During those times when you can barely handle another "Will I see you at 'Super Essential Industry Event' tonight and tomorrow night and the next night?" or when the thought of a string of industry lunches has you panicked over the projects staring you in the face back at the office, I would offer a few approaches that are not so black-and-white to help get your sanity back.

How many followers do you have on Twitter? How many followers should you have?While Twitter follower count is the most cited metric of Twitter profile importance, I really don't care about that number. With some exceptions, I've found little correlation between the value of a Twitter profile and the number of followers. Some people with high follower counts are interesting, and some aren't. Some people with low follower counts are interesting, and some aren't.

Many in the industry have been taking a lot of reactive -- and appropriate - steps to deal with privacy issues as they surface. Most important, the industry, through its trade associations -- including the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the 4As, the ANA and the DMA -- have begun implementing self-regulatory principles to ensure that companies provide a basic level of privacy protection to users. But all this is not enough. It's time for online companies to get out in front of the privacy issue, and the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission has provided some great guidance.

Numerous articles have been written about how the music industry is dying, but that's not what I'm here to write about. Instead, I want to raise awareness of the fact that the business is potentially better than ever. From my perspective, the music industry is now set to experience a rebirth and a reinvigoration because the stars have aligned -- the industry part is getting cut out, and the artists are the ones to make the money!

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I almost never run for exercise. So running 26.2 miles certainly wasn't on my to-do list this month. But then I got an email from social connector, social do-gooder and good friend, Toby Daniels. Toby was reaching out to a group of social media "influencers" (I know what you're thinking, and I'm also not sure how I made the list) to run the New York City Marathon on Nov. 7 in order to raise money for Camp Interactive. So later that day, after convincing myself I wasn't going to die, I told Toby …

In surveying several burgeoning areas of our industry -- including the emergence of new types of companies such as DSPs, RTBs and the like -- I realized something. Entirely new levels of skills development are required for the marketing and media professional who must say current and ahead of the curve. In a way it's unfair, but it's also incredibly exciting. We are not talking about "re-skilling" necessarily, but depending on how you've been oriented, there's a whole new standard for keeping up.

I don't attend many industry conferences, but there were a few this past July where I noticed something peculiar: the head shots of many of the speakers used in event publicity and promotions were years out of date. Compared to their current real-life appearance, many of the speakers' headshots portrayed them with far fewer gray hairs and wrinkles, and an abundance of retro hairstyles and yesterday's apparel. This stood out like a sore thumb.

I know the last thing that local media companies need is another Web-driven disruption in their markets, particularly one that could take a big chunk out of their revenues in the next few years. But I believe that location-based Web services will take 20% to 25% of the annual revenue out of local media's current advertising base within four years. That spend will be displaced by promotion and marketing fees paid to these new location-based services or applications that run on top of them. To the incumbent companies, these new services will be like craigslist on steroids.

For years there was little to no seasonality in online because it was masked by the overall growth of the medium, but in the last two to three years publishers have been seeing signs of a seasonal advertising flow for advertisers: many advertisers appear to decrease their spending in the summer months. I found this odd, so I did a quick, informal survey and reached out to 10 marketers and 10 publishers whom I know. They all agreed the trend exists; their advertisers tend to spend less in the summertime, not because of any perceived decrease in traffic during those …

There are two major tactics marketers can take to reach consumers in mobile: build applications with enough utility to attract consumers, or pay to place ads (or some other brand integration) in applications that have built a critical mass of users. But as mobile enters its next phase, it's interesting to look at the parallels between where marketers are today with mobile and how social network marketing has evolved.