that canadian girl

This evening, I came across a post where I couldn’t help but think that I had to share with fellow bloggers.

Darren Rowse, pro-blogger and six-digit-salary man, tells bloggers to get rid of their inferiority complex, and I could not agree more! He gets loads of emails from bloggers asking for tips or advice (why don’t I get more mail from you readers?!) with many self-deprecating comments, claiming they’re “no A-list blogger” and “don’t write as well as they do…”

So this is to tell you, my fellow bloggers, to take pride in what you do. It doesn’t matter if all you write is a weenie little blog to track your child growing up, your BMI going down by preparing for a half-marathon for charity, or a technology rant.

Think positive, be proud of the fact that you’ve braved the wild world of blogging. You may not realise it but you’re boldly going where most of people around you won’t have. So grab that blog by the horns and be a sassy self-promoter. Whether it gets you a job, helps you find like-minded people for a project or just gives you an outlet to blow some steam off, enjoy the fact that you’re still more cutting edge than you might think.

Anyone who’s witnessed a typical weekday for me will have noticed my slight addiction to Twitter, a service that simply can’t be explained and has to be experienced.

But in my attempt to justify the thousands of updates I’ve posted on it, I’ll highlight a few amazing ways Twitter has helped me and those around me this week.

• It helped me discover how other bloggers felt about being accosted by PR agency, resulting in an article for The Blog Medic called “Marketing Ethics: Ten ways to piss off a blogger”.
• An ad hoc conversation led to a friend getting a job offer, and the entire conversation up to scheduling an interview call happened over Twitter.
• It allowed me to find a couple of new contracts for Pepsmedia redesigning blog templates & site launches.
• Since SXSW, I’ve managed to stay in touch with many of the lovely people I met there without going through the usual “ok I’ll reply to that email later”, where later becomes never. By keeping it bite-sized, Twitter makes it easy to stay in touch.
• I’ve found amazing support for the idea of SocialMediaCamp in London in July through fellow Twitter users who are interested and can provide skills and contacts I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.
• A few people offered sound advice with regards to the process to setting up a limited company, again calling on the experience of others.
• It was the fastest channel through which I heard about Russell’s decision to stop developing Mowser on Monday night.
• It’s a great way to swap kitty photos with Mel Kirk

So there you go, it’s a business resource like no other, a great communication tool and an entertaining place to have water cooler conversations with like-minded people.

A couple of days ago, Hugh quit Twitter to work on writing his book. Now I’m considering quitting Twitter, but nobody’s signed me up for a book.

The reason? Spam, spam, eggs, bacon and spam. Well, without the eggs or the bacon. The sheer volume of new followers I’m getting these days who are blatantly spammers is getting increasingly frustrating. Sure, I can block them one by one, or simply ignore them, but if Twitter could implement a “flag as spam” a la Blogspot, then we could help each other and avoid 10,000 other users getting the same spammy follower message.

To add to the frustration, a friend pointed out that spam followers could very well use your RSS feed to create random copy for spam emails or blog comments in the future. I haven’t come across it yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s already happening.

I guess for now, the less drastic route for me to take will be to create a rule where all notifications of new followers will go straight into a mark-as-read folder. It won’t solve the problem that my feed could end up as spam material for some unscrupulous asshole out there, but it’ll have to do for now.

What this means is that if you start following me and you want to have a conversation, you’ll need to send me a message @vero for me to react and add you as well. Crappy, but it’s the best solution I can think of.

Anyone got a better idea?

South by SouthWest is over. Well, the interactive bit is anyways. Music is clearly still going strong, as I witnessed walking down 6th Street and lