It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, but there’s nothing like a conference to get me back on that horse. I’m currently out in San Diego for the 7th Annual Healthcare Unbound conference, featuring such speakers as Forrester’s Liz Boehm and DMAA President & CEO Tracey Moorhead.

Things kick off tomorrow morning at 7am PST. I’ll be taking notes and posting them on the fly (or at least nightly) as I did for SXSH and SXSWi. Stay tuned…

In the meantime, it shocks me that Twitter is not selling one thing already: analytics. Brands, marketers, and even plenty of Twitter Elitists would kill to know more about their influence: from the really simple stuff like visits to your profile, to better understanding how your conversations spread (beyond invented metrics like ReTweetability). Omniture has rolled out a Twitter analytics package, but much of the data I’m envisioning can only come from the mothership. Not only would this provide value to those already well established in the community, but would be indispensable to those trying to build a business case for their companies and clients to dip a toe in the water.

This seems like a no-brainer. The talented developers at Twitter could launch this tomorrow if they wanted. So where are the analytics?

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. — Winston Churchill

An annual marketing survey released by Alterian in February found that a startling majority of marketers fail to implement analytics to measure the success of their efforts. Only 47% of the 1500 marketers, agencies, marketing services providers and systems integrators polled asserted the use of analytics in their campaigns.

Most alarming, however, is the attribution of this statistic to the fact that marketers found analytics “difficult.”

Churchill had it right, but it seems some marketers have taken him too literally. “Occasionally” is not the operative word; it is of course intended for ironic effect. Measurement — regardless of how we may define success for a given initiative — is the only way we as marketers know if our strategy was sound. And it is one of the key inputs in defining and optimizing the strategy the next time around.

Street teams are a tried and true promotional tactic; yet in the ad above, Western Union shows us it can be hard to give anything away to strangers on the street — even cold hard cash. But leave it to marketing “amateurs” at the Hope Fellowship Church to come up with a simple but ingenious ploy that I was helpless to resist.

I was approaching the entrance to the T the other day when a woman standing just outside asked me if I’d like a free granola bar. Never one to turn down free food no matter what it is or how recently I’ve eaten, and thinking that this was a sampling promotion, I said sure. So she handed me a plain old Quaker Chewy granola bar. Umm… OK?

But I soon realized that this unassuming woman was in fact a master of sleight of hand, as I discovered under the granola bar in my hand a business-card sized note:

There you have it: Free Food + Soft-sell Message = Everybody Wins. Put another way: you can hand me flyers all day long, as long as there’s a chewy granola bar attached to them.