…and the one closest to my house!
According to an article in Inc. Magazine Portland, Maine was the 32nd best U.S. city for doing business. Contributing factors included a 1-year job growth of 1% and 5-year job growth of 8%.
Here at flyte we’re doing our part. Our 1-year job growth is 50% and our 5-year growth is 200%!! Where would Portland be without us! 
Today’s topic: when is it OK to take email addresses you’ve collected and add them to your email marketing campaign?
I’m having a dilemma. I’m trying to balance the needs of my clients to ethically market their services while protecting them from becoming spammers. Everyone hates spammers, so no one wants to look in the mirror and see one looking back at them.
First: How flyte defined spam:
Specifically, the issue at hand is how do we handle emails that they’ve collected over time? I was always in the camp that said if you didn’t get permission to add them to your email mailing list, you can’t add them.
And so on…
When clients did come with a list of previous customers, vendors and associates they were often upset that we wouldn’t add them to the email mailing list…yet they also hated spam and spammers.
Often I suggested that we send out an "invitation email" to this list. It consisted of the following:
Lawyer friends have told me that it’s funny that laypeople assume that they know everything about the law. Random people ask them questions about copyright, import/export, restraining orders, cybercrime, etc. Most lawyers are very specialized and don’t feel comfortable talking outside of their area of expertise. (Perhaps out of fear that they’ll then be sued by giving bad advice.)
The same is true with Web developers. Because I spend much of my day in front of my computer a lot of people assume I know everything about computers, the Internet, networking, spyware, etc.
In fact, one lawyer–a friend of a friend–who had just finished lamenting the above mentioned fact about lawyers, asked me what I did. "Oh, you work with computers? I have a question. Suddenly my computer at home is really slow. What’s causing that?"
(Oddly, I was able to diagnose it, despite the fact that she was on a PC and I live in a Mac world. I asked, "do you have a teenager who has recently downloaded some music file-sharing software?" That quickly led to what the issue most likely was.)
Wow…five paragraphs in and I’m still not to the point of the post. I must really be trying to avoid work today.
The point of today’s post is to announce a new category on our flyte blog called Ignore It! Every week, a client gets an email or a fax that should go directly to the circular file. Invariably, they instead send it to me. (I don’t blame them; if I get a scary looking tax thingy in the mail I immediately contact my accountant.)
To save time, and perhaps shame some of these companies into better practices, (hah!) I’m going to start blogging about them here. No, I won’t create any links to them and give them any of my PageRank, but I might post some phone numbers if I’m really pissed.
If you have any suggestions for additional companies to add, please contact us rather than using the comment fields below. Provide as much detail as you can.
Today’s Ignore It! Spotlight: Domain Registry Support
What this company is doing certainly isn’t illegal…just misleading. They see a company’s new domain registration the way street hustlers see fresh-faced teens getting off the bus in Los Angeles…fresh meat.
Once you’ve registered your domain (i.e., yourdomain.com,) you’ll get an official looking fax from them titled: FINAL NOTICE OF DOMAIN EXTENSION. (Ah, if only it was the final notice.) They tell you that yourdomain.us "has now become available for registration. Consequently the possibility of conflicting domain name registrations may occur." (My emphases,not theirs.)
With phrases scattered throughout like:
REGARDING: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY NOTIFICATION PROCESS and
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE UNITED STATES LEGAL CODE and
You are required to advice the notification processor of your intent to license this domain name…
it’s no wonder why it scares the bejeezuz out of many people.
This is not a business plan! This is a business scam!
There is no service being provided here. There’s no value-added item. This is just flood insurance for the north pole. If you do want to tie up other versions of your domain, worry about .org, .net and .biz long before you worry about .us. I mean, who uses .us?
In other words, if you receive a fax by the Domain Registry Support…Ignore it!
Personally, I love the letters page of any magazine. Especially after a big, controversial article or issue. The exception is the letters page after the SI swimsuit issue…are they recycling letters from the 50′s or are people still up in arms about women in bikini’s in their sports mag?
This morning over frozen waffles and a cup of coffee I opened BusinessWeek and read the letters column that contained responses from the article Blogs Will Change Your Business. Some of the responses had been posted to the BusinessWeek Blog early on, but others either came in by mail or email.
There were people on both sides of the argument, and many reasonably skeptical. Some excerpts and thoughts follow…
In the real world a few hundred–maybe a couple thousand at best–say something sufficiently interesting to draw a reasonable number of hits. As for the remaining 8,999,000, they are relegated to the blogtopia of taking in each other’s electronic laundry!
–Paul N. Wenger
West Hartford, Conn.
While it’s true that most business bloggers won’t get the type of traffic that BusinessWeek, Stonyfield Farms, or Microsoft might enjoy, I think that’s missing an important point. Many of us run small businesses, and don’t need the ear of the entire country. With the Web, and now with blogs, a company serving a niche audience can survive. The Internet loves specialists!
A company doesn’t necessarily need to reach everyone. By creating targeted posts of interest to their customers and prospects, a good blogger can grow his/her business without thousands of visitors a day.
