Monkeyserver.com

Last Thursday I went to the second Triangle Tweetup, held at C[Capstrat]], a local media agency. It was quite a nice location, though we did fill it with the 60+ twitterers who showed up. As always @waynesutton did a great job of organizing interesting presentations, among which were:

• Twitter Movie Reviews, a cool app by @JazzyChad that aggregates twitter movie comments to catch the vibe about a movie.
  My thoughts:Pretty Hip, but I can probably get the same info by just listening to my feed, many trends seem to emerge from small groups and be echoed by the masses. Aside from that, I know which of my friends to trust on this front. Listening to the masses might end up with me watching the next jackass movie, no thanks. Either way, it is a great way to show the power of twitter to find what has buzz and what the crowd likes - crowd sourcing at it’s most pure.
  The big downfall I saw to this tool was that it was almost completely manual, and that just won’t scale. However, Chad seems to be on top of getting things automated, if he can sort that out he may be able to branch out to other areas instead of just movies. What about restaurants, hotels, vaca spots, or products. There could be money to be had here…
• The latest in media devices from @shepherdfx (Francis Shepherd). This was a review of the latest in mics and cameras mostly at the pro and semi pro level. Quite interesting to see where the market is going.
  My Thoughts: All this stuff is out of my price range, but it’s great to see everything is getting cheaper and cheaper, which means it could be in my price range soon.
• @critter, the local colorful twitterer, did a presentation on C[seesmic]]. I think Critter actually talked about this at the last tweetup as well. This time however, the app has grown more into its own, and I now better understood that it is more about interactive movie chat. Like a video twitter. A huge improvement is that there are threads.
  My Thoughts: I don’t do much video chat, it feels like the futuristic world that every wonk was predicting 20 years ago. It’s not that it isn’t a cool site, I’m just not hip to video posts yet. Maybe I’ll try it out soon, if I did, it would definitely be at seesmic, the site is slick and looks quite easy to use.

After the presentations we had some group chat, I didn’t take notes, but here are some major convos I recall:

• C[brightkite]] - cool or annoying?
  A lot of people have picked up on brightkite, a site that lets you broadcast your location in a twitteresque way. So twitterlike, that you can have it actually feed into twitter as well. A smooth integration that many were quick to jump on. The downside of this is that people are now getting spammed with everyone’s location, most of the time I don’t care that much, and many of the people aren’t remotely near me. Besides that, the locations are in address form, some one could be 50 feet away from me, but I wouldn’t know because I am horrible with street names.
  It’s a cool site, geolocal twitter, neato, but I think it still has some work to do before it is truly answering a pain.
• What if twitter goes down… I mean for good
  What will we all do?! Ok, it’s not that bad, but a common reply was “Get work done!” Sad but true. Pownce was brought up, a common complaint being that no one is there - not so true if twitter is dead. I threw IRC out there, because often times the only difference between the two is I’m a little more trigger shy on twitter.

After that the group mostly split up and headed over the bar Capstrat has across the hall (sweet!), some great conversations where had there as well, here’s a bit of what I took part in:

• @jessmartin mentioned that C[Startupweekend]] is coming to the triangle, with a background of coding and a love for startups, this sounds pretty enticing.
• Would C[brightkite]] be better if it were built into the phone, I see the possibility of more great innovations with android coming. Side note, why the heck did apply ruin the iPhone by stifling innovation and not allowing third party developers free reign? If it were built right in then I would have to do anything to tell people where I am, GPS coords could be sent back automatically, and if a friend is within X meters I could be automatically notified.
  
  The question was asked whether or not twitter should do this. Some argued that part of its essence is simplicity and that features like that would muddy it. I agree that the simplicity is key to bringing in new people and getting them addicted. I think the real challenge with any product is adding new features without adding complexity. Twitter’s vision isn’t clear, they may stay 140 char text box or they may branch out, only time will tell.



• Will twitter sell?
  Will they sell, or maybe the better question is after which milestone will they sell? Some postulated that they need to prove the monetary value of a user first, has facebook done that - I’m not sure. A good question was asked here, what if they try to make some money but do a bad job, because it’s not their specialty and by doing so falsely generate a lower valuation. Perhaps they won’t try at all.
• SMS marketing on mobiles
  I think this will take off in USA at some point, but several people brought up not wanting to be spammed. I think if it’s done right it will be more like a service than advertising. C[APML]] (I believe this is what people said) was brought up as a good start to making sure this was done right. Definitely a sticky bit that needs to worked out, exciting!
• How to start using twitter corporately
  I mentioned that I had obtained a few twitter names for Bronto, but that I haven’t done anything with them yet, since I haven’t figured out the route I want to go. @Justis said that was a great idea, think it through before you start a feed that is useless, confusing, or just not a good reflection of your company. Good point. Also, make sure to grab your company’s name and any variations on any new social network right away or some one else will, even if you’re not sure what you’ll do with it yet.

