Of Google Analytics and Nightmares

The following post was written by Mark Van Tilburg, the executive director of marketing and communications at Youngstown State University.

Before anybody dreamed up the term “Web-too-point Oh,” when having a fax machine of my own and three buttons on my desk phone made me a state-of-the-science communications executive, I carried myself with such great confidence and a kind of light-footed romantic sense of the world that all problems, great and small, were manageable. I slept every night straight through, certain that the next day’s challenges would be easily conquered.

What a lovely dream.

Yes, my days as an Olympic-class sleeper (able to log a solid 9 to 14-hours in nearly any circumstance) are now but a distant memory, lost to the cold sober reality that one of my jobs as a university marketing director is to manage the never ending development and deployment of the university’s website.

I fear that those halcyon nights of yore, will likely never be mine again, because everybody is looking to me to ensure that the institutional branding goals and web content integrity meet their expectations. Every one of our faculty, all alumni, donors and current students (not to mention the universe of web surfers, IT geeks, high school students, parents and grandparents) has 24/7 accesses to monitor our progress.

It’s no wonder, me thinks, that many days I just want my pillow and a couple – seven stiff shots of Black Jack. As John Keats (the greatest English poet of all times, period!) so aptly put it:

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

………

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth;

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

And with thee fade away into the forest dim….

Is anyone else out there suffering, even mildly, from flights of fancy and distraction or similar symptoms?