Warning: This post may make you extremely uncomfortable. Read at your own risk.

Today, there is virtually no reason not to have your pulse on the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Data abounds, and to even the most casual business owner, this data can open up keen insights into where your marketing time and money is working for you, and where it is not.

To illustrate, I want to describe a strategy we are deploying on a web site right now, and this approach is saving us hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars normally wasted in the startup phase of any business model. The philosophy and steps behind this strategy is the same as you would read in practically any college marketing textbook: Devise, Implement, Test, Interpret Data, Revise and Repeat.

The real difference with what we are doing (across multiple marketing and advertising channels, such as Social, AdWords, SEO, Content) involves close micro-step evaluations of key drivers. Quite simply, rather than wait for an abundance of data, we are making swift course corrections based on tightly prioritized goals, using tiny-yet-measurable data samples.

This strategy requires that we ask difficult questions about our assumptions, letting none of them remain as sacred cows. Instead, we rather assume that we know nothing about what may work, and rigorously test every aspect of a business model, from messaging to offer to price point. And we are doing this rapidly.

Here’s the kicker: We are able to do this based on almost real-time data, in increments of fewer than 100 visitors to our web site.

It’s pretty exciting, and I believe it will lead us to circumvent the normally expensive and time-intensive process new businesses must endure when launching something new.

So the question I have for you is: What do you think you know about your business marketing metrics? Do you know what is working and what isn’t? How do you know it? And how long and how much is it taking you to find out?

Anyone who has been engaged with us for very long at all knows how passionate we are about telling stories. To our way of thinking, a good story has the power to make a brand, but even more importantly, it can connect us as human beings and perhaps even change the world.

So when I watched this video over at TED.com, I knew I had to share it with you.

If you are tasked with telling stories about your brand, or if you want to brand the world with an idea you have, you owe it to yourself to watch this video.

Last week it was revealed that iPhone users might have had their locations tracked by Apple. People are up in arms over what is obviously a major violation in privacy.

Wake up, people. Google reads your mail. Apple tracks your locations. Facebook tracks your user habits. It’s all to sell you stuff.

While I agree it’s a bit unnerving to have a major corporation documenting your every move, let’s get realistic. Apple, Google, and Facebook are relatively uninterested in what you are ACTUALLY doing. In fact, most user information is tracked for the sole purpose of selling you products you will likely be interested in. Emailing about Spiderman posters? Google will target advertisements selling you superhero paraphernalia. Suddenly “liking” parenting websites on Facebook? You may notice Facebook ads for diapers and other baby gear.

Yes, it’s creepy and it borders on unethical. But can you blame them? It’s becoming easier and easier to ignore advertisements on television, radio, and other mainstream forms of media where we were once bombarded with products and services. I’m not condoning Apple’s transparency failure in tracking user’s locations, but I’m not surprised and you shouldn’t be either.

If you were to ask that question to most business owners they would look at you like a “deer in the headlights” because they don’t have the answer. The truth is; no one actually has the answer to that question because it’s a bit arbitrary as articulated in this post from a panel at the latest South by Southwest Interactive Festival in regard to 4 questions brands need to ask about the value of Facebook fans.

There are far too many variables to consider to be able to put a number on the value for each and every business; even the different models. I see a lot of companies in the local market that are pushing Facebook and Twitter as a “must have” for their businesses. I believe local is the last frontier in marketing online and everyone is entering into the local market and trying to gain their piece of the pie and that can lead to confusion; especially when business owners are busy running their businesses and are not familiar with what is happening online.

To tell you the truth, I’m online and reading the latest and greatest everyday and it can be confusing to me as well. This article helps identify why. I’ve seen valuations for Facebook Fans as high as $168.00 to worthless. If a fan is indeed worth $168.00, then getting as many fans as possible makes a lot of sense for your business. If it’s worthless (and they will all be worthless for companies that are not willing to engage), then your money is better spent somewhere else.

The main things to consider are the profit, influence potential, acquisition costs and brand affinity. Each of these will play a role in calculating the value of a fan on Facebook. Just remember as you navigate these waters that it doesn’t take much to alienate your fan base so be careful to only put out positive and enlightening information and never bash your competitors.

Words. I love them. Sometimes too much. I have been known to string together sentences with upwards of 60 words. I habitually gravitate to 4- and 5-syllable words. This is for my own enjoyment, not yours. I just love words. I think I love them because I love ideas. And words are nothing if not elegant conveyors of ideas.

But then I started Twittering. And the imposition of 140 characters was a real tough one to embrace. My earliest tweets lamented this fact frequently.

Then something happened. The limitation made me wrestle with words in a new way. I started looking for conciseness. I had to have faster, clearer, better ways of expressing myself. In the process I discovered that flowery prose is not always the best way to communicate, after all. In fact, the 140 character discipline has made me a better writer, by reigning in those tendencies, and reminding me that comprehension is more important in the message than getting to use that shiny new abstract metaphor.

I still love them, though. Twitter hasn’t changed that. And I’ll be damned if I’ll let it.

