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Sometimes the most important thing in Mass Email is not knowing when or how to send, it’s knowing when NOT to send.

I know, those of you that aren’t involved in the active end of marketing are saying “He’s a bloody spammer…”  The truth is this – I am the gatekeeper who decides who gets to use certain cherished customer lists.  And part of that it ensuring anything that is sent is relevant to the particular user group in question.  And I strongly suggest that anyone in my position managing a customer list for email contact ought to take their job very seriously.

If you’re doing things right, you’ve got an unsubscribe list.  In my case, my email program parses against that list immediately before it sends.  If you’re on that list, your’re not getting any more email from my system, period.  As such, I need to do everything I possibly can to keep our customers from joining that particular list. 

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Due to a newly discovered Windows Flaw, vBulletin is liable to cross site scripting attacks.  They have released a new update to the current 3.6 code stream, and patches for the previous code streams as well.  Go here to find out more (if you have an earlier version, click the patches link).

My Morning Jacket performing “Lowdown” at the Mercury, Austin, TX on June 3, 2003

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A couple weeks ago I posted that the International Herald Tribune was offering an new service that allows you to create podcasts of the stories you want to read and download them to your preferred listening device.  Here’s a review after using it over the past week.

Overall, it is a striking innovation in the way newspaper content is presented.  The implementation needs work, but the basics of the system are sound, easy to use, and give entry to traditional newspaper content into an area it’s never gone before.  My gut feeling is that this is one way the newspapers can follow their dwindling readership base.

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I was talking with Val O. last night and she said “Okay, if not press releases, what should they be doing.”  My snarky answer, “Whatever works.”  But really it’s simpler than that.

Let’s take a look at a friend who’s product manager for a legacy software product.  It’s got 20 years of service, and runs on a platform that’s no longer made or supported by the company that made it.  Feature-wise, it’s still the best in the industry.  So they decided to extend the product by porting it to Windows.

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I’m full of righteously indignant bile and ready to spit nails today, so if you’re not in the mood for a good rant, perhaps you want to skip this post.

Press releases – I have little use for them.  Sure, it’s good to get into the trade press, but the truth is this: your customers don’t read much anymore.  Sorry folks, I know all you MarComm types just spewed non-fat mocha latte out your nose, but the truth is out there.  I say again: your customers don’t read anymore and they especially don’t want to be told that “you’re pleased to announce” anything. 

Take a look at the places that print your press releases, and even more importantly take a look at where the releases show up online.  If they aren’t relevant to your business, your pr isn’t relevant.  I’m finding “important” press releases for customers turning up in Google news off Indian tech sites.  Nothing wrong with those sites, but I’ve got to think the client’s core customer base ain’t reading the Hindustan Tech Voice for their tech news.  The truth for those who want to look, is that Josef Goebbels’ smarmy litany about your new vaporware isn’t real marketing. Your customers see through it and shake their heads, while muttering to themselves.

Marketing engages, marketing discusses, marketing evolves.  We’re pleased to announce that the press release died alone in its cave, a victim of apathy, leaving nothing of use to anyone, save a few ashy paintings of wooly mammoths on the wall, and a pile of well gnawed bones.

For the record, issuing a press release about your new product, then saying “yup, we did the marketing bit” just doesn’t cut it.  If your product is worth selling, it’s worth marketing properly, even if you’ve got a non-existent budget. 

(Jim Forbes has a good bit on Tech PR today as well – perhaps not as vitriol soaked, but a worthwhile read…)

Okay, I’ll admit it – I’m probably the only person on the face of the earth who doesn’t own an Ipod.  It’s not that I don’t love music, I do.  I’ve just normally streamed stuff of archive.org, so I never got around to joining the Ipod nation.

