Escape to Chengdu

Email Insider - Making it Personal

From Email Insider: http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=613#comments

 Here are four ways to personalize your email program today:

1)    Include the recipient’s name somewhere in the message. This is one of the simplest but most powerful personalization tactics. As Dale Carnegie famously said, “A person’s name is to that person the most beautiful sound in any language.” Just be careful how and where you use a name: it often works well as a salutation in letterform messages, but can seem gimmicky when used gratuitously.

2)    Add a user control panel to your emails.  Dedicate a portion of your email to the recipient: add a user control panel or personal profile section. This is a piece of real estate the recipient “owns,” featuring a combination of user data and the opportunity to update that data - the ability for users to control their email experience. This could be as simple as “Hello, John Doe,” preceding links to a preference center with controls on email format and frequency. (We jokingly call this a “faux-file.”)

A more developed user profile section might include account or loyalty program information, recent activity details, and a subscriber photo. In one test, adding a personal photo to an email control panel inspired a flurry of recipient activity; there was a massive uptick in profile photo updates every time an email launched. Whether it’s pictures or preferences, even adding a faux-file can help you build out real user profile data by offering obvious blanks to be filled.

3)    Personalize content based on a user’s preference center selections. Give recipients the ability to specify how much and what type of information they want. This is a great approach for content publishers. It’s simple: ask them what they want, and then deliver that! If they want to hear about Olympic diving, send them an article about that famous triple-flip.

If you give your subscribers the opportunity to tailor content to their interests and leave out information that doesn’t appeal to them, I guarantee your retention rates will increase. For more in-depth tips on this tactic, fellow Insider columnist Melinda Krueger wrote an excellent article on preference center-based content publishing just yesterday!

4)    Include specific product recommendations within a mass mail message. This is more of an advanced email-ecommerce fusion move, but if you are already capturing user behavior and/or purchase information on your Web site, it’s the next logical step.

Populate a submessage section of your mass mail with personalized recommendations based on recipients’ past purchase or browse behavior. Use default content for recipients you don’t have enough data to make recommendations to.

the end of the online petition

The folks who started MoveOn.org were pioneers in the art of online organizing. Avaaz, which was envisioned as the global arm of the MoveOn brand, deploys many of the same techniques as the older MoveOn. It’s my sense that these techniques are obsolete, relics of the web1.0 era.

The online petition. The letter to the editor. The message to your member of congress. These tools were instrumental in sparking national movements around such causes as saving PBS, stopping artic drilling and ending the war in Iraq, but as e-advocacy experts are now discovering, these tactics did not cultivate future leaders in the movement. Instead, these tools helps ordinary citizens take part in change, but failed to connect them with a self-sustaining, longterm community (some exceptions outstanding, including MeetUps, DailyKos and other community blogs, etc).

Today, Avaaz.org asked me to to sign a petition that’s allegedly being sent to Chinese President Hu Jintao, demanding he start a “meaningful dialogue with the Dalai Lama.” That’s all well and good, but what’s not meaningful here is the ask itself, and the assumptions it makes about Avaaz supporters. Assumption #1 is that we’d believe that this petition could even reach Hu Jintao, and that if it did, that Mr. Jintao would actually care. Assumption #2 is that we’d feel satisfied simply signing our name to a meaningless petition and forwarding that same meaningless petition to our friends and colleagues, so that they can help grow Avaaz’s email list.

(If, in fact, Avaaz has connections to the inner CCP sanctum that I’m not aware of, and that, in fact, this petition to his majesty can actually reach the President, than I still maintain that Avaaz must convince me of that possibility.)

Do you see where I’m going with this? Avaaz, you’ve got the right politics, but you don’t respect me. I have no doubt that you’re able to affect real change in the world, but you also want to grow your email list and, subsequently, grow your donor base. I understand the need for GROWTH, but don’t waste my time with cynical, growth-based campaigns. Connect with me other people who care about Tibet, maybe people like me who’ve lived in China and understand the enormous complexities of the Chinese government. I would love to dialogue with others who share my perspective, and perhaps work with them on a way to affect change.

Folks, it’s time for online organizing to enter the era of web 2.0, and your sad little Facebook group is not cutting it.

idea for blog post

Zogby Interactive poll on journalism

http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews2.dbm?ID=1454

Highlights:

Web sites are regarded as a more important source of news and information than traditional media outlets - 86% of Americans said Web sites were an important source of news, with more than half (56%) who view these sites as very important. Most also view television (77%), radio (74%), and newspapers (70%) as important sources of news, although fewer than say the same about blogs (38%).

• Although the vast majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the quality of journalism (64%), overall satisfaction with journalism has increased to 35% in this survey from 27% who said the same in 2007.
• Both traditional and new media are viewed as important for the future of journalism - 87% believe professional journalism has a vital role to play in journalism’s future, although citizen journalism (77%) and blogging (59%) are also seen as significant by most Americans.
• Very few Americans (1%) consider blogs their most trusted source of news, or their primary source of news (1%).
• Three in four (75%) believe the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.
• 69% believe media companies are becoming too large and powerful to allow for competition, while 17% believe they are the right size to adequately compete.

Jonny Goldstein's wrap-up

From Jonny Goldstein:

Bloggers and PR/Marketing people talking about how to piss off bloggers. From a conversation at SXSW led by Rohit Bhargava:

1. People who are obviously not longtime readers who pretend they have been.

2. Stealing content, messing with your identity

3. Getting you on mailing list and not getting you off it.

4. PR based outreach. Treating bloggers like journalists.

5. Getting irrelevant press releases–spend the time to make sure it’s going to the right person.

6.Not treating people as people.

7. Once you have developed a relationship, then you can have better odds of them doing you a favor.

8. Make it hard for people read/view/listen to your content. Formatting on content. Make it very easy for people to view your media if you are asking people to view it and promote/review it.

9. Having to deal with bureaucratic layers.

10. Not identifying yourself transparently. False representation.

11. Dont’ treat bloggers as press at events.

From Jeremiah Owyang

Eight Meaningful Measures of Social Media

1. “Number of unique users
2. Returning versus new readers
3. Referring source statistics
4. Links from other sites
5. Google PageRank
6. The ratio of blog comments to blog posts (where applicable)
7. Total time spent on the site
8. The popularity of the content itself, which gets the most views”

SXSW 08 highlights

Marketing the Campaigns, Obama vs. Clinton

Tobaccowala uses one of the fiercest brand battles of the day to underscore his view: the race between Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Politics aside, he believes one of the reasons Obama is outperforming Clinton is that the New York senator is borrowing from marketing practices circa 1980, while Obama’s strategy is rooted firmly in the present.

“With Clinton, it’s been top-down, command and control; with Obama, it’s been grassroots facilitation,” he says. For one thing, Obama portrays an inclusive image: He uses the word “we” instead of “I.”

Tobaccowala believes Obama has delegated more authentically and his grassroots organization has proven deft in planning and managing the chaos of a campaign. As Clinton’s organization has fumbled, her top-down style raises questions about her ability to run a country.

While Obama’s grassroots approach has helped him raise a lot of money, Clinton spent aggressively on a one-hour town hall meeting telecast on the Hallmark Channel this month, billed as “largest, most interactive town hall in political history.” In fact, only 540,000 households saw it, and the town hall ended with Clinton being cut off in mid-sentence by a previously scheduled program, the perhaps aptly named A Season for Miracles. Obama, meanwhile, benefited from a tribute video produced by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, at no cost to the candidate, inspired by Obama’s “Yes, We Can” speech. It is now approaching 10 million views on YouTube.