I was thinking about the idea of things coming full circle – i.e.: remakes of old movies (that often turn out not to be as good as the original), fashion styles that reoccur and website ideas that come back into vogue after a time.   Like it’s said that good ideas aren’t ever used up (I don’t know where that is said, exactly) – it makes sense that certain ideas would be tried again.

The insight – from a Social Media Monitoring standpoint – is the same conversations, are more or less, repeating – and because they are defined – with the right concept – which i’m laying out here – you can monitor for them.  Read the rest of my post and keep that in mind.  Sometime soon, I will show my readers examples of what follows.

One idea that got tried again was Ask.com – which now looks like it’s going back to it’s origins as a question and answer Search Engine – the same Jeeves that used to be your butler now wants to again, be your butler – but a more intelligent one – a few have written about it today including Greg Sterling in Search Engine Land.  I’ll be playing with the service, along with it’s vast historical database of questions shortly.

Another thing that seems to be back in the news – or being redone is the Pentagon Papers – instead they’re now Mr. Obama’s Pentagon Papers of the war in Afghanistan.  Like before,  war needs a propaganda machine but also has others who feel the truth isn’t being told (or being told fairly) and suddenly – a “leak” appears, like it just did.   It’s not like anything here was that much a surprise – you expect governments to not tell the truth – so that idea came back into vogue.

Yet another idea that seems to keep coming back and then going away is making websites mobile – I haven’t done it to my site yet but played with a few programs to show me what webmetricsguru.com would look like as a mobile site and it was awful – though Robin Good’s article on the subject was fantastic – I just didn’t get results I liked and doing it right would cost more than I want to spend, judging from the entrants in the article.

Oh yeah, then there’s the 1000 buck wing bolt –  saw a story about that in the New York Times yesterday but I can’t find it today – same idea that cost overruns are caused by military contractors who are charging obscene abouts of money for small things that are next to worthless, a bolt or nut.

Then there’s WebRoot – I had it back in 2000 –  I remember subscribing to it for some thing related to security (unless I have the company mixed up with another of a similar name) and now they have come out with a new Security as A Service offering that is again, coming full circle, but on a higher level, of what they initially offered way back when.  Funny, one of the new “threats” is “mobile computing” – which didn’t exist, for the most part, 10 years ago – at least, not as it does now.

Getting stuff done that gets results is also coming back – except now we’re talking about Twitter – also failing – fail big – and the fastest way to respond online is Twitter.  With small business it’s day to day stuff vs. looking towards the future – with big companies it’s more about getting through layers of bureaucracy.  Here, Brian Eisenberg and Dr. Ralph Wilson talk about it ( I know Brian fairly well and have met Ralph Wilson once in San Jose at SES – both have been strong web presences to me over the last decade)

Yet, except for Twitter – nothing really is new about what was said in the video – but it rings true – and it makes me feel good just watching it.

Then again, Chris Brogan brought up a familiar image – that of the Painter in a post about what to focus on – keeping your audience happy or getting what you need to get done, done.

Reading past the lines I got the feeling Chris was talking about himself – focus on what is going to work (and make money – and pay the rent) vs. spending a lot of time keeping spectators happy but ultimately, not making a sustainable living.  Chris challenges us all to look at our own “windows”.  Yeah, I need to look at mine – and I am.

Know about all the jobs going overseas?  Well, that idea came back except this time, someone went overseas to look for a job cause they could not find one here.

… When Andrew Dana Hudson found himself unemployed (along with most of his graduating class) even after sending out 500+ resumes, he decided that sponging off his parents in St Louis wasn’t much of a plan. So he flew to India, where he traded his English proofreading skills with a local newspaper for room and board, and he lives modestly but well on about $10/wee

So what I’ve been seeing is a lot ideas coming full circle the last few days – tell me what you think.

I worked on the analytics of a clients’ site most of today; we did a lot of Google Analytics enablement to track visitors to this popular restaurant site in New York.  We have most of what we want to track handled by virtual pageviews and an event tracking script – but one thing I can’t directly control is how the site is used, or not used; that’s true of any site/project.

