It used to be that technological advance meant faster, better quality and cheaper. But today’s consumer under pressure to save money, are increasingly flocking to low cost netbooks as they are usually “good enough” to accomplish everyday tasks. While the high-end power users and gamers will always crave better video cards, faster RAM and system buses, computer hardware has progressed to a point where anything more is overkill. Little wonder the netbook market is growing like weeds.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this.

Back in 1997, the MP3 format came to prominence that took the music industry to a new and very uncomfortable place. While audiophiles and industry pundits poo-poo’d the format for its lossy fidelity, they were completely missing the point — given a decent encoding bitrate, MP3′s were “good enough” for the vast majority of the population. What they lost in quality was gained in convenience, portability and flexibility that the format provides.

Now that we’ve seen the “good enough” effect in technology, I suspect we’re going to start seeing that principle applied to business thinking. We’re already seeing it in software development methodologies, where iterative process and rapid prototyping trade rigor for speed. Getting something out the door quicker and into the market helps validate the concept and clues for future direction. Ryan Jacoby’s ideas about “time to first feedback,” demonstrates this concept deeper. After a few quick-turn Piece together enough clues and you’ll know where to go next.

I was recently interviewed by the New York Times about “smartphone etiquette” in this day and age. The main question was whether or not I thought it was acceptable to type away in meetings. As you might imagine, I had an opinion on this and one of my observations made the cut in the published article. Here’s the article:

Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners

At various points in my career, I’ve worked with various marketers who all dream of closed loop marketing, where they can account for the direct impact of their efforts on sales. If sales is like an art and science and marketing is much the same way. These days, everyone wants it to be more like the latter, with more predictable and demonstrable results.

In a previous role, I worked at a demand generation software company that helped companies market their wares and track how effective their campaigns were. Besides email and microsite campaigns, they had a pretty cool feature that tracked a user’s behavior on a website. What separates this from your typical analytics program, was its ability to provide very detailed tracking on a per-user level and if the user clicked through to your site via email, we’d even know exactly who it was, how often they visited the site and what they did there. It was the online equivalent of keeping an eye on people in your retail store – what products they picked up, what labels they were reading, which sales people they spoke with and what items they were thinking of buying. The software had the ability to aggregate all of these activities automatically and rate the quality of these web-based leads depending on what you deemed important. For instance, if a user came to a site through an email campaign, clicked through to the site but then left, that person would rank pretty low. But if another user clicked through, visited a few times, downloaded a whitepaper and signed up for a webinar or demonstration, that person would rank quite highly. The lead scoring program would notify sales people who performed a certain number of these valuable activities and if the user did enough of them, he or she would be considered a lead and thus worthy of a follow up email or invitation to an event. For companies that want to allocate their sales resources strategically, this is a great time saver because it helps separate the tire kickers from the true spenders. It also gives insight into which companies might be interested in your own company.

More recently, I’ve been looking into linking behavior with business results. Web analytics has certainly come a long way from the days of downloading huge log files and parsing them into your desktop software that made pretty generic charts and graphs. I would say the capabilities of companies like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics has come a long way since then. Our ability to track activity and visualize data is amazing. We can even understand which web pages are putting in the most contribution to conversion, a term I first learned about in accounting class. But when it comes to inferring user intent, the picture becomes less clear. For instance, I can know what % of visitors ultimately end up converting, but what are the activities that are required to make that leap? And what if the leap requires visiting other sites that you can’t track or analyze?

That’s the next step that so far, few if any companies have been able to take. Here are a couple of scenarios:

• A site visitor is about to sign up for your service or buy something online but wants to read a third party review before committing. They leave, visit any number of sites from Amazon, Yelp, Epinions etc. and then sometimes come back to buy.

• Someone visits your site via search and decides to spend time there. Next, the user searches for your brand to get near real-time commentary on Twitter before coming back to sign up for a trial.

