I was part of three unrelated discussions this week all, I think, moving us in the right direction.

1.  As you know, ALM has been without a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) since we separated from Incisive Media last September 30th.  With our financial perrformance stabilizing during the first half of 2010 and the need to move faster to develop new products and integrate new technologies, our senior team has now concluded that the time has come to fill that spot.  I have now met with and retained a Recruiter to help us draft a job description and to find us the right person for this critical position.  Honestly, I don't know how long the process will take -- likely a few months -- but I hope to have a new CTO in place by the fall and having an impact on our business shortly thereafter.

2.  A number of us have been talking about Social Media and the ways in which it might be used to build connections to our audience and grow our business.  And we have quite a few individual and business experiments now going on with LinkedIn and Facebook Groups, Twitter feeds and both individual and group blogs.  All of that is terrific.  The time has now come to see if we can use social media in more organized and disciplined ways that lead to measurable results.  To get from here to there we have retained an agency -- Marketechnique -- which specializes in how companies use social media to build stronger relationships with their customers.  We'll likely start small, choosing a couple of market segments or brands so we can get comfortable with the process and learn how to apply it in our environment.  Anne Jackley in our Digital Media Group is managing the project for us, and I know that she will be working with many others around the company as we move this forward.  If you are interested, you can learn more about the work Marketechnique has done for others on their website http://www.marketechnique.com/. 

3.  Had several good discussions this week about developing a mobile strategy for the company, with Jill Windwer (Digital Media Group) and Esfand Pourmand (IT) helping us to navigate.  Just as a few years ago we talked about our web strategy and how to present information on the desktop, the time has now come to figure out what information we should be making available to the on-the-go professionals (lawyers, realtors, etc.) who rely on us for the information they need to succeed in their work.  Jill, Esfand and some of our editors and publishers will be working over the next few weeks to figure out how best to move forward, and to identify outside developers who can do the necessary programming once we decide what we want to offer to our audience.  

On that same subject, I was struck this week by two articles that crossed my desk.  In one, the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, noted in an interview that we need to start working toward "mobile first" strategies in the way that we currently think of "web first".  The interview with Schmidt can be found here: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-googles-schmidt-still-crazy-about-mobile/

The second article was published by our friends at ClickZ and is called "10 Tips for Creating a Winning Mobile Strategy". http://www.clickz.com/3640798.  I think we particularly need to take to heart the suggestion that "the mobile web isn't the mini-internet".  We need to think about what specific needs our audience would have while they are untethered and on-the-go, and then design mobile sites or apps which meet those needs.  There may be good reason to make an existing newspaper or magazine mobile accessible, but simply rescaling our existing websites for the smaller screen isn't going to be enough.

That's enough to think about on a summer Friday right before a long weekend.  I'm off on two weeks vacation, as far away from all things digital and electronic as I can get.  Wishing you all a wonderful 4th of July holiday.

Bill