My sister-in-law called me today with a question about Facebook. Should her church spend money to advertise itself on Facebook? My gut reaction was absolutely not. I am not comfortable with a church spending it’s tithes and offerings on advertising. Shouldn’t that money go to social services like housing the homeless or feeding the needy? However, I have to be careful not to let that reaction become dogma. This issue, like most in life, does not have a simple yes or no answer.

Here in Nashville, we have multiple mega-churches. You will see billboards all over town advertising these churches as if they were a company advertising it’s services. Now, I understand that it would be foolish to think these churches aren’t run like a corporation at times. Honestly, that’s not entirely a bad thing. A well-run church will be efficient, and will use it’s resources wisely.

However, some part of me feels that free services like Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages or Squidoo are better for churches to use. The resources that would be spent on advertising could then be spent on programs like Room In The Inn, food banks and counseling services. These are the types of things I have always felt were the Church’s true calling. After all, Christ implored his followers to help the “least of these”.

In the end, I can’t say whether or not it is a waste of church resources to pay for an advertising campaign. It is up to the individual churches to decide if that is part of God’s mission for them. Nevertheless, I think they would do well to make sure they are fulfilling their core mission. What do you think?

As marketers and new media lovers, we spend an abundance of time trying to sell our clients on the idea social media, why they need it, and the best ways to implement it. Because of this, and also due to recent trends and boosts in how we use social media, countless businesses are using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other networks tools to get their message(s) out there.

Some businesses do it well. Some businesses do it poorly. Some businesses don’t do it all.

This begs the question: Do all businesses NEED social media? And in today’s rapidly moving marketing environment, if you aren’t taking advantage of social media, is there a cut off point? At what point does it become too late to invest in a newborn social media strategy?

There isn’t a clear answer to this. The truth is that some businesses don’t need social media; businesses that won’t use social media correctly especially shouldn’t use social media. If you’re not producing your own content, and don’t intend on producing your own content then social media will be nothing more than an exercise in regurgitation for your company. While I don’t believe there is a cut-off point making it, “too late,” to utilize new forms of media, I do believe businesses run the risk of being left in the dust.

If a company has never used social media in their business plan, and is committed to creating (with guidance) original, interesting and significant content then they are the perfect candidates for new and social media. And I would like to meet them.

I’m sure you get emails just like I do everyday telling you how to obtain all the online traffic you could ever imagine; and it requires little time or money. If you get these, run away and do not click on it for any reason because there are 2 main reasons you are not getting the type of traffic you want; Google can’t find you and/or Google has no idea what you are about. Let’s take each one of these and drill down a little further.

Google Can’t Find You

The first thing to realize is that unless you are in a very specialized niche market, you are not the only one in town, in the state or in the nation doing whatever it is you do. That means you should get an idea of who your competition is and what they are doing online. You must also realize that you may be in a category that is highly competitive and that means you will have to do even more to be found.

It is still amazing to me how many people believe that once their website is built they’re done! If this is what you’re thinking then you really are done; online. The idea of “build it and they will come” has been disproved so many times I’m not going to go into it again here. Just know that after a website is built, the real work begins. That’s because being indexed in Google and other search engines is not enough. You have to work to get the right links, citations, reviews, mentions, articles, videos, podcasts, etc., etc, etc. to get ahead and stay ahead of the crowd. This means you will either be doing it yourself, which take a lot of your time or paying someone else to do it for you, which means it costs money.

In the town I live in I typed into Google “my town bank” (with the quotation marks so I would get an exact match) and got back “about 10,700,000 results” This simply means that out of all the banks in my town there are about 10,700,000 pages competing for the top 10 positions on Google. So you have a chance of 1 in 1,070,000 of achieving that ranking in the organic search. If I put “my town my state bank” the results are “about 68,700 results” or 1 in 6,870. Now think about how you are listed on your website and the terms you are associated with.

As you can see, it will be easier to be found if you are competing against 68,700 pages instead of 10,700,000 pages. This brings me to the next item on our list.

Google has No Idea What You are About

The first thing you need to understand is that Google ranks pages, not websites. The rank you have on your home page is for that page only; not the entire website. Every page on your site needs to be about something particular so your pages are not competing with each other. While this seems impossible, it’s not. Let’s take the bank example and look at how a bank can divide and conquer in the online space.

One tactic is to divide your pages by location. While this is very doable, it can be tricky because of local and map search technologies. Make sure you consult someone who understands local search, and not everyone in search does, who can help you through the local search maze if you have multiple locations.

Another approach is to divide your pages by services; your home page would be toward your overall bank and you would have your other pages highlight your services. For example you might talk about the history of the bank and why your customers can trust the bank with their money on the home page. You may then put up category pages that are topical as in mortgages, savings, CD’s, etc.

The biggest mistake companies and people make are talking about the same things on multiple pages and using the same wording and keywords for descriptions of those things. Remembering that the search engines see each individual page as a place where information is stored and they will pull up the best information that can be found that is indexed. If you talk about the same things on each page you are in essence competing with yourself; thus Google, Bing and the other search engines see a bunch of pages talking about the same things so they dismiss your website as confusing.

So how do you compete? Be very targeted and concise and choose your market well.