This is post, mostly, about the state of mind for doing effective Analytics work.

Have noticed, that, what I consider to be my best work, often gets done when I can afford to be playful with Analytics and when there’s room to focus vs. Being Diagnostic.

It’s almost as if, being present, mindful, alert, yet relaxed, at the very same moment, is that optimal “zone” from which to operate out of.

Steps to reach that place might be different for each person; tried to mentally note what did it for me.

Analytics work can often be full of dry and tedious, diagnostic details and procedures, and I suspect, the very nature of Analytics might interfear with creativity; but in some cases, it enhances it.

One case would be doing diagnostic tasks to learn how campaigns are set up and run, how a business works. The detail work can be a grounding mechinism, after a while the details gets internalized, freeing energy up to be creative with.

What I am finding is there needs to be a systematic, diagnostic underpinning to Analytics but we also need move past that, think creatively, to come up with something important, almost as if it was seen for the first time.

I guess that’s why I like watching Monk, or earlier, Colombo; a lot of Analytics is detective work, but the best detectives are creative thinkers, who use their grounding in diagnostics to take them to a new insight, new level.

That’s what I strive for, anyway.

Ever look at an empty apartment or house?

Webmetricsguru.com reminds me of an empty apartment that I’m moving into – with all my stuff (ie: RSS Feed, New Template, Google Analytics, Graphics, and not even all my posts loaded in – after all – I wrote more than 3000 in the 2.6 years I had it at KMM).

I have a designer I’ve hired to come up with a really “different” template – for this blog – I’ve given her my vision and now I’ll wait to see what she comes up with.

And there will be ads running here too, but my ideas of that are to use much more targeted advertising than before, and go right after the post itself – I’d like to go with Buzzlogic and perhaps, AdRoll, for our new Blog Network.

And I’ll be at Search Engine Strategies next week – and I’m hoping to get the Google Penalty that was applied to the entire Know More Media Blog Network – it seemed unfair when it was inflicted last January – though I was held captive by Know More Media’s advertising decisions with penalized me, and the rest of the bloggers, even though we had nothing much to do with why the penalty was applied.

Anyway, that’s in the past.

Be patient for another couple of days while we get Webmetricsguru.com up to date and re-invigorated – with a new look and feel.

marshall sponder

Time to move on to a new and much better opportunity – and starting 2008 off well, I'm leaving IBM for a new opportunity at Monster.com where, among other things, I'll be working closely with the Visual Sciences platform.  Should be fun!

I'm excited and grinning.

One of the first things I did, after making some calls yesterday, was have a drink with Ancient Shriner (Code4Software.com's Jared Freedman) in Second Life, at one of the houses he's built – that's wine I'm having – in case you can't tell.  I'm the avatar on the left, Jared is on the right.