For example, all the analytics enablement work won’t tell us much about current or future marketing campaigns if the campaigns bypass the website.   The only way Google Analytics (or any analytics knows about anything) is when people visit a site enabled with tracking code, etc.  Google Analytics can pick up Social Media traffic (I have a social media traffic filter set up I’ve used on a variety of profiles) – but if, in designing and executing campaigns, we don’t design them to so they interact with the website (where the tracking code is) at key points – I don’t see how Google Analytics will tell anyone much about the campaign – or anything about it.

So … when people say … “show me the ROI” – I invested “X” in this program – show me the “Y” of it  …..  and nothing much of what they did had anything to do with the website (say, we did a WOM campaign and got 100 more people to visit one of the restaurant locations and spend “Z” amount of money – nothing of that has anything to do with the Analytics  enablement of the website – unless we make it about that … that’s right – unless we design programs to use the analytics tracking we set up … we might as well forget about setting it up in the first place – because it’s not going to tell us much.

So, I’d suggest – figure our your goals – then outline your strategies – and write down the campaigns and tactics that fall under the strategies  … do any of them go through the website you just enabled?  If not – collect 0.   On the other hand, having a well enabled site for site analytics – it doesn’t take all that much to set up landing pages and design campaigns and tactics that make people use those pages.

Or maybe we just make the process “fun” – read Beth Kantor’s post on How To Make Social Media Experiments Fun!  There’s also a post on What Do We Really Mean By Art? that I need to read.

And while we’re at it – in this case I noticed one very interesting feature that Google Analytics provided.

Mobile traffic increased by 52% over the last 100 days or so compared to the previous 100 days; interesting because even if you can’t get everything to run through a website – you can probably get it to run though a mobile site since just about everyone has a mobile device and most are created to run some level of browsing activity.

Getting to my journal – read It’s Not About Influence, It’s About Trust by Jason Falls which I thought was quite a good post.  In it Jason makes a point that …

… The difference in influence and trust is the difference in quantity and quality. Perez Hilton can get you a lot of eyeballs, but are they the right eyeballs and will they do anything with your information? Louis Gray won’t get you a lot of eyeballs, in comparison, but the ones he gets are golden. He gets them because his audience trusts him.

I’m more interested in Trust than Influence, which you can’t put in a can.

But you can put a sandwich in a can and make it last a year, so I’m told – it’s called a Candwich.

Trying to wrap my head around the idea – can’t say I’m wild about it – it’s one thing to put a sandwich in a can, but would you really want to eat it after a year if you had a choice?   I suppose, if I’m desperate…..

Did you realize Social Media might help people with Social Anxieties – see Can Social Media Help with Social Anxiety Disorder?

….We could even speculate that perhaps, one of the many reasons Social Media has become so popular is due to the massive amount of people plagued by this disorder. Besides its convenience and global reach, Social Media can also play an important role to help heal those who suffer from the silence of this all too common turmoil.

There’s also a nice info-graphic here.

As alluded to last week, I’m formally announcing  I was invited to speak (and accepted) at the next Communications on The Top Forum of Top Managers on February 17th, 18th 2011 in Davos, Switzerland.

Last week I mentioned

….. new Communications on the Top conference in mid February, 2011; the details are still being worked out.

( I always wanted to go to Davos for the WEF but must have somehow dreamed up Davos after the WEF – just as well, from what I heard the global elite are as clueless about where the world is going as the rest of us and Jeff Jarvis’s accounts from the WEF in Davos and Dubai the last two years strongly supports that). Interestingly, one of the first things  the Keynote presentation at the Communications on the Top will cover is the feedback from the 2011 WEF.

This week, with the first batch of speakers for next years’ conference being announced it hit home ….. details of my presentation topic are still being worked out – you can see some of the people who’ll be joining me in Davos next year (and I hope some of my readers are among those who attend).  On the Top happens a few weeks after the WEF -

Ok, so here’s the program for next years conference in Davos – I’m listed in the program for the first day … EXCITED!!

Forum Program 2011 – Draft Version

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