Higher Office
by Claire Cain Miller

Upstart Jive Software aims to change the way people work by bringing social networking to the office. It's up against some firm called Microsoft.

Jive Software chief executive David Hersh has a lofty goal: a world where office work is so fulfilling, inspiring and free of trivialities that parodies like Dilbert and The Office cease to exist.

There are loftier goals--ending genocide, famine, cancer--but Hersh's is a good fight, and you can make a lot of money helping companies get themselves out of those endless e-mail chains and pointless meetings of office work. Jive's software uses the Web to do that.

"People live in e-mail and documents no one else can see. We're changing the way companies work," says Hersh.

Read the full article on Forbes.com >>

db Clay, known to many of us at Portland's Saturday Market as the groovy collection of wallets made out of duct tape has come a long way with their sophisticated new e-commerce website built primarily using Ruby on Rails technology.

www.dbclay.com

To kickoff the site and 10 year anniversary (founder Garett Stenson started at 19 years old in college - sickeningly talented young entrepreneur) of the company, db Clay is throwing an insane party on Thurs, May 29 at Lizard Lounge and a 2-day sale on May 30-31. Check out the invite and the goods here >>

The MediaPost article begins:

Email Open Rates: What's the Alternative?
by Loren McDonald , Thursday, May 8, 2008

MY PREVIOUS COLUMN, "WHY THE Email Open Rate Must Die" spawned a spirited debate, mainly on these three topics (click here to read the first column and all 17 comments):

Don't kill the open rate, but view it in the proper perspective.
PLEASE let it die!
What can we replace it with? You don't offer any suggestions other than to say we can do better.

I stand guilty as charged of not offering an alternative to the open rate in that first column. I will remedy that in this column.

The Open Rate: Rename, Rethink, Redefine

So, what are the alternatives to the open rate?

1. As I understand it, none exist today or in the near future. Some have suggested using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to track opens, but many email clients also block CSS. The major email providers (Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail/Live Mail, Gmail) can more accurately track "open or read rates" because the email client resides on their servers and does not have to hit an external server. But, the chance of these email providers sharing open data is as likely as world peace.

2.So, let's rename it the "Email Render Rate" or something similar that reflects what the tracking images really measure. My proposed "render rate" would more accurately reflect what occurs when images are loaded in a recipient's email client. This includes in preview panes, software clients such as Outlook or Web-based services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

This redefinition (nothing else changes) will benefit retailers and others for whom product images are important to conversion. A render rate of 25% lets the sender know that their email rendered with images in 25% of the messages seen by recipients' inboxes or smart phones.

Analyzing the subscriber base by render rate over time would help the marketer better optimize creative for subscribers who normally view images and for those who don't. As smart marketers and the industry make this shift, I'm sure dozens of other creative uses of the render rate would also emerge.

3.Next, let's de-emphasize the open rate and focus the email scorecard on output and business metrics. I'm not devaluing email process metrics. In fact, I find tremendous value in spam-complaint and unsubscribe rates, for example.

But ultimately, the only metrics your CEO and CFO care about are those that measure how the email program supports business goals such as growing revenues, increasing margins, improving customer retention and lowering communications costs.

Read the full article here >>

Freedom, A Twitter Away For UC Berkeley Student Arrested In Egypt

"As surreal as it may sound, Twitter can get you out of jail! The catch...send the right message to as many people as possible as fast as you can and voila!

UC Berkeley journalism graduate student James Karl Buck (29), former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, was arrested during a demonstration in Mahalla El-Kobra, an industrial city in the Nile Delta.

What the Egyptian authorities didn't probably expect was the prompt reaction of a large circle of friends in the United States and the anti-government bloggers in Egypt, who were sent an instant text message from his cellular phone: "ARRESTED," the San Jose Mercury News reports.

The micro-blogging service allows users to send text messages up to 140 characters long, and the message Buck sent had the desired outcome: his friends called the University, the American Embassy, as well as the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and other media.

The result: he was released the next day, although according to his affirmations, the Egyptian authorities told him just hours after his arrest, in the middle of the night, that he was a free man."

