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.

Standing out for your online news offering is rapidly becoming almost impossible for publishers.  After all, as we each get smarter about using RSS feeds to only get the content we want, the old "news portal" sites of several years ago are becoming less and less important. 

When it comes to social media tools, most are not gender specific.  That's a good thing, as it means they can be uniformly useful for everyone, but it's a sign of evolution when more specifically targeted sites start to appear.  It happened with websites and now the same seems to be happening with several new interesting social media tools popping up targeted at women. 

The New York Times asks, “Should Yahoo stop trying to beat Google at its own game?” and VC Jim Breyer says, “They should take a hard look at the search business, and it may well be the right time to stop trying to out-Google Google.” Wow, that sounds awfully familiar — probably just a coincidence. In any case, the Times and others are reporting some radical notions that had been floating around Yahoo prior to Semel’s stepping down as CEO — acquiring MySpace from News Corp in exchange for a 25% stake in Yahoo and conceding search to Google.

In all the coverage of Terry Semel’s stepping down as Yahoo CEO to be replaced by founder Jerry Yang, there’s a standard reference to Yahoo’s failure to beat Google — and the implication that perhaps Yahoo can never beat Google. The main reason way Yahoo has lagged Google is that Yahoo has been trying to beat Google at its own game:

This past weekend I was moderating a panel at CommunityNext, a smart event focused on everything about online communities coordinated by Noah Kagan.  The event was a fun gathering of extremely smart folks from some of the hottest online communities today - and panelists/speakers shared many great thoughts on topics ranging from how to be more awesome, to the genesis behind HotorNot.com.  Through the day, I took several notes and during the flight back to the east coast, started to aggregate the day into some central lessons about online communities gained from listening to many of the speakers, as well as looking at what is making many of the sites from attendees stand out.  Here's my list of 10 lessons that I took away from the event, as well as a few great sites that are worth visiting for further exploration:

As the year comes to a close, it's time to look forwards to next year and what are shaping up to be some key trends for marketers to track through the year.  To add to the already vibrant discussion of trends to pay attention to, here is my stab at a few top marketing trends that I will be watching in the new year (in no particular order):