Do you have a mobile strategy, or are you just winging it? Participating in the mobile landscape is like any relationship: to be effective, you have to know what you want going into it. You have to be willing to commit and to compromise in order to have success.

Your brand message doesn't know what Twitter is. Your brand message doesn't know what Facebook is, either. But that shouldn't stop you from figuring out how to use Twitter, Facebook and many other social media tools to spread your brand message, because, when it comes down to it, your brand message has no idea what television, radio and print are, either.

During a week when many of my brood were at CES in Vegas, I was out West doing something very different, yet related -- private training for corporate executives on the industry and business of digital. As 2010 began and a show whose core is all about progress was raging on in my periphery -- I appreciated the themes percolating in the boardroom.

Reflecting back on the 2009 holiday season, I received an unprecedented surge in two types of holiday cards from industry colleagues and other acquaintances: mass e-cards and mass-printed cards with no handwriting (not even a signature). Meanwhile, the volume of handcrafted, personalized cards and letters has dropped significantly. This is a radical shift from the past, so I thought I'd unpack this a bit....

I'm in Las Vegas today, attending the Consumer Electronics Show. The city is crawling with folks fascinated with the latest in consumer devices, from gadget geeks that hang on every word of the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, to the digitirati trying to find the next big thing. The show officially kicked off last night with a keynote from Steve Ballmer touting Microsoft's tablet PC software -- and it will be in high gear for the next several days, starting with the opening of the exhibit floor this morning. It's still early to know what big stories will come from …

I started last year by talking about the balance between art and science in digital marketing, and I feel the need to revisit the topic slightly from a different vantage point: that of data and creativity.

The list goes on, and will grow as people get more and more insight into celebrities' personal lives through social media. Brands are making an active decision to sponsor these individuals; the question is where will consumers draw the line of responsibility?

Ultimately, this accountability mythology is not one that we as an industry want to get trapped inside of. So, let's look at the promise this way: let's hold digital media as accountable as it wants to be. It's fine to be aspirational. But, it's time to catch reality up to aspiration. The good news is that -- a new decade of advance upon us -- the areas needing traction are clearly driving forward.