I'll share some appropriate pics and video upon my return and try to make it somewhat relevant to the online marketing world, but for now, I'm going to enjoy a well-deserved week off blog posts, among others. Did a little research on YouTube, and thought I'd share this one:

eROI has been in Old Town / Chinatown for the past 6 months and we've seen a dozen other software companies and creative agencies move into the neighborhood. We're big fans.

ENGLISH VERSION

MANDARIN VERSION

KATU.com: Lincoln H.S. parents receive hoax 'prom night' letter

"PORTLAND, Ore. - Administrators at Lincoln High School are trying to find out who sent a hoax letter to parents about this Saturday's senior prom.

The letter is printed on what appears to be Portland Public Schools letterhead and it says students will likely be drinking, doing drugs, and having sex on prom night.

The letter goes on to encourage parents to open their homes for parties so kids don't drink and drive and even provides instructions on how much alcohol to provide.

District officials say they did not send the letter and that it is an elaborate hoax.

In addition to finding out who wrote and sent the letters, the district wants to know how the pranksters gained access to addresses of parents and guardians of Lincoln students."

The full report is at this link:
http://eroi.com/online-marketing-resource-center/resource-center/?sec=3

Respondents:
· Over 500 marketers were surveyed about the subscribe/unsubscribe process. While these processes are improving, they have yet to reach what we would call exceptional.

Key observations:
· People are not matching up other marketing efforts like they should
· People are not monitoring feedback loops and complaint rates
· The thank you page, prime visitor real estate is being wasted
· Not surveying subscribers at opt out
· Not allowing frequency changes

Some Results:

I. Opt - in:
--Only 30% of the respondents say they use opt-in; still below where the industry should be

--Of those that use opt-in; only a 4% provide more than 10 ways for someone to opt-in and the majority, three-quarters, have only 1-3 ways.

--Incentives/Content for opting:
§ 88% offering newsletter subscription
§ 29% offering access to preferred content
§ 24% offering discounts/coupons
§ 22% offering some kind of contest

--One-third of marketers don't do any segmenting at opt-in

--Landing page improvements needed

II. Opt-Out
--30% of marketers don't pass opt-in names onto other systems

--65% won't pass on when subscribers opt-out

--CRM Systems - lead way in third-party applications for opt-in/out

--90% of marketers don't follow up with opt-outs - potential for reaching through other channels

--One-third of marketers don't send a confirmation email after opt-out - which can offer the chance for the subscriber to change mind.

III. Feedback Loop:
--Nearly one-quarter of email marketers don't know what they currently do with abuse complaints, or how they are handled. Is this lack of education by the ESP or is it lack of understanding the value of feedback loops and the purpose of them?

--Only about one-half of email marketers currently monitor feedback loops.

Until then, Download the Full PDF presentation of "Bringing Sexy Back to Email" here>>

It's the second downloadable document on that page. Tell me what you think.

Stross mentioned in the NY Times article that both Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Mark Cuban of Mark Cuban get upwards of 2,000 emails every day and 700 messages daily in Facebook, and both of these executive process all of these emails themselves. I get about 400 emails per day and usually reply to and send 60 emails/day if I'm not booked in meetings all day.

While email is the killer app and where I spend most of my time "online," I also occasionally blog, use LinkedIn sporadically, barely use Facebook, and Twitter when I'm distracted at a conference. Basically, this blog post is my first online admission of becoming an old man - with so many distractions, I wonder if technology company entrepreneurs and executives will evolve into communicating in truncated sentence grunts with very little deep strategic thinking, planning and writing.

I have clients asking frequently, "how will I have time to do everything I do now, AND blog AND engage in all of these conversations about my brand in every single online community?" I've adapted my answer to a more definitive "You can't do it all single-handedly." Let me get back to my 35-year old friend who has 40 profiles - LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Answers, Lockergnome, digg, del.icio.us, and on and on and on. The new generation and grandpa-old 35 year olds playing the new generation's world, attention deficit disorder is a requirement, not a condition.

