Joe's Jottings

Well, it’s a while since I wrote a blog post so why not kick off with a slight bit of professional heresy.  I write software for a living; have done for over 30 years, starting with SCMP microprocessors in my teens (yes, I was THAT sort of teenager…) and working through everything in between until now when I spend my time split between .NET, JavaScript and PHP.

Now, why do I write code?  Well, occasionally I do it for fun, but mostly I do it for profit – my clients pay me to do it.  Actually, that’s not right.  My clients pay me to solve their problems for them using software. 

I’ve never been one of the great ‘geeks / hackers’ in life; I’m a radio amateur and electronics whizz, and the closest I ever came was in my teens and early twenties when I was fiddling with low level stuff like analogue to digital converters and the like; but pure software geekery has never been me.  I used to say to people that I was a reasonable programmer but an excellent developer; now I’m more likely to say I’m an excellent problem solver.

Don’t get me wrong; I have an active interest in my profession, from the perspective of how I can deliver better service to my clients in delivering what they want from me.  And I like to think that I write sound, efficient and effective code.  I create data structures, create objects to model those structures and business processes, create code to implement these abstracts and put something on my client’s desktop or web server that allows them, bottom line, to make more money or save more money.  I also write code that is easy to follow and maintain, that has sensible variable names, that I document and leave a pile of useful information with my client.  And I’m there for them when needed.  I love it when I get a call from a client who tells me ‘We needed to add a new feature, so we took a look at the code and documentation and we think we’ve done it right, but next time you’re in, could you give it a quick look?’ – the ultimate accolade for me – I’ve delivered code that others can pick up and run with.

I’m methodical, but don’t have what you could call a methodology; I was recently asked whether I was agile; I almost replied that I used to be but since I tore my knee cartilage a few years back I’m not as nimble as I once was.  Do I practice Extreme programming; not really, I’m more Church of England, middle of the road, myself….

I’ve started to notice that there are two broad categories of software developers; those who work for software houses or in large development teams where words like Agile, Extreme, kanzen, dojos, user stories, sensei are the common parlance, and those who work very close with business and organisational problems, where the usual words that define a day at the coalface are fix, solution, feature, document, debug, budget, timescale.

I like to talk to my clients in their language; I’m afraid I still work in a world where businesses have processes, not user stories; where they don’t particularly care what technique I use behind the scenes as long as I deliver working, maintainable and efficient code, to budget and on time.  I’m sure that the software house methodologies work effectively but do they provide yet another layer of obfuscation, bureaucracy and abstraction between what we do and what our clients and customers want us to do – solve their problems?

No matter how much we dress things up with Japanese words (and I speak with some knowledge and experience of Japanese culture and management) we must not lose track of what we do and why we do it; we solve problems by developing effective software systems delivered on time and to budget.  That is all our clients care about; we’re not ninjas or ronin; we’re professional programmers and problem solvers.

I guess what I’m saying to developers is don’t fetishise what you do to the point where the process becomes more important than the product.  It’s rare I have much good to say about Steve Jobs and the slavering behemnoth that is Apple, but he did once say ‘Great artists deliver’.  And that’s what it’s all about.

‘Chasing Cars’ is the name of a song by the band ‘Snow Patrol’.  I quite like it – I’m a sucker for sad songs and this is a fine example of the genre.  However, it has a little bit of ‘back story’.  According to Wikipedia:

“The phrase “Chasing Cars” came from [singer Gary ] Lightbody’s father, in reference to a girl Lightbody was infatuated with, “You’re like a dog chasing a car. You’ll never catch it and you just wouldn’t know what to do with it if you did.”

That phrase has stuck with me, and I have to say that over recent months I’ve been considering more and more how much time we all spend ‘chasing cars’ in our lives.  I’m currently going through one of those times in my life of what can best be described as ‘internal reflection’ (Some unkind folks might call it ‘loafing’ or ‘contemplating my navel’; I’m not listening…  ) and I guess that some of what’s going through my head right now is a product of that.

What cars do I chase?  Well, I suppose over the years I’ve been a good starter and not so good finisher; ideas are very cheap – I was saying this to a group of start-up people recently – and what counts is implementing those ideas in a form that makes them usable.  If it’s an idea for a business, build a business that’s making money; if for a novel, a written manuscript; if for a cunning invention – a working prototype.  I’ve had a few opportunities over the years that have been very close to what most folks would have called ‘big hitting success’ but that didn’t come to fruition.  On a few occasions I’ve definitely considered that, rather than being afraid of failing, I’ve previously been much more afraid of success.