BTW, if Paul N. Werger is out there, please contact me or leave a comment below. I’d love to know your thoughts on this.
To what problem is Weblogging the answer? No problem in reality, and every problem in the minds of its boosters. Haven’t we seen this trend before–in push media, home-page building sites, portals, and viral marketing?
–Nico Macdonald
London
I think the problem is connecting with customers, a problem almost every business suffers from. Although at first glance Nico’s list seems like a collection of over-hyped bombs, I’d argue that every item in that list survives today in another form (with perhaps push media being the exception. That was a problem of taking into consideration only what the company wanted and not what the customer was interested in.)
Home-page building sites may not have turned the Internet on its head, but they certainly survive and companies are making money off of them. And aren’t blogs just the newest version of home page building sites? TypePad and others are certainly making a business out of them.
Portals continue to survive today…aren’t Yahoo and MSN.com examples of thriving portals?
And since when isn’t viral marketing working? Perhaps Ms. Macdonald hasn’t been to Burger King’s subservient chicken Web site.
On a smaller scale, I’ve found viral marketing works wonders. Since I posted a free download of my business blog presentation my blog traffic has tripled. It’s too soon to tell, but if only a few people end up hiring flyte to consult with them on their business blog, or ask me to speak to their organization on blogs, it will be well worth it.
Blogs will survive, but they will morph into something different but similar. This will be the future of blogs: (spoiler alert!)
(BTW, I’ll keep this post up forever so we can come back and laugh at how wrong I was.)
Again, if Nico is out there and finds this post, please contact me…I’d love to hear your thoughts.
In short, many small businesses and solopreneurs read BusinessWeek. Even if blogs aren’t the answer for the Fortune 500, they offer great opportunities to the rest of us.
Thoughts?
Darren Rowse references a post by Peter Flaschner and discusses whether design matters in blogs.
There was a lot of intelligent back and forth. I think a lot of blog purists believe it’s all about the content. Designers counter that "people like shiny things."
The discussion of content versus design in blogs is like discussing what makes a rectangle bigger: height or width?
A good looking blog with bad content won’t encourage repeat visits, and quality posts
in an ugly wrapper will be perceived as mediocre or even poor writing. (If you doubt this, pick up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book: Blink: The Power
of Thinking without Thinking, which I just reviewed in a previous post.)
I love a blog’s simplistic layout. However, they are also (generally) well designed. The
default choices at Blogger or Typepad are (mostly) all attractive. Well chosen fonts and remote style sheets allow people to express themselves without mucking up the design.
That
being said, after months of looking at my own blog, I decided that I
wanted our designer to take a crack at it. (He will soon.)
There will be a lot more custom designs for blogs going
forward, both for better or worse. No matter how nice the default
layouts may be, (compared to so many poorly designed Web sites out
there,) ultimately people will want to express their individuality
through design as well as through content.
I know what you’re thinking: Thank God not another post about blogging! (I hear you…I needed a break, too.)
The other day I finished Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell. I had read an interview with him in Business 2.0 or Fast Company or one of those types of magazines that I like and the ideas that were in the book intrigued me.
The basic idea is that sometimes a gut reaction (the first two seconds) can be better than scientific research. Gladwell looks at why this is true, and why sometimes our initial reactions can go so wrong.
The book starts strong, with an excellent (cautionary) tale about a museum’s purchase of a great find in near-mint condition. All the tests they do come back proving the statue is as old as it’s supposed to be, and all the accompanying documentation back up its authenticity.
However, as art experts are brought in, they almost immediately sense something’s wrong, although they can’t put their finger on it. Some actually feel sick.
After another round of extensive testing, the statue is proven to be a fraud, despite all of the scientific evidence to the contrary.
While the book is filled with interesting and intriguing stories
like that one, and the debacle that ended Amadou Diallo’s life, in the
end, it’s just a collection of fascinating stories. The common thread
that ran through the stories was too weak to leave me with a feeling of
"aha! Now I know what to do!"
However, let me share a little story with you (if you’ve got the time.)
Addendum: Find an updated version of these Web marketing PowerPoint slides here.
Today’s seminar on How to Plan, Build and Promote a Business Blog went well. (Except for me blanking on my opening remarks and thus skipping some ever-so-clever insights and observations.)
Despite what I might have thought, people came up to me after and told me they learned a lot. That’s always cool. If I transferred some of my enthusiasm about blogs to the people who came that’s great.
What I tried to get across is–that in the end–a business blog is just a communication tool…it can be used well or poorly. Hopefully, by the end of the presentation more people knew how to use them well.
If you’d like to take a look at my PowerPoint presentation, have at it. I have two versions: one is a PowerPoint Show (2.9MB) which you’ll need PowerPoint to run. After you download it you may need to open it in PowerPoint as opposed to just double-clicking on it. I haven’t figured out why.