So, what's my advice in this cultural change in expectations of keeping up in the online marketing world? Experiment with all of the social networking sites and tools, and find 3 sites/tools that generate the most value to you individually and/or your company (as an entrepreneur, individual benefit/company benefit is often the same). Thankfully, there is a new protocal, OpenID, where one username/password will carry all your info with you for every online community you join, because in the future, we will all be participants in hundreds of these broad social communities or niche branded communities.

With the acceleration of online communication, it relieves anxiety just to admit that "yes, I too, feel completely overwhelmed and overloaded by using every social site and tool that comes along." I've said it and those words shall set me free. Now, if I could just leave my Blackberry locked in my office desk on a weekend. Fat chance.

Download the Full PDF presentation of "Bringing Sexy Back to Email" here>>. It's the second downloadable document on that page. Tell me what you think.

The genesis of the idea for this speech came from attending a panel on email marketing at MediaPost's OMMA Hollywood show last month. At that panel, the nation's top email experts, who I have a ton of respect for, all had a similar response to the question, "what's exciting coming up in the near future for email marketing?" After a few chuckles and shrugs that it's the same old same old in the email world, these top email software and agency experts' answers included "email is a workhorse" and it "is the plumbing of the internet." To paraphrase the response, email has the highest ROI of any online marketing medium, but it's ultimately boring in its implementation.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Where is the passion? Where is the sex appeal? Email has been around for a long time, but don't tell me it's boring. Email is dead sexy, but first let's explore who is sexy to you? Before you look at the images below, think about who you find sexy and why are they sexy? Great looking. Hot body. Amazing voice. Atheletic. Bad girl or Bad boy personality. Something luring you in?

Ignore these pics below, and tell me WHO IS SEXY to you?

What does this have to do with Email?

Email is Dead Sexy and here's why:
--Email is the Killer App - only true push medium
--More brand touchpoints than any other medium
--Highest ROI - Email Works
--Core of Building Online Community
--Successful Email Trigger Campaign - Fosters 2-way dialogue

Don't forget to download the Full PDF presentation of "Bringing Sexy Back to Email" here>>.

Two crucial factors are driving the trend: Software companies -- particularly those focusing on social networking, online advertising and finance -- are thriving. And a hip office in a central location can be a competitive edge in attracting top-notch staff."

To check out the OregonLive blog entry, go here to see the full monty >>

The Oregonian article really needs the images to accompany it, so see those below.

www.emarketingsummit.com for information and registration
Use Discount Code EROI8EMS for the $129 price. Prices includes two day summit, both luncheons topics and Don Tapscott Featured Speaker breakfast on April 17.

The 4th annual eMarketing Summit meets in Portland, Oregon this year, and brings together marketers, business owners and internet professionals.
This two day Summit focuses on social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing and web 2.0 tools, including widgets and more. Guest speakers include Don Tapscott, Author of Wikinomics; Rohit Bhargava, Sr. VP, Digital Strategy, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Kent Lewis, Anvil Media; with additional speakers from Northwest Airlines, Razorfish/Avenue A, Hill & Knowlton Digital, Jive Software, Kick Apps and many others.

4/16: 10:30am - 11:30am
What the Heck is a Widget?
Dylan Boyd, Vice President of Sales and Strategy, eROI, Inc.
Matt Bijur, Vice President, Business Development, KickApps
David White, VP of Business Development, FlightStats
Mike Berkley, CEO, SplashCast Media
Widgets are building blocks for social aggregators. Widgets can also quickly help your web site reach new audiences in web 2.0 including social media, blog, web site and more. This expert panel will discuss the roadmap to planning, designing, creating and distributing this innovative gadget.

4/17: 10:30am - 11:30pm
Bringing Sexy Back into Email Marketing
Ryan Buchanan, President, eROI, Inc.
Has your email marketing program gotten tired, neglected, and stuck in a rut? eROI CEO, Ryan Buchanan, will use several case studies from some sexy and unsexy businesses to show how marketers can breath life back into their email marketing program. More...