For quite a few opportunity-filled years I was, looking back on it, chasing cars; had I managed to get what I was allegedly going for I’m not sure I’d have known what to do with it.  Were the same opportunities to present themselves today, I can say two things; I’d give them a rather closer going over to make sure that I really DID want to chase ‘em, and then when I’d made the decision I’d get out there yapping and barking until I caught ‘em.

The trick is to know WHY you’re chasing your ideas and projects; what are you wanting to get from them?  Money? Fame? Success with women / men / small dogs?  Free food and drink at your local pub?  Or do you just want to contribute to society?  Grow spiritually? Help out folks less fortunate than yourself? Get your own back on folks who upset you at school?

Don’t let yourself chase cars in your life without being reasonably sure you’ll know what to do if you manage to catch the object of your desire; I’ve been there and it’s a bloody waste of time if you’re not sure!

One of the great things about Twitter is that it brings articles to my attention that I wouldn’t otherwise have read. This blog post originated in one of those articles. It’s here - in it, the writer notes that managers and creatives tend to work on different chunks of time for getting things done – for managers hour diary slots are usually adequate, but for creatives an hour barely gives you time to get going. So far so good – I’ve written a Joe’s Jottings piece in which I mention that my own to-do list doesn’t deal in units of time much under half a day.

The writer then goes on to comment on how his organisation – a venture capital outfit – runs it’s diary slots on the ‘maker’ basis rather than the ‘manager’ basis. And turns the whole thing in to a selling point for their services. OK – at one level this is a good example of catering your working practices to your client base, but it started me thinking again about the increasing tendency I’ve witnessed in the last year or so amongst start up companies and those catering for them towards over-complicating what are really quite straight forward and, in some cases, old fashioned, good personal and business management skills and techniques.

I’m just getting a little tired of seeing things that are just this side of bleedin’ obvious being touted as if they were the bastard intellectual offspring of an orgy between Wittgenstein, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Drucker.

I wear a number of hats in my day to day life; I’m a husband, cat-wrangler, consultant, software developer, charity Trustee, line manager, householder, social entrepreneur…you get the picture. Each of these activities requires me to operate in different ways – sometimes I’m working to someone else’s priorities, sometimes to my own. Oddly enough these things all get recorded in the same diary, with prioritisation and time-slots allocated to the job in hand. If there’s a day on which I want to do development work, I block it out in my diary – the things that will shift me from that are family or major line management issues. If I have a board meeting, I block out the morning or afternoon. It’s called time-management, prioritisation and flexibility. It’s an essential component of what is needed to get stuff done in a world that is messy.

It’s important for startups to get used to the idea that sooner or later they’re going to have to get used to dealing with the world the way it is, not the way they’d like it to be. Pandering from VC companies doesn’t help this; people in startups learning the basics of time and diary management and prioritisation will.

I came across this rather interesting article from the personal blog of a Pastor in the US recently in which he suggests that Tweeting in Church might be a good idea.  Now, I have to admit that I was something of a late adopter with Twitter (and Facebook…and for that matter with SMS texting….yeah, OK, I’m a bit of a Luddite in some respects!) but I have to say that this suggestion surprised me.  I’m afraid that when I’m in Church I’m focusing on my own engagement with God, via my participation in the collective experience of the congregation in the church.  Which sounds more like an academic treatise than a celebration of faith, but that’s me!

the idea was that by tweeting ‘commentary’ on the sermon and other aspects of the service it could be regarded as a means of evangelising to the outside world and so bringing the Word to others – perhaps, but I think it’s one tweet too far for me.  Which then led me on to business meeting tweets, conference tweets, etc.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing but despite having a Blackberry, a Netbook and enough technology at home to sink a small boat, I still go to meetings armed with a pen and paper for note taking.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s reliable, no batteries to run out, makes no weird noises, doesn’t force me to think ‘How do I do that?’, will take text, drawings and doodles and isn’t ostentatious.  Pen and paper is what I like to call ‘humble technology’ – it does what it says on the tin, no muss, no fuss.  I’ve been in meetings recently where iPads have been deployed, tweets have been made (as I found out after leaving the meeting and looking at twitter) with no apparent damage to the business of the meeting…but…looking at my own notes taken in the meetings concerned, I’m wondering whether the meetings were actually needed / useful as my notes are pretty skimpy, and I take good notes.

