Hi. My name is Andrew and I am a recovering Twitter user.

It’s been over a week since I last logged into Twitter from my laptop or cell phone. Call me a “Twitter quitter”, but my rationale was solid:

1. I have been spouting increasingly anti-Twitter rhetoric to my marketing peers to try to talk some sense into those that think Twitter is the next marketing revolution.
2. I spent a long weekend on a remote island off the coast of North Carolina for a wedding and didn’t want to be “that guy”. None of my friends knew what Twitter was, and if they did, I don’t think that it would even remotely interest them.

Of course there were a couple times I wanted to check up on the randomness of other people’s lives. But I resisted the temptation and instead enjoyed a few extra minutes of thought and contemplation rather than cramming even more information into a brain already clogged with “news” from around my social network.

One week later I’m still here. The world didn’t stop turning. As much as I would like them to, the lives of people I know (and some I don’t know) don’t revolve around me. I haven’t missed any meetings. All messages intended for me got to me through other channels. I might have missed out on an interesting conversation or two, but they are likely long forgotten by the participants anyway.

Bottom line, it IS possible to stay off of Twitter without missing out on life. I estimate that I actually re-gained about 2-3 hours of productive working time by not tweeting or trying to catch up on others’ messages during the day.

Hmmm…I wonder what else I can unsubscribe from or stay away from? TV? Probably. Facebook? Probably not. Blogs and forums? Not a chance. Books? Wouldn’t want to. The Internet? Not if I want a paycheck.

All marketers know that their jobs are part art, part science. Some companies lean more towards the analytical science of quantifiable marketing, and others are more comfortable with producing beautiful works of art. Is one necessarily better than the other? Not necessarily, depending on your target audience and your business objectives.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the marketing industry is heading down the path of producing and analyzing quantifiable metrics for as many aspects of a campaign as possible, similar to the financial industry’s transition in the 1970’s:

“There is every reason to believe marketing will go through a similar transition, but the principles of marketing–which are around storytelling, entertainment, targeting and selling–will be augmented by analytical tools,” Schmidt said.

This sounds good on paper. There are very few marketers who want to know less about how well their campaigns are working. But it is easy to fall victim to the hype and start thinking that all of our analytical problems will be solved by throwing more CPU cycles and clever code at the problem.

From my days as a Media Planner at a very analytical advertising agency and a Web Marketing Manager a very analytical automotive retailer, I can tell you that the current crop of advertising metrics and analytics packages are nowhere near where they need to be to replace a human being’s experience and strategic capabilities. As Schmidt said, analytical tools will only augment the principles of marketing, not replace them.

The Holy Grail of Marketing Analytics (doesn’t exist)

To really satisfy all the needs of all marketers, a full-fledged analytical marketing program would have to satisfy my newly-created (and partly tongue-in-cheek) tenets of the “Golden Rectangle“; balance the aesthetically pleasing with mathematical accountability.

Tenets of the Golden Rectangle of Marketing

1. Analytical marketers must be able to correlate sales to marketing initiatives. Every sale must be attributed to one or more marketing channels for a period of time. This includes online-to-offline conversions and purchase decisions that involve multiple decision makers and/or long periods of time.
2. Analytical marketers must take all known (and unknown) variables into account when drawing conclusions. This includes macroeconomic factors, competitive strategies, seasonality, media mix, creative execution, brand recognition, solar flares, word of mouth, personal beliefs, and customer’s internal thought processes among other things.
3. Analytical marketers must drive real-time decisions about optimizing across every marketing campaign a client is running, regardless of medium. Hindsight is always 20/20, but it doesn’t tell advertisers what to do with their next marketing dollar when the variables change.
4. Analytical marketers need to understand that some of the success of an advertising campaign will always depend on the human input, whether it is creative or strategic. Machines won’t be able to replicate those traits for a long time to come.

So while it’s great to think that one day all marketing will be entirely analytical and based on some algorithm somewhere in the computing cloud, we have to remember that we live and work in the real world of human wants, needs, desires, psychology, sociology and physiology. If Google can learn to manipulate those variables, they may very well create the next golden rectangle. Until then, people can still serve as the cogs in the marketing wheel.

Wondering when Google is FINALLY going to bless your Google Apps account with offline access to your Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations? Like most Google Apps for Your Domain users, I have been waiting (not so patiently) for the ability to download my documents to Google Gears to work offline in airplanes, subterranean offices, or other internet-challenged locations.

Unfortunately for Google Apps users, the rollout of offline access will occur after the rollout to regular non-Apps users:

We’ve sometimes delayed the launch of features like group chat and colored labels to Google Apps domains because we want to ensure that all the features we bring to the Google Apps suite are useful and stable before providing them to our business, education and organizational users.

However, as an administrator it is possible to opt-in to new services and features within Google Apps by configuring your domain settings like this:

1. Log in to the control panel at https://www.google.com/a/your_domain.com. Be sure to replace ‘your_domain.com’ with your actual domain name.
2. Click Domain settings.
3. Under the General tab, and in the New services and features section, check the box next to Turn on new features.
4. Click Save changes.

It may take up to 24 hours for the features to be added to your domain, but it beats waiting for the rest of the Apps world to catch up.

A few of the offline features and benefits are explained in this video from the Google Apps team:

There’s an informative series of articles over at Shawn Smith’s blog on NewMediaBytes.com about Quick Response (QR) codes. For the unfamiliar, QR codes are 2-dimensional barcodes that contain information about a product or service, similar to (but better than) the barcodes you are used to seeing on everyday products.

QR codes are already popular in Asia, where consumers snap photos of them with their cell phones in newspapers, billboards, and other un-wired media. Special software takes the image and converts it to data such as a URL that can be accessed on the phone’s browser or downloaded to a computer. It remains to be seen how popular these items will become outside of the Asian market, but Shawn’s series of posts paint a very rosy picture of QR codes’ future in the U.S.

I am sure that QR codes will play a role in the mobile web of the future because the technology is too powerful to ignore. However, I don’t think the U.S. market is ready for them just yet and adoption rates will be slowed by the expense and low penetration of broadband-enabled phones with data plans. Case in point, a ZDNet article about an initial trial at Case Western University shows that students are slow to adopt the new technology for a few primary reasons:

• Cell phone carriers charge for data usage. The price for each transaction varies by carrier and by whether the phone owner has an unlimited data plan or pays by the megabyte.
• The software does not come pre-loaded on cell phones.
• There is no standard technology in the U.S. that spans multiple wireless carriers, handset manufacturers, and software developers.
• QR codes are currently only deployed in a few locations around campus: bus shelters, campus newspapers, and a few promotional handouts.

In my opinion, the market will mature when consumers get free (or ad-supported) access to these programs and the wireless industry implements and promotes a common set of standards. The technology has to be built in, work on any device and with any carrier, and should be as idiot-proof as taking a picture with the phone’s camera.