A recent Business Week article reports that AOL plans to create the "newsroom of the future" by using high-powered technology to revolutionize the business of gathering and presenting news.

At a time when print giants like former AOL sister company Time magazine and virtually every major daily in the U.S. are struggling to cope with the new media landscape, AOL has hired more than 500 full-time journalists and buys contributions from more than 3,000 freelancers.

Quoting CEO Tim Armstrong, the article goes on to say that AOL is using advanced analytics to measure reader interest and engagement in stories those journalists create, and may even share profits with writers whose stories earn the most page views. As a former journalist, I understand how earth-shattering that approach really is. But more importantly, I believe that marketing is undergoing a similar, analytics-inspired revolution. I wish I could say that marketers were leading the charge in B2B Marketing Analytics, but we’re not.

Just an hour ago, I participated in a teleconference where a marketer told us he believed that he suffered in the recession-driven budget free-for-all because his management questioned marketing's relevance to sales. It’s my guess that similar sentiments are expressed regularly in the executive suites of B2B companies around the world.

The good news is that, as with journalism, technology offers marketing the tools needed to transform our industry into the kind of sales relevance the C suite seems to be seeking (some might say, demanding).

In fact, we are all too often drowning in data – time on site, bounce rates, click-through rates, impressions, open rates, abandonment rate, page rank, to name just a few. But how does this arcane language of the new media relate to our real-world task of demonstrating our success (or lack thereof) in achieving business goals? The answer is different in almost every case. Why? Because the goals are different, as are the tactics and programs employed to reach them.

So there’s no cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all answer. But there is an answer. You just have to look for it, and be willing to pressure your team to provide it. And my guess is that you want to produce it before budget times rolls around again next year.