See what’s happening? Just like in real life, people are increasingly gathering information elsewhere particularly on 3rd party sites. But for a marketer, how do you quantify the value of these interactions not happening on your site? How do you score leads happening out in the blogosphere, forums or Twitter? As we got closer to closing the loop, it opens up and gets even broader and even more complex than before. So what’s a marketer to do? Ideally, there would be a super tracking cookie that could send back data on sites users visit, but privacy concerns don’t make it feasible. Here’s some general thoughts on alternatives:

• Monitor the social space and get a pulse on the quantity, tone and influence key sites/destinations have on your customers. There are tons of tools that can help you do this, including Radian6, TruCast, Cymfony and others.
• Get a baseline understanding of your brand’s chatter and draw correlations between volume and tone of discussion with product releases or announcements.
• Segment this incoming traffic from social sites and compare with direct site traffic, search engine and campaign traffic. This will give you an idea of what impact the social sites have in comparison. It’s not perfect, but it’s a start and right now, it’s more art than science.
• Keep at it. Marketing is a constant evolution, so the more you can observe, the better you can refine and the better you can deliver to your customers.

A little lighter fare for this weekend. For people like me who are into their mobile devices, their selection of apps reveals a bit about their personality. I used to get excited to try out new apps, which come out daily. But now, figuring out what screen to put them on stresses me out!

There are now over 25,000 iPhone apps available in the iTunes Store but the iPhone has slots for 148 applications, or 9 screens full of apps. Even if you bought all 25,000 at a cost of US$71,442, many are pointless (Bubblewrap anyone?) And until Apple provides an easy way to manage them, except manually dragging icons around from screen to screen, I’ve become less inclined to experiment with potentially time-sucking apps. Of the 7 screens of apps I have, I’d say screen 2 is by far the most heavily used one. I think I use most of these everyday and some several times a day. My recent post on juggling priorities and availability of various applications on the iPhone help narrow things down to just the essentials above.

Looking at my most heavily used screen, the top row shows that I am a news junkie. Yup, guilty as charged. You might wonder why I have both the NY Times and USA Today apps  and for good reason. The NY Times app until very recently, was pretty crappy and unreliable so I used USA Today as it is much stabler and faster. Plus it has more sharing features, like sending URL’s to text messages or Twitter.

Row 2 tells you that I’m rather food-obsessed with 4 dining apps in the second row, but these are just the tip of the iceberg! I have a whole other screen chock-full of other food-related apps, including one specifically for espresso drinks! OK, enough about that.

The third row is where things get ultra practical — subway schedule/map, flight tracking tool, note taking app and weather. Row 4 is about socializing, from instant messaging to microblogging to full-on blogging. You know, gotta have various ways to kill time in airports, traffic or boring meetings. Not like that ever happens to you now, does it? Maybe I should use that time to figure out what applications to download next.

Email > Twitter > Facebook > Breakfast > RSS (on the go)

A few years ago, my email was the last thing I looked at before going to bed and the first thing I did when I woke up, often during breakfast. Fast forward to the present and now a bunch of “news” compete for my attention: email, RSS feeds, news sites, Twitter and Facebook updates and so on. Because the time-space continuum isn’t changing and I still need to rush out the door to work, there’s less and less time to cram all of this reading in.

As a result, the stuff that I actually read becomes shorter and shorter. While email is still my top priority as it probably is for many others, my priorities have shifted. I find I am more efficient when I compartmentalize my attention. It used to be that I’d login to Facebook on my computer but now, I simply scan status updates on my mobile. I used to catch up on RSS feeds through Google Reader, but now, I refresh them on the mobile and read them cached on the train to work. Most recently, I’m finding Twitter gaining in the attention competition. If one is judicious about who to follow, I believe it’s possible to get a timely pulse of what’s going on at a glance because the 140 character limit enforces efficiency and blends nicely with my morning caffeine spike. I am sure a couple of years from now, there will be something new that will shake things up.

What does your morning routine look like today?