We then have the recent debacle in the UK where some aspects of an industrial relations negotiation between British Airways and Trades Union representatives was tweeted to the outside world, resulting in a ‘pitch invasion’ of the building where the negotiations were taking place.  I’m sorry…negotiations are supposed to be delicate affairs between the parties involved and any mediators.  If someone feels they can’t negotiate without doing the equivalent of bellowing from the window, perhaps they need to be in different jobs.

As you can probably tell by now, I’m not a fan.  My own rules of Twitter are pretty straight forward:

• If I’m in a meeting, focus on the meeting. 
• If I’m at Church, focus on that.
• If I’m at an event and want to tweet, I’ll wait until a ‘natural break’ and do it then.

I recently read a good tip about the etiquette of Texting and Tweeting.  Basically, imagine pulling out a crossword puzzle and doing it.  If you wouldn’t do that in the situation, then you really should think hard about whether you should tweet / text (emergencies excepted, naturally!!)  I was at a social event the other evening and I found that tweeting is sort of like smoking used to be (never smoked so maybe on tenuous ground here…) – it gives you something to do with your hands whilst you’re nervous!

In most meetings, unless you’re there as an observer or reporter tasked with providing a running commentary, I can’t imagine a need to Tweet that can’t wait an hour or so.  So just focus on making the meeting effective.

Maybe I’m just old, or maybe I just don’t get some aspects of modern business – or are some people online purporting to be business experts just arrogant and opinionated folks with insufficient experience and a habit of stating the bleedin’ obvious as if they’d just discovered a Unified Field Theory?

And what triggered this off?  As frequently happens these days, I came across something on Twitter that just bugged the Hell out of me.  And it was the following:

“Book publishers. Stop talking about cannibalisation. Create and invest in businesses and services which destroy today’s model.”

I guess the reason why this statement annoyed me is that I’ve had books and magazine articles published, starting in the early 1980s, and I suppose I have an emotional attachment to the whole paper based ‘traditional’ publishing business.  One of the aspects of that business I like even now is that there was an element of quality control involved that the current ‘anything goes’ online world lacks.  Those nasty gatekeepers called ‘editors’ used to brass all of us off, but they at least ensured that what was published fitted the style of the magazine, was reasonably well written and was believed to be good enough for other people to spend money on.

Because the traditional publishing business did something that most modern online publishing isn’t managing to do – make money based on quality, focused product.  Why buy content when the Internet is full of it?  Getting people to buy text content is increasingly difficult and I’ve seen more than one magazine that I used to buy regularly go to the wall because of the free availability of published material on the Internet.  So what’s the problem?  The problem is that whilst there might be items of high standard on the Net (I hope I produce a few myself) what is lacking is the focus and selection that went in to a magazine – in one pace you had a series of relevant articles, of high quality.  Over the years we’ve kept getting the promise of ‘The Daily You’ online – a one stop web site which you will be able to configure in such a way as to get material that interests you.  That promise has never delivered.  Whilst there are a number of issues that I have with the concept in general (not going to go in to them here – that’s for another day) the basic problem is that whatever ways have been used to try and put something together that gives us relevant and quality content, like RSS feeds, it’s never quite worked.

To be told by someone ‘go and destroy today’s models’ sounds like iconoclasm of the worst sort.  Destruction of what doesn’t work is one thing;  destruction of a market place and set of products that does work is quite sad, especially when the new products and services coming to replace what is going has elements of ‘The Emporers New Clothes’ about them.  And a lot of ‘new media’ stuff does start with cannibalisation – when you aren’t paying for content, you start by linking to it, re-hashing it, etc.  Whilst there are markets for new, paid for content on the Internet it’s frequently poorly paid and provides little stimulus for authors to spend time in developing engaging content when they’re going to see very little recompense for it.