Other tidbits that got thrown around: Why C[Bronto]] is so cool (shameless plug, I know), how to open a beer bottle with your ring, SAS has great benefits, and I need to get into Raleigh for beers with @jefftippett and @Dimambro, among many many others.

Then we got tossed out at 10:00 so the Capstrat folks could go home. A fun night of stimulating conversation spent with some hip local people. After a couple years down here, I’m definitely starting to understand why the triangle is such a great place to live.

 

I recently had another article of mine posted in an industry pub. This time it was an article about standards for html email rendering published in Marketing Profs. Ooooh Exciting! Right? Ok, I get it, it’s not really that exciting. But it is important.

Here’s an analogy, because I’m a big fan of those, imagine if every type of car ran on different gas. I’m not talking about different octane, like 87, 89, 93, I’m talking about different types of gas. It would make the cost of gas so much higher because each gas company would have to make so many different types of gas. That would be silly, so much wasted time and effort. If there were just one type of gas then the companies could optimize their process to create one better grade of gas at a cheaper cost.

Well, right now email marketer have to do something similar. They have to try tailor their messages to work in all sorts of different email clients: Yahoo!, Outlook2003, Hotmail, AOL, and two of the worse Outlook2007 and Gmail. If emails rendered the same in more of these clients it would make things a lot more simple.
The impetus for this article was the email standards site, email-standards.org. A great site and a great movement. BTW, I love their project to get GMail to notice them, project grimace, which I contributed to!

The guys over at google are always introducing great new products and apps. But it’s not always the products they introduce, but how they introduce or educate you about them. Check out this video from Google Russia showing what you can do with gmail. It happens to be in russian, but it’s still a great video to watch.

For more info and detail into this video, check out the blog post from google’s blog.

I just got back from a great conference, Email Evolution, out in San Diego. Ever since joining Bronto Software, myself and DJ Waldow have really been getting involved with the email marketing community out on the internet. DJ especially has been ferocious in his efforts to add something to the already amazing resources that are out there.

We’ve really worked to push Bronto to commit to providing a valuable resource for marketers in general, not just our customers - and it is something that Bronto has now achieved through the combined efforts of our team.
Well this week we finally got to meet up with a number of the other bloggers and industry experts that we have been trading links and blog posts with for the last year or so. (Such as Chad White, Tamara Gielen, and Dylan Boyd just to name a few)
It was fantastic.

This is a really enthusiastic community, after having spent just a few days with everyone it is easy to see that we aren’t driven by competition with each other, but rather cooperation and a genuine love of email marketing.

I just got a little more PR for myself and C[Bronto]] yesterday. An article I had written this summer finally got some airtime. This time over at C[DMNews]], the article was on the main page yesterday, along with a shot of my mug. This one is a fun review of W[bounce message]]s, likening them to ice cream flavors. I think it’s worth a read, if only just to see mention of Moose Tracks and Ben & Jerry’s in an article about the technical aspects of managing rejected email messages. Check out the article - 31 Flavors of Bounce Messages - the article isn’t up anymore, but you can check out the original blog post at Bronto.

I was pretty psyched (and I still am a bit) when this got picked up. I hadn’t been blogging here long when I wrote this article, but I thought I would go out on a limb and write something different, just to see if it would get noticed. I guess it worked.

As the title states, it’s nothing more than that, but I’ll take what I can get.

So here’s the deal, a blog post I wrote got picked up (and then re-written by me) to be featured in imediaconnection, an interactive media and marketing site. The article is titled The best way to expand your email list, which was their choice, not mine. This article is about using the forward to a friend functionality to grow your list.

I’m not sure I’d endorse it as the best way to grow your list. I do think it is a great way to add like-minded people to your list, but it’s effectiveness does limit it’s overall usefulness.

As I said in my last post, this is all part of the continued up tick in PR for Bronto, and I’m happy to ride that wave and contribute to the growth.

Update: More plugs (just cause I can) - my article got mentions from a few of the people that I admire most in the email blogosphere - Tamara Gielen (at the top) and Mark Brownlow (down at the bottom).

