My company recently moved to Google Apps, a software-as-a-service office suite. I was skeptical at first. The behavioral change was painful. Precision and features were lacking. But after four months, I'm now a convert and advocate for cloud-based email, documents, presentations and calendar. Here's why:

The history and growth of electronic media has been marked by some key events, when explosions of audience interest took new media to new plateaus. Arguably the John F. Kennedy assassination and the first moon landing were landmark events in television coverage that went far beyond U.S. audiences. CNN's compelling coverage of the first Gulf War put cable news on the map and was the first stake (of many) into the hearts of the print newsweeklies.

Much of Internet marketing is intended to sell products. What's most interesting are the differences between selling products that are primarily impulse buys vs. those that are considered purchases, and the implications that can have on your chosen marketing strategy.

Recent discussions have suggested that perhaps brands' quick responsiveness to complaints in social media settings, especially Twitter, might be training consumers to voice complaints even more. I admit, when I first heard this, I had to think about it, because it seemed a reasonable hypothesis. However, the truth is that as people become more comfortable with using tools like Twitter to broadcast, or "graphcast" (broadcast to their social graphing), the conversations in social media channels will more and more resemble how people talk to each other in everyday life. And, unfortunately for marketers, people are more likely to talk about …

Depending on how we interpret and tally the notches on our belt or loops around the proverbial block, some of us will say we've been in digital, by one definition or another, from 10 to 16 to 27 years. We all geek-out on keeping track.

Management teams consistently celebrate and pay lip service to the idea of KPIs, but they often fail to effectively establish and apply them. This failure sometimes results from unclear corporate strategy. KPI problems can also stem from a failure to apply the necessary discipline and investment in intelligence, analysis and reporting. Making matters worse, there is a common trap many managers fall into: reporting a litany of metrics that do little more than indicate that a lot of activities are going on in the organization.

What will the next generation of TV advertising look like, and who will drive it? I participated in a panel discussion this week at OMMA Video where we wrestled with that question. Will set-top-box data and measurability change TV? Will it be advertising leveraging "Request for Information" interactivity on standard remote controls, as Canoe Ventures is advancing? Will it be addressability combined with demographic or purchase data and an influx of direct mailers? Or will it be driven by cross-platform campaigns linking Web video to TV campaigns?

Does your agency focus its attention on tactics, rather than strategy? Many people talk about the agency model being "broken," and the primary reason is that most agencies are compensated by their clients based on tactics, not strategy. When you compensate your agency partners for the tactical side of the business (the media plans and the banners or websites they create) rather than the strategic side of the business, you get what you pay for.

I'm a TED addict (that's the nonprofit whose theme is "ideas worth spreading"), and this week Joanna Blakley landed in my inbox to talk about fashion's free culture and what we could learn from it. In the fashion industry, she argues, there is very little copyright protection, which forces a huge amount of innovation. In addition, the demographic for knockoffs was never the same as the demographic for the original anyway, so who cares if someone is paying $2 for a fake Louis Vuitton clutch purse on the streets of Manhattan?

This week's column simply celebrates a single thought I heard at the very end of the week that instantly resonated. From the point of view of one super-duper global honcho: "We are supremely client-facing, with zero self-awareness."