The freetard mentality is again coming through with so many of these Business 2.0 zealots – I have news for you.  Free doesn’t survive hard times.  It’s not enough to say ‘the content is out there, just find it’.  People like to pay for organised and focused material because it saves them time.  Destroying today’s models before there is anything to replace them is simply the business plan of the would-be market dictator – those who would come to lead a mediocre market with mediocre products because the good stuff has already gone to the wall.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Open Source software and have used some of it fairly widely in various development projects that I’ve done.   I’m also aware of the fact that people involved in the development and support of such software are typically volunteers, and on the odd occasion I have called upon people for support, I’ve always had good experiences.

I’ve also seen some absolute stinkers of ‘support’ given to other developers, in which the people who’re associated quite strongly with the softwrae have treated people in a rude, patronising and often offensive and abusive manner.  Now, in 20+ years of dealing with IT support people – including folks like Oracle, Microsoft. Borland (showing my age) and even Zortech and Nantucket (back in the deep past!!) I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve had this sort of treatment from big bad commercial software houses.  It’s unfortunate that I’ve seen dozens of examples of this poor customer service from Open Source suppliers in the last couple of years.

Because even if we don’t pay, we are customers – and some of the worst behaviour I’ve seen from companies where users are required to pay for a license when the software is sued in commercial situations.  It’s hardly encouraging, is it?  I know it can be frustrating to answer the same question several times a day, especially when the solution is well documented, but rudeness isn’t the way forward.  After all – it doesn’t exactly encourage people to use the product, or pay for a licence – rather than persevere or even volunteer a fix, folks are more likely to just go to the next similar product on the list.

Ultimately, it boils down to this; piss off enough potential customers and people like me will write articles like this but will name names and products.

So, here are a few hopefully helpful hints to people involved in regularly supporting products and libraries.

1. If it’s your job, you’re getting paid to do it.  If you’re a volunteer, you’ve chosen to do it.  In either case, if you don’t feel trained up enough in the interpersonal skill side of things, just be nice, and read around material on customer support.  If you don’t like it support, then rather than taking it out on customers, quit.  Because you’re unhappy is no reason to take it out on other people.
2. Remember that the person asking the daft question may hold your job (or the future of your product) in their hands.  You have no idea whether they’re working on a project for a small company or a large blue chip / Government department.  Your goal is surely to get widespread adoption – the best way to do this is to make folks happy.
3. Even if the fix IS documented in any number of places, be polite about it.  If it’s that common, then have it in your FAQs or as a ‘stock answer’.  The worst sort of response is ‘It should be obvious’.  Of course it’s obvious to you – you wrote it.  It isn’t obvious to other people.  This seems to be a particular problem with ‘bleeding edge’ developers who swallow the line that ‘the source code is the documentation’ – it may well be, but if you want your product or service to be adopted you need to get as many people as possible using it.
4. Don’t forget that if someone perseveres with your software, through buggy bits, they may be willing to help you fix it.  The chances of you getting a helper if you are rude to them is minimal.
5. If you get a lot of questions or confusion about the same issue, perhaps it’s time to update the FAQs or Wiki?  And don’t forget sample code – if you’re generating code libraries PLEASE provide lots of real-world examples.

And to all the nice support folks – thanks for all the help – it is appreciated!

With thanks to Rachel G. who gave me the idea of writing this up!

Over the years I must have tried any number of Time Management techniques – I have to say that whilst I’m much better these days at fitting what I need to do in to the time available, but it’s taken a fair amount of time to get the simple fact through my head that there are only 24 hours in a day and no matter how hard I try I can’t ‘manage’ that time – no matter what I do it still passes me by at the rate of 1 minute per minute.  I can’t stockpile it, slow it down, speed it up; just work with it.

During teh 80s I tried to run with a diary, then a Filofax; in the 90s it was a Time Management System.  They didn’t help me much at all.  Then, sometime in the early 2000s, I came across the solution to my pain which I’ve worked with ever since.  The simple To Do List – and today I’m going to share with you the secrets of my listing success!

The Book

Despite having a Blackberry (I love the calendar function) I still use a hard backed A$ notebook as my main day to day journal.  Apart from making notes in meetings, containing my To Do lists and being my general working notebook, it’s also the place where I initially record my dreams first thing in the morning and any bright ideas I have.  Each of these notebooks last me between 6 months and a year, and I label them up according to the first and last day recorded in them.  I have a stack of old ones upstairs!