Last week I went nuclear on the “bring your tunes with you” issue.  Forget about your 2 gig, or even your 80 gig Ipods.  I got a 160 gig MyBook and downloaded my whole library.  Sure, I have to use the laptop to access the songs, but I’m rarely at a place where that’s a big issue (you can plug into any stereo with one of these).  If I really wanted to go wild, I could have gotten one of these…one whole terabyte baby, in a case roughly the size of hardcover novel.  That’s more storage than your major metropolitan daily newspaper had before the turn of the millenium.

So what’s on my MyBook?  Everything…from pretty much everything the Grateful Dead played between 1969-1973, to String Cheese Incident at the Veegoose festival last weekend.  My tip for those of you who haven’t heard her is Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. Grace rules…check her out here with Joe Satriani, Steve Kimock and Stephen Perkins at last years Jammies doing “Cortez The Killer” (mp3 link) – no Hammond B3 on that one but man does she have pipes…

 Or you could just watch her do “Nothing but the water” at Wakarusa this year.

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(Yech – I just tried some of the searches that hadn’t been working and now they are – hence the entire premise of this post is, at best, questionable.  I’m still going to leave it up as it brings up a question we need to consider – how reliant are we on Google, and how will small changes in Google affect our online marketing efforts)

Everyone’s talking about the long tail, and savvy marketers devoting more resources to looking at blogs, buzz management and all things community.  It’s great to see, but in the background, subtle changes at Google may have forever changed our landscape. 

In the past, the web has had a very long reach.  An article posted in 1999 on Reel-Time.com still generates a lot of email for me, even though it doesn’t come up at the top of the search topic “Fly Fishing Monomoy” anymore.  The key is that our back catalog or archives were very important to us, as a place where relevance was to be found, where the true depth of our sites really shone.

Sometime in September David Churbuck mentioned in a post on his blog that I was “one of the smartest guys on the topic of publishing technologies” (I’m not, really – I can name many more worthy).  Google immediately (in an hour or so) listed that post at the top of any search for “smartest guy publishing technology” – which gave us a lot of laughs at the office.  As Lis Pennington (arguably Lis Pennington is the smartest person in publishing technology) notes, they got the suffix on that wrong…smart@$$  is more like it. 

The story came up the other day and and we redid the search.  Nothing…nada…negres.  The post has been dropped out of Google as though it never existed.  Which prompted some immediate searching on Google for topics from several blogs “previous” links. Again, they didn’t show, even when searching for exact text.  Apparently Google applies a negative weight in it’s algorithym to anything not on the homepage of a blog, or anything older than, say, a month. (note: later research shows this NOT TO BE THE  CASE)

The problem is this: while as marketers we may be trying to influence the buzz, that means that our efforts are fleeting.  If the long tail has a short memory, corporate bloggers may be shoveling against the tide.  If Google is devaluing what we have to say after 30 days, should we not consider some mashup of a traditional article structure with commenting?

It used to be that Google recalculated results monthly (if that…) – but now I am seeing results from blogs particularly showing up within the hour.  It would appear there have been major changes in the Googlescape over the past year.  It’s time to do some serious research…

Disclosure: This is based upon personal observation – not analytical research – as such any reference to changes in the Google algorithm, etc. should be taken with a grain of salt. 

JP had a great follow up to yesterday’s bit on Community Participation.  He quite presciently notes that roles within communities are not stagnant, they in fact evolve.

My experience with the Reel-Time.com community demonstrates this in spades.  I saw a three-four year cycle in our users in that niche community for saltwater fly fisherfolk.

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David Churbuck’s posted here and here on the subject of lurkers and forum engagement in online communities, as did J.P. Rangaswami on his ConfusedofCalcutta.com blog.  David suggested that I post on my experiences in working with him on the Reel-Time.com forum since 1995 or so.

Here’s the critical stat from J.P.’s post:

“I’ve always believed in a simple rule-of-thumb about opensource communities:

* For every 1000 people who join a community:
* 920 are lurkers, passive observers
* 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
* 15 are activists, actually doing something
* …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession”

My point as commented on both blogs is that they’ve missed a small user group – the 2 out of 1000 users who will need to have their head stuck on a pike as a warning to others.

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