Patience

Patience is not one of my virtues. Personally and professionally, I get very edgy when the lifecycle of an idea from conception to construction is too long. I work in software because I can’t handle the seemingly neverending product cycles of physical goods. When I worked at GE for a summer and when I realized that it took a two-year R&D project just to add 8% on to the the length of a wind turbine blade, I resolved to never work in a company that produced physical products again. Two years is a lifetime.

I now find myself working in what is really the very early stages of an industry. Things are moving very rapidly from both a competitive and a product landscape. But the things that the industry is doing right now are really baby steps towards the end goals of true social marketing.

The end state is pretty clear: 

• Cookies will increasingly be associated with CRM records (already happening).
• URL shorteners and on-site analytics will converge. Marketers will be able to merge on-site clickstream data with off-site touchpoints.
• Multi-touch conversion pathways will be standard. NoSQL and map-reduce back-ends will allow analytics users to slice audiences in ways never before imaginable. Tracking Facebook Ad > Like > Interactions > Conversion as a conversion pathway will be common. And it will all happen within one tool.
• Word-of-mouth purchase influence will be algorithmically assigned to individual social posts, and aggregated to social properties.

I want to go there now, but there’s so much to build in the meantime.

Patience.