The Time Slot

I was terrible at being on time for appointments and estimating task duration and completion dates.  My wife realised the problem; I tried to fit too much in to the time I had available, and was making unrealistic expectations of myself.  So, I started working on the concept of a ‘time slot’ for tasks.  the commonly used slots are as follows:

• 0.5 hours – absolute minimum time for ANY item in the list.
• 1 hour – simple programming tasks – simple bugs, basic functions.
• 2 hours  -  programming tasks that involve modifying screen layouts, new database tables, etc.
• half a day – any task requiring time away from home, client meetings.

Fitting my tasks within the day in to these slots sometimes results in me underestimating what I can get done, but it gives me ample time to deal with unexpected problems, making tea, combing cats, playing with Twitter, etc.  It also means that I can usually under-promise / over-deliver.

The List

The actual list consists of….well….a list of tasks that I want to get done within a day.  I try to write things down in order of importance (rather than urgency).  The first thing I do is take a look at yesterday’s list; anything that wasn’t done I’ll consider bringing forward on to today’s list.  Otherwise, I’ll try and split jobs from the previous day’s list as follows:

1. Not that important, more of a ‘nice to have’.
2. Something that I am waiting on someone else for – i.e. I need information or resources to do it.
3. Something that I am prevaricating over.
4. Something that is now no longer relevant.

If it’s in category (1) then I’m likely to just leave it on the previous day’s list and make a note for today to ‘take a look at yesterday’ if I have time.  If (2) then I check whether I have the resources; if I don’t then I’ll waste no more time on it but list it.  If (3) then if important I’ll prioritise it.  If (4) then it just gets dumped.  I also take a little time out to determine why I’m bringing stuff forward.  For example, did I hit snags with other tasks that caused me to over-run?  Did I try to fit too much in?

Once I’ve got the list I go through it and attach a rough time to each item, and prioritise based on the ground of urgent/important, important, urgent.  If the amount of time taken is longer than the working day, then stuff gets carried over to the next day’s list.

I’ll often put the list together the night before the day to which it refers; that way I have the list ready to go when I hit the desk.

The ‘Special List’

This is a list not attached to a particular day but that consists of things that need doing at some time over the next few weeks.  It gets prioritised and ‘timed’ like my daily list.

And that’s it!

I work through the list, sticking with the priority order I’ve set as far as I can.  If I get bogged down with soemthing, I allow myself to flip around the list a little, but will attempt to clear all the urgent/important and important stuff that I’ve allocated to myself for that day.  I don’t get myself too hung up on the list; some days there’ll be stuff that’s not finished; other days I’ll get the chance to eat in to the ‘Special List’ a little.

Things to bear in mind  If something takes significantly longer or shorter than I estimated, I’ll note the actual time donwn, but NOT less than half an hour.

If you want to try this technique out, then the following may prove useful:

1. Old books are a guide to timings; I often estimate jobs by looking back at how long previous jobs took.
2. If jobs keep getting moved around the lists, take a good hard look at them to see whether there are any subconcious reasons why you aren’t tackling them.  Take a look at my article on Banjo playing JEDI.
3. Don’t try and fit too much in to the day.
4. Sometimes you may get benefits from ignoring the priorities you initially set and just getting jobs ‘knocked off’.  This works well in terms of your lists getting shortened but just remember that the aim is to get the jobs on the list done, not make the list look good!

Back in January the UK Government opened a web site up that was described as “a one-stop shop for developers hoping to find inventive new ways of using government data”.   The site, http://data.gov.uk/, aims to pull together government generated data sets in a form that application developers can use to create ‘mashups’ of data from different sources of public and private data, create map based information from the data, etc.  In other words, the idea if to open up public data for private use.

I was pretty excited; professionally I’ve used some public data in the past and acquiring it is usually quite hard going.  Even if you know where to find the data, it’s not easy to just grab and download, and then it comes in various formats that need pre-processing to make useful.  So, I was pretty excited when I heard about this project.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my nipples were pinging with excitement, but there was definite anticipation.

So….my thoughts.  Bottom line for me at the moment is ‘Sorry chaps, sort of getting there but there’s a long trail a-winding before you reach your goal’.  Now, this may sound rather churlish of me, but allow me to explain….

