Chocolate Cubed

As 2008 comes to a close everyone is talking about what is next.  What is going to define 2009?  Is it going to be a new widget?  a new phone? Will Apple come out with a new device that is all the rage?  Will Dell win back its share of the laptop market?  Is Obama going to change the world?  The fact that everyone is talking about it and is excited about something new is exciting in and of itself.  To me, this means our creativity is firing and innovation is abound. 

As a marketer, I read David Mullen’s 5 PR Predictions and think he has some great points.  I want to focus on his point about measuring people.  I agree with David that we will start measuring people instead of impressions, but I think it will go a lot further than that.  I don’t think the economy is turning around so quickly, which will cause companies to be very “bottom line centric”.  Companies will want to show how their investment in Web 2.0 has paid off and that will mean qualifying the active users/visitors.  It will mean developing ways to report how effective social networking tools are, like managing a twitter account.  Yes, twitter allows the company to talk to it’s customers one-to-one, but did that person buy something?  Did they click on an ad?  Did they refer someone?  How long did the cycle take? 

I think 2009 is going to be the year of the number crunchers and web analysts.  Maybe it is time to take a statistics refresher course.

Bob Herbert wrote an interesting op-ed piece this morning in the NY Times titled “Stop Being Stupid“.  Bob credits Madoff for saying that he paid investors with “money that wasn’t there”.  The piece ends by saying that we need to go into serious debt to jump start our economy and that we need to start investing in world-class infrastructure.  

I completely agree that the U.S. and the American people need to start watching the dollars they spend and stop spending money that isn’t there. I agree that we all need to tighten our belts and stop “the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods”, but where is the incentive for innovation?  Not only do we need to educate, feed and provide health care for the country, but we need something to aspire to.  Kennedy put us on the Moon without knowing the science.  What is the next frontier?  Artificially Intelligent robots in every home?  Mars?  Flying Cars?  What is America’s dream?  Once we figure that out, we will be on the road to recovery.

Since I came back from vacation in September, I have had a very hard time getting back into blogging.  I have taken up twitter in the meantime, which has occupied more time than I ever imagined, but blogging and micro-blogging are very different.  Until now, every time I blogged I felt that I needed to have a position and a wel thought out argument about an article I read, a site I saw or an idea that I wanted to rant about.  I am starting to think that I was very wrong and didn’t truly get the idea of blogging, which is why I found it so hard to write something every week.

I now think that blogging is about being part of the conversation: the conversation of the web.   It should be an extension of what I micro-blog about and give me and my followers a larger space to converse.

Any thoughts?