Seth Godin has done it again.When he launched the Unleashing the Idea Virus, he came up with a clever strategy to get it in lots of peoples heands and (apparently) worked out an exclusive deal with Fast Company to publish an excerpt and feature it on the cover of one of their issues.
Now he’s pimping Purple Cow, with a cool new marketing strategy, excellent packaging and – from the “if it worked before, it’ll work again” theory of marketing – an excerpt in Fast Company.
Seth’s a pretty clever marketer.
Once again, the email service providers (ESPs) are teaming up, to try to convince ISPs to stop filtering their email. A good idea, but unless and until they find a way to compensate ISPs with cold, hard cash, the effort will only be marginally successful in the best case.
Even if the ESPs were willing to compensate ISPs (not likely), I still have my doubts. Almost two years ago I tried to start a company that would facilitate payment of e-postage from ESPs to ISPs. The ESPs hated it, of course. But so did the ISPs, who thought I was asking them to accept money for spam. I tried expalining that the system would only be used for permission-based email, but they didn’t really make a distinction. In their eye, if it’s not 100% confirmed opt-in, it’s spam. Oh well.
(Here’s a link to another story about this in DM News, but it will expire in a couple of weeks.)
(And another.)
(Oops. One more.)
Ballot stuffing? Today I received this email from ClickTracks, which makes log analysis software. They want me to vote for them in the ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards. I can undertstand their desire to win, but I’m not even a customer. I downloaded their software a while back but frankly haven’t even had a chance to evaluate it. Is this the kind of communication I can expect from them going forward? If I vote for them, will they vote for me when I ask?
Didn’t think so.
Interesting. According to Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox, email newsletter subscribers have a “high emotional attachment” to newsletters, which inhibits them from unsubscribing, even when they don’t read the newsletter any more. I’ve noticed this in my own behavior. I’m subscribe to many newsletters that I don’t read any more, but I stay on the list because in some future universe where I have infinite time at my disposal, I might read it…
At the same time, Nielsen notes that many years “fear that unsubscribing might not work.” This is because of the urban legend that spammers treat unsubscribes as proof that an address is “live.”
Aside: While I respect his work, I think Nielsen too-often prioritizes usability over commerce. He hates popups, for example, even though they are a proven method for driving desired user behavior. While I’m not a fan of popups as a user, neither am I fan of TV commercials or, for that matter, Wal-Mart making me go through a checkout line and actually paying for their product rather than letting me just pick out what I want and leave. TV commercials and charging for products are also proven business methods that, when you get right down to it, fly in the face of usability.
Finally learned how to use the microphone on my computer. Like the sound of one hand clapping? Click here. Though I don’t think it meets the definition presented here.