I saw a story on DMNews that J.C. Penney is now on trying to get on people’s desktops. Basically they want an avenue to advertise to customers. It’s not too surprising to see J.C. Penny playing in this space. They were recently listed as #12 in Internet Retailer’s top 500 list, so I expect to see them making waves and trying new things.
However, this move has me asking the question, isn’t this the point of the internet itself? I don’t think the problem is that people don’t know how to subscribe to your email list or check out your webpage. It’s that you aren’t actually providing compelling content that keeps me coming back. I’m not sure asking me to download an app to run on my computer is going to change that, even if you include a calendar(!!). Delivering this type of info is exactly what RSS feeds are for. Attempting to circumvent that via your own app just serves to clutter people’s lives more.

I guess this is just an attempt to get out in front of all the people who are confused by or scared of terms like RSS. And this tactic may work for the first few companies who try this, but it certainly won’t scale. You can’t have a JCPenny, Barnes & Noble, Gap, and HomeDepot tool running all at the same time. Beside that, people grow weary of self serving apps like this - why do I need to give you space on my machine to directly advertise to me unless you are providing some immense value that I can’t get elsewhere? I know I don’t need JCPenny on my desktop, maybe I’m just not their target demographic. Alright, I know I’m not.

Update (6/26/07): While surfing around I happened across some one else pushing these BDAs (Branded Desktop Apps) as a solution. Since he’s the VP of the website, I guess I can see why he thinks it’s the solution to the problem. I still think it’s just an awkward paradigm.

I was just poking through my gmail spam folder and noticed that a few of my newsletters had dropped through. That’s not altogether surprising, but I did notice that Vonage was getting in there more often than it made it to my inbox.

A quick look through the content of one of them revealed a few things:

• Large, colorful fonts - we’re talking orange here
• Large footers - that’s a lot of small point font
• at least 7 exclamation points!! (at least there weren’t two at a time)
• A bit image heavy

While none of these are dead spam give aways, they all would add to the score. All in all, still not enough for me to say it was overly spammy. One of the other messages was very tame, with lots of text, no crazy formatting, and almost no !’s. Guilty by association? Maybe, these things are kind of a crap-shoot. I would guess the answer is yes, since my monthly bill got spam foldered too, and that was just plain text.
It just goes to show that we have a long way to go. It’s really hard to be sure that you aren’t missing stuff in your spam folder, and it’s hard for companies to send you interesting emails without getting marked as spam. oh email, why are you so fickle?

BTW, eBags, ProFlowers, and Home Depot each had an email in the spam folder as well.

Update:  I just ran across this page exposing some evil behind Vonage’s Refer a Friend program. Apparently google was smarter than I thought!

…And life goes on. I’ve just signed on to a new company, Bronto. This is a big move - well, I’m not sure when a new job isn’t. But I’ve been flying back and forth to Boston for the last 9 months, and now that’s coming to an end. I’m happy to have found a company in my new home town that focuses on email marketing; something I have become very passionate about over the last couple of years.

This may come as a surprise for some people, heck, it came as a surprise for me. I’m very excited though, it’s always a blast to join a new company. You get to learn new products, people, and challenges. Bronto is very promising, they have a great app and a lot of people who are very excited about what they do. What more can you ask?

Have you ever received a confirmation email, you know when you bought that new pencil sharpener online, or when you signed up for the newsletter on gerbil rearing? That was a transactional email, and they’re sweeping the land.
I’ve been asked several times about transactional emails in my travels. It’s obvious to anyone who has tracked open rates that these emails can have the highest rates out there, because honestly, this is one of the few cases where the customer truly wants to hear from you. Whether you’re telling your customer that their item has shipped, or notifying them that a monetary transaction has been completed, customers tend to open these emails. So this is the perfect email to put it in the hands of your marketing department — but many companies don’t see it that way.

“There’s no way, whether due to business or technical reasons, that marketing will own our transactional emails.”

This was a response I recently heard from a leading financial transaction company whom I was talking to about email marketing. For better or worse, they had very tightly integrated these emails into their operational software, and they weren’t going to change that. For those companies out there who can make the switch, I can only urge them harder and harder to do so now while you can. There is no reason that transactional emails need be plain text! You can use text and graphics here; you can do more than just tell them what they are expecting. And by doing more, you will entice them to do more, and that’s just what you want.

Here’s a good article from clickz that expounds upon this same topic.