definitely gold right now is Twitter, riding a wave since it's popularity at SXSW last year, the site steadily seems to be getting more and more users.

At every conference or tradeshow, you get a badge. I have a box full of them on my desk, an increasing number of them with the title of "Speaker" affixed beneath my name. I recently had a conversation with some colleagues about the importance of being a speaker at an event. Often, the most important benefit is not just the visibility of speaking, but the license that speaker tag gives you to have a conversation with other speakers. If you think about it, the badges at a conference are like a caste system. Your badge identifies which group you belong in and can often dictate how people embrace or shy away from a conversation with you.

CES 2008 - I spent this week at what is probably the largest tradeshow in the world. The sheer size of CES means that information overload is inevitable, and the consistent challenge for any exhibitor at a show like this is rising above the clutter. If you think about it, this challenge is no different from any other tradeshow or exhibition ... though CES is surely more difficult to stand out at than most. Throughout the show, there were a few vendors that did do something noteworthy to stand out. This post is about how they did it and some marketing lessons you can learn from their efforts.

CES 2008 - What happens in Vegas this week won't stay here for too long. If you have been watching or reading any media at all this week, you have seen all the rampant coverage of everything from CES. Being here at the epicenter of the hype has been an interesting experience. Think of it as a cross between a museum exhibit of never before seen artwork, and walking past storefront display windows on 5th Avenue.

Today is the day for new year's resolutions. For most people, this means the inevitable pledges to get healthy, lose weight, work less and spend more time with family. Like any good blogger, though, I have several social media resolutions for the new year. In no particular order, here are my three big ones:

I love lists and I love trend predictions. So a trend prediction list would be an obvious choice for my post today, on the last day of the year. Throughout the past week I have been reading lots of smart projections on what to expect for the year ahead. With all the discussion of microtrends, the evolution of how we consume media and highly useful recap lists of smart thinking from 2007, I thought I would take a different approach.

Do you have a Kindle yet? All the buzz about the Wii aside, the most lusted after gift this holiday season for media pros may just be Amazon's new digital content reader called the Kindle (which sold out within 5.5 hours upon first release a few weeks ago). The device may not have an Apple-esque level of sex appeal, but it does represent a huge shift in thinking that may just propel portable digital content and ebooks in particular to the kind of widespread adoption that digital music has already enjoyed.

This post is the continuation of a topic I started yesterday all about the right metrics to focus on and how many marketing teams may be using the wrong ones without realizing it. In Part I, I shared 10 meaningless metrics that brands should consider moving away from. Most of those metrics are either based on precedent (what brands have always measured) or ignorance (a lack of knowledge about other metrics to track). As a whole, the single word that defines the old view of metrics is to focus on impressions.

We all know marketers love metrics. Flashy award winning campaigns are great and celebrity spokespersons are always appealing, but most of the time we try to base judging the success of a campaign on hard and fast metrics. The only problem is, many times the metrics that marketers use to gauge success are wrong, inaccurate, incomplete or just plain useless. There are two main reasons this happens ... precedent and ignorance.

The author of one of the greatest blogs on the Internet announced a few weeks ago that he would be posting far less often. In a world where it seems that everyone (and their mom) is starting a blog for one reason or another, seeing one prominent and popular blogger decide to do it less often captured my attention, and it should capture yours too. The blogger I'm talking about, of course, is Scott Adams - creator of Dilbert. His blog serves up his signature wit in narrative form and offers his reasoned approach to highlighting stupidity in the world, both inside and outside of the workplace.

This is a post that I am guessing will get some fairly passionate responses on either side of the debate. Here's the question lots of people are asking today: where and how much does privacy really matter to you online? This is a critical question for 3 reasons:

My job is all about conversation. Having one with clients and peers, and helping them have one with their customers. To a degree, my own book is about conversations so this may seem like a strange observation coming from me ... but I don't see any point in publishing a video on YouTube and allowing comments.

There has been a firestorm of discussion lately after Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of the long tail recently "outed" all the PR professionals that had been contacting him with anonymous spam style "Dear Editor" communications.  On a day where he had more than 300 of these, he finally decided he had enough and fired off a post banning those PR folks from contacting him and adding him to his blocked sender list.