When it comes to brands on Facebook, the past few years reflect hype and a competitive race to acquire the most Fan connections. But brand marketers are sobering up and asking hard questions about the ROI of social marketing. Perhaps no question is asked more often than "What is the value of a Facebook brand Fan?"

Without an outside source of funding, most media and technology startups would perish. The cost of hiring engineers and salespeople is usually just too high to self-fund a business until it is profitable. There are usually three stages of fundraising that a startup must go through to create a sustainable business:

In corner offices around the world, in marbled boardrooms and in whisky bars, they gather: movie executives, trying to figure out how to keep people coming to the movies. Music titans, scheming about suing file-sharers. Television producers, debating how they can force people to watch commercials. The business models of the last 60 years are under threat, nobody's figured out yet how to make enough money out of the new ones, and everybody's worried.

Let me start off the bat with a mea culpa as it relates to the four buzzwords or clichs that are anywhere on the continuum of painful to putrid: big data, native advertising, transmedia, and ecosystem.

"Business has only two functions: marketing and innovation." This quote is attributed to novelist Milan Kundera, according to most places I searched. It's a great quote, though I'm not sure how Kundera can be qualified enough in this arena to have made this statement in the first place. But I do find this ideas interesting as a thought-starter. We live in a world where marketing IS innovation, and now we're knee-deep in the evolution through two generations of marketers.

"Twitter is a frenemy," said Jeff Zucker, CNN's new president, as reported by MediaShift. Jeff Zucker was describing the cable news network's relationship with social media and added, "the network uses, relies on -- and is scared by -- social media." Twitter had a marquee moment last week, particularly late Friday afternoon and evening, that should scare most television news outlets in the business of reporting breaking news.

Last week at the Lerer Ventures CEO Summit, executives from New York media and technology startups discussed the challenges of building a company from scratch -- particularly those challenges related to people. Given that startups are highly dependent on the talents of the first few dozen people who join up, it's essential to get the most out of each employee. Here are six steps I've found effective in building great startup employees:

Two days ago, New Zealand became the thirteenth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. The amendment to the definition of marriage passed through Parliament with 77 "ayes" and 44 "nays," following a passionate debate that included quotations of Shakespeare and politicians saying how much their job "rocks."

I'm tired of research companies presenting the results of what people say as if it factually represents what they did or are likely to do. Come on. This is the era of digital media and marketing and Big Data. We can have massive direct measures of most consumer media and consumption behaviors, and we have extraordinary abilities to store, analyze and present that information. Why do we still rely so much on sending out surveys asking people to tell us about behaviors that we can much more accurately directly measure?

I woke up sad today. I love what I do for a living. I love my family: my wife, my sons, my sister, my parents. I love my life and the people I have in it. I love my job and I love writing for Mediapost. I love being challenged with ideas, and being able to openly express my points of view a for others to respond to in this kind of forum. I don't love it when things happen like what happened on Monday in Boston.