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he would have to "moderate" his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be "more efficient" than the traditional media that usually eats the lion's share of P&G's ad budget.This is coming from the man who increased P&G's adspend by a staggering 24 percent over the two years through October 2011, even though sales rose only 6 percent in the same period.

Note that P&G's revenues were up 4 percent to $22 billion in the quarter but the company's costs for sales, general and administrative work were flat.

n the call, McDonald and his crew were asked about ad costs three different times. McDonald eventually said: As we've said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent. Actually, I believe that over time, we will see the increase in the cost of advertising moderate. There are just so many different media available today and we're quickly moving more and more of our businesses into digital. And in that space, there are lots of different avenues available. In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions and there are many other examples I can cite from all over the world. So while there may be pressure on advertising, particularly in the United States, for example, during the year of a presidential election, there are mitigating factors like the plethora of media available.

What’s the potential audience size around a Twitter hashtag?

in the early days of webs stats, reported figures tended to centre around the notion of hits, the number of calls made to a server via website activity.

Widespread social media monitoring/tracking is largely still in the realm of “hits” measurement. Personal dashboards for services such as Twitter typically display direct measures provided by the Twitter API, or measures trivially/directly identified from Twitter API or archived data – number of followers, numbers of friends, distribution of updates over time, number of mentions, and so on.

Once upon a time, the hush-hush plans and special-access security clearance would have been about some cutting-edge sneaker technology: the discovery of a new kind of foam-blown polyurethane, say, or some other breakthrough in cushioning science. But the employees in this lab aren't making shoes or clothes. They're quietly engineering a revolution in marketing.

Nike Digital Sport, a new division the company launched in 2010.

On one level, it aims to develop devices and technologies that allow users to track their personal statistics in any sport in which they participate. Its best-known product is the Nike+ running sensor, the blockbuster performance-tracking tool developed with Apple (AAPL). Some 5 million runners now log on to Nike (NKE) to check their performance. Last month Digital Sport released its first major follow-up product, a wristband that tracks energy output called the FuelBand.

This emphasis on organic growth has a side benefit of distributing authority. In Holacratic systems, individuals operate without managers because many of them have decision-making power in a particular area.

Decision-making is further aided and hastened by airing ‘tensions’ in meetings. Stirman defines this use of tension broadly, calling it “any difference between what is and what could be.” In this sense, tensions can be negative (e.g. I don’t have time for that project, my chair isn’t ergonomic, etc.) or positive (e.g. I have a vision for a feature we should create).

“Once you identify what a tension is, you can feel it in your shoulders, in your ears. You know you’re worried about something. Now, when I identify a tension, I jot it down. If I can’t resolve it by myself, I bring it to my circle’s next tactical meeting. With these meetings, you’re always making things a little bit better.”