The other is a PDF of the handouts. It weighs in at a meaty 7.7MB. Why? Because there’s a lot of screen captures and I didn’t bother resizing all of them before adding them to PowerPoint because I ran out of time. Maybe I’ll go back and fix it sometime in the future.
These will only be available for download until 5/25/05, so grab ‘em while they last.
Remember: If you have trouble opening the PowerPoint Show, first launch PowerPoint, then through PowerPoint open the show.
Addendum (5/22/05): Because I’ve received a lot of positive feedback and links from some of the luminaries of blogging–people whom I’ve learned, borrowed and stolen from–such as T.L. Pakii Pierce, Patsi Krakoff and Denise Wakeman, and Priya Shah, I’m going to keep these up until Friday, May 27th.
Part of the reason I don’t want to keep these up forever is because I’m already rethinking my approach for the presentation. I want to talk more about how business blogging can fit into one’s online marketing campaigns and provide more examples. I also want to focus more on RSS, which I think may be the most powerful component of blogging.
This was version 1.0, and just like your baby photos, you don’t want them brought out by your parents when you have your date over.
<shameless plug>
BTW, if you’re looking for someone to present to your organization on Business Blogs, or you’re looking to consult with someone about starting your own business blog, please contact me. I’d be happy to speak with you and work something out.
</shameless plug>
Addendum (5/30/05): Thanks for everyone who download the presentations. At this point I’ve taken them offline. When I have the new and improved versions, I’ll post those to this blog.
If you want to be alerted when that happens, be sure to subscribe to this blog through the subscription box (near the top right) or syndicate this site through a newsreader. Thanks!
Today we’re sending out a new issue of our email newsletter newly re-christened "flyte log." This month’s feature article is "5 Reasons a Blog is Better Than an Email Newsletter…and 3 Reasons It’s Not."
I actually wrote this article before I read the post "RSS Vs. Email: Its a Stupid Debate" at Marketing Slave. Hopefully blogger Priya Shah will forgive me my title, since in the end I come to the same conclusion she does…blogs and email marketing work best together.
One of the big plusses for blogs right now is that email newsletters
often run into impenatrible spam filters. Bloggers often cite
this as a reason why blogs rule.
However, we’re already seeing
instances of comment spam and trackback spam; now there are complaints about "blog and ping" scenarios which T.L. Pakii Pierce explains in How to Blog for Fun and Profit better than I ever could in his original post and in his follow up. He also cites some other instances of blog spam. With spam comes the spam filter. How this may affect the future of blogs is still up in the air.
Wherever there’s opportunity, there will inevitably be opportunists.
Blogs are not a replacement (at this time) for email newsletters or Web sites. The more marketing sticks you have in the fire, the more opportunity you have for some toasty marshmellows.
You can read the entire "blogs vs. email" newsletter online here. You can subscribe to the newsletter from our home page or right here:
Caveat: by signing up for the free email newsletter you will also be receiving our free report "10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Web Site." Hope that’s not a problem.
Mark your calendars! Get out your day timers! Bring a bag lunch!
Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 18th, Rich Brooks will be presenting a free business blog seminar: How to Plan, Build and Promote a Business Blog.
Date: 5/18/05
Time: 12 noon
Place: The Resource Hub, Portland, Maine
Directions
Get more details on our business blog seminar.
Often, when I talk about business blogs–which is often–people ask, "but what would I blog about? Do my customers really want to hear about my products and services three times a week?"
Probably not. But I think that question belies a misunderstanding of how to best use a business blog.
Although a business blog is ultimately about business, a blog solely promoting your products and services is doomed to fail.
A blog is a communication tool, and your customers and prospects probably don’t want to be "communicated to" regarding your offerings repeatedly throughout the week.
Sorry to say, most of your customers, and even more of your prospects, don’t care about you. They only care about themselves.
As it’s been said before, everyone is tuned into radio station WII-FM. (What’s In It For Me.) Keep that in mind in writing your blog.
For example…
My wife, who is fortunate enough to hear me talking about blogs 24/7 at home, works for Casco Development, a software firm in Portland, Maine, that created ShopVue, software that tracks information on factory floors. Their client base consists of manufacturers.
She often says, "this is all fine and good, but what would we blog about? We don’t have enough content to communicate with our clients several times a week with what’s going on with ShopVue development, or even tips and tricks to use the software."
I couldn’t agree more.
However, what are their clients interested in? Anything to do with manufacturing. Every day laws are passed and rates go up or down that affect their business. Every few months a new buzz word comes along–now it’s "lean manufacturing"–that all businesses try to incorporate.
What if Casco began a blog that reported on laws, stats and surveys that impacted their client base? Prospects may begin to see them as an expert in the field. When they talk about lean manufacturing–and how ShopVue could help companies achieve it–they would already have a captive audience.
Throw in regular ShopVue tips and tricks, client success stories, manufacturing trends, press releases and best practices, and they have a real opportunity to succeed.
Yes, it will take time and effort, and a decision will need to be made regarding the ROI, but that’s what I would blog about…if I were Casco.
What are your clients interested in? What can you be blogging about?
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