About a month ago, Shelby Bonnie, the CEO of Whiskey Media, articulated a fantastic argument for "killing the CPM" on TechCrunch. I couldn't agree more with Bonnie' s ideas about discontinuing the use of CPM as the primary metric for online advertising. The next logical step in the conversation is: If not CPM, then what?

Recently, I have been struck by the prevalence of certain ideas -- and they are provocative ones. They play like the feistiest of pet ideas. But, in their glibness are they just a little too precious? Outrageous in their simplicity? Or is their frequency a clue to our actual course?

live by the principle of liberal disclosure in my work, on my personal blog, on Twitter and in my personal offline life. But I disagree with the FTC's silly new requirements that bloggers must now disclose payola -- material exchanges of goods with marketers. I don't like government meddling in my personal speech.

Today, more people can have more relationships -- personal, business, casual, formal, fleeting, long-term -- with more people more often than ever before in history. When consumers have so many different kinds of relationships with so many different people and companies and products and services and ideas, how can any, or many, of them stand out? How can media companies or marketers establish meaningful visibility, let alone usage loyalty, in this ever-entangling clutter? There is only one answer now: trust.

I feel as though social media is currently pigeonholed into the same boat as mobile (which has been in the same boat for the last four years): it's about one to two years away from maturing as a medium for advertising. That doesn't mean that social media (or mobile, for that matter) is not a strong marketing medium. It just means we have to be honest about what needs to be fixed -- or else bad ads will continue to happen to good people.

During my honeymoon I actually unplugged for nearly three weeks -- well, mostly. It's amazing how much it feels like there is to catch up on after traveling for three weeks, both back at my office and in the world of social media in general. Like many people on vacation, I took the opportunity to read some real books (well, kinda real books -- I did read them on my Kindle). I was a little worried that living life 140 characters at a time and news feed item to news feed item had completely destroyed my ability to read "long …

On some sectors, there is a high emphasis on using digital as a customer service tool, with endless case studies on quick-footed crisis control through Twitter. But the picture is so much bigger than this. At best, a blended, dialed-in digital marketing program is evolutionary and transformative. Everyone involved learns and gets better; progress happens. At worst, it's like herding cats. So many moving parts, so many parties involved. The daunted will think small.

"In tech startups, marketers are more important than developers." That's what one aspiring Web entrepreneur and software developer told me the other night. Yet while I love to celebrate my art and craft -- I'm a marketing guy -- I disagree

Many companies are now taking steps to try to control their destiny in a future where TV can be consumed "everywhere," on a multitude of different and widely distributed devices and platforms. So today, I am going to discuss my thoughts on how this future might play out -- who might find the elusive business model for profitable cross-platform video scale, and who might not.

If you read the news, you can become very confused about the state of the economy. According to some sources, things are looking up (see the stock market) -- and according to just as many others, things don't look too good (see the impending wave of mortgage resets in real estate). Whom do we trust? Whose opinions do we value?