Nature of data

First of all, a lot of the data on the site has been available in other places before now – however it is at least now under one roof, so to say.  The data is also available in disparate formats, like CSV files, etc.   The data is also pre-processed / sanitised – depending upon how you want to view it.  In some cases the data is in the form of Spreadsheets that are great for humans but dire for automated processing in to mashups.  The datasets are not always as up to date as one might expect; for example, on digging through to the Scottish Government data, I found nothing more recent than 2007.

Use of SPARQL and RDF

Although the SPARQL query language has been implemented to allow machine based searching of the site to be done, the data available via this interface seems to be pretty thin on the ground AND, to be honest, I’m not sure that the format is the best for the job.  SPARQL is a means of querying data that is represented in the RDF format to search what’s called the ‘Semantic Net’ – a way of representing data on teh Internet that is more easily made meaningful to search tools. But for a lot of statistical data, this isn’t necessarily the best way to search for data,  and the SPARQL language is not widely used or understood by developers.

No API

There’s no API available such as a Web Service to get at the data.  The site acknowledges this and states :

“The W3C guidance on opening up government datasuggests that data should be published in its original raw format so that it’s available for re-use as soon as possible. Over time, we will covert datasets to use Linked Data standards, including access through a SPARQL end-point; this will provide an API for easy re-use.”

I think this is a rather facile argument.  Apart from the data not being that up to date, one can surely publish the contentof the data raw – i.e. no numerical alterations – whilst still making it available via a SOAP, JSON or other similar API that more developers might have experience of and access to.   As it stands it just seems that some of the time spent on this project could have been spent in getting the data in to a format that could be served up in a consistent format to a wider range of developers.

This current interface – wait for the heresy, people – may be wonderful for the Semantic Web geeks amongst us BUT for people wishing to make widescale, real use of the data it’s NOT the best format to allow the majority of non bleeding-edge developers to start making use of the data available.

Summary

This is an early stage operation – it is labelled ‘Beta’ in the top right of the screen, and as such I guess we can wait for improvements.  But right now it just seems to be geared too much towards providing a sop for the ‘Open Data’ people rather than providing a widely usable and up to date resource.

Hands up whoever has heard of the Red Queen’s Race?  That was the athletic event in Wonderland where the participants had to run very hard to stay exactly where they were.  I’m becoming convinced that we’re entering in to that sort of event in the online marketing and PR world – and probably beyond as well.  And it worries me.

The article that sparked this off is here - nothing major, really, but it did get me thinking.  Does anyone ever give any online or software technique any realistic time to show whether it can deliver the goods anymore?  Or is it all a case of ‘MTV Attention Span’?  Does everything have to prove itself within a 30 second elevator pitch?  If something does the job, does it effectively and meets whatever targets are set for it, why do so many people jump ship as soon as the ‘next, next thing’ comes along? 

There seems to be no scope today for a technique or technology to get time to prove itself.  Of course, there are going to be some advances that are just so awesomely great that it’s obvious even to a relative techo-Luddite like me that they’re worth using immediately, but for other things, how can you know whether you can get more out of an upgrade when you probably haven’t even measured the value of your current process?  If you’re using online tools like Facebook, Twitter, Search Engine Optimisation to market your business, then do you actually know how much business comes to your site via these various channels?  Because if you don’t then simply changing techniques to fit with the current ‘fad’ is likely to be a waste of time; you simply don’t know whether the new tool is worse or better than the old one!

Impatience with results from all online marketing methods has always been an issue; people still seem to think that making quick money is posisble on the Internet; I’m afraid the only way to do that is probably to sell people on the Internet ‘Get Rich Quick’ schemes!  But flicking from one technique to another and then to another without giving time for them to work or even knowing whether they ARE working is pointless.

So…my advice?

Well, bearing in mind that I am certainly NOT a marketing expert and not a millionaire, all I can say is apply good, sound, marketing techniques, such as:

1. Measure your traffic to your site or business before you start, using a metric that matters – whether that’s page impressions, money earned, downloads made, whatever suits your business.
2. Introduce new marketing channels in such a way that business from them is identifiable.
3. If your business is cyclical in any way, let new techniques run for at least a fair part of that cycle.
4. When you have your baseline, make changes to the channels one at a time and measure any effects based on those changes.

Just remember the old adage that you cannot manage what you can’t measure; just because the technology changes doesn’t mean that common sense approaches to marketing should change as well.