From a Google marketing director, Dan Cobley.

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don’t Give A Shit?

And on the other side (breaking news?).

This on her Twitter … "In bed watching Family Guy. Love this show.! So hilarious! Stewie is my favorite love his accent."

So now I’ve switched to  Parallels from VirtualBox and so far its 100% better in terms of ease of installation, CPU usage and CPU usage.  I can actually run Adobe Fireworks and Windows Live Writer at the same time.  VirtualBox kept hanging all the time.  I wonder what VMWare Fusion does?

We were doing a quick brainstorm on what to call the key metrics to measure sales and marketing people jointly and came up with “ratios and revenue” or in other words  “R&R.”  The point is, how do you get your marketing people aligned with your sales people.  Working on the same thing. Worrying about the same goal.

I like the term is its a great pun too.  There is no rest and recuperation involved in worry about ratios and revenue.

Sales people think that marketing is off doing some stupid “non priority” that doesn’t matter to the only thing that matters; revenue generation.  On the other hand, the marketing person knows that the CEO is paying their salary and when he or she says ‘”go jump” they say “how high” as that’s generally who pays for the bacon. 

How to fix this?   Measure them both on the success of conversion ratios in the demand generation process –obviously  the number of names generated before the pipeline begins,but more importantly the % of leads accepted by sales, the % converted into product opportunity (forecastable pipeline) and finally the % actually converted into revenue. 

This sounds simple but its excruciatingly hard to get marketing people to accept; they have generally been burned far too often by the sales rep who can’t sell or is happy to blame the marketing program.  Or they simply don’t see themselves as a business person; they are a creative genius after all.

But I think the bigger problem is not really the marketing person.  It starts with the CEO and what they inspect and respect.  I have had the misfortune to work with some CEOs and Presidents (of Fortune 500 companies and startups) who do not even consider dirtying their hands with ratios and revenue, or have so many pet projects going on that the poor marketing staff are spinning like whirling dervishes daily.

So there you go, ratios and revenue.  It’s not the whole picture of course.  But its a great acronym and as some great philosopher said; all great journeys start with a great acronym.

It looks like a category has emerged while my head was turned.  Analysts are now talking about ‘listening tools.’  Forrester recently ranked Radian6 and Nielsen as two of the top two tools that money can buy.    This has been a very confusing area for quite a while.   No one tool really did the job.  No one tool really still does the job as far as I can see.  Some cost a lot.  Many are still free or low cost.  Seems like you can do at least half the job for free.

Problem is, if you don’t have deep pockets what do you invest in?  Sure you can use Google search or alerts and the like but you really do need some form of automation to be able to get your job done professionally.

Here are some that I like and use regularly.

Yahoo Pipes (or xFruits).  I love this tool as the single best way to combine RSS feeds and sort and filter them all together and output a combined feed.  It really is very undervalued, both by Yahoo and the world in general.  I’m guessing it simply looks too complex to use.  In fact, it’s very easy.

Feedburner or Feedblitz (or xFruits again).  I use these tools regularly to create aggregate  emails from all my various website and RSS searches from Pipes.

Trackur.  Bills itself as Google Alerts on steroids.  I find it a little buggy but a very simple useful way of seeing a stream of search type content from blogs, twitter and facebook in one place.

Social Mention.  I find this tool very useful for a quick idea of the sentiment about a client’s brand or products. 

Alexa.com … I had forgotten all about it but Alexa really is the best for looking at who is visiting your client’s web site adn where they stand in the rankings.  I have also extensively been using HubSpot’s competitive and SEO grading tools for the same purpose which I like a lot.

Touchgraph.  I love this as a way of mapping who is linking to who for my  clients.  I treat it as ‘who do you hang out with’ on the web.  Its almost always surprising to them.

PostRank.  I have always liked their engagement ranking system which I put on all my blogs since they rolled out a new enhanced service and plugins for WordPress sites.

WordPress.  Not a listening tool obviously but it could be.  WordPress, or tools like it, are the future of the web as far as I am concerned.  By this I mean that dynamically created content-rich  websites based on blog content that engages your communities in a  conversation is mich better than playing thousands of dollars for Ad Words.   I have always gone to and fro between Drupal and WordPress.  The reality for me however us that WordPress can do just about anything I need to do, with far less complexity for a technical amateur.  And you can use it like a listening tool with the right themes which is how we created http://mymediareport.com

I use Feedburner and FeedBlitz quite a lot.

I’m also trying out Viral heat but am undecided about how good it is. And  I like the look of eCairn, Traakr and IT database but have not found a reason to use them yet.

Been trying out Oracle vitual box, in place of Parallels.  Seems to work rather well.

So I’m sitting in Nonni’s Restaurant having dinner and the oddest couple sat down next door to us.   A lovely old couple but a very odd; out of synch with the 20th century and observing it from afar. 

Or perhaps two aliens who had just come down to earth and decided to start it with a dinner at a french bistro in a small American town. 

So, anyway, I could relate the whole conversation but it was all beautifully summed up by one non-sequator:

Her:  “I don’t know what kids today will do in the future .. they are all so much into this technology thing.  When will technology come to an end?”

Him: :”Aren’t you surprised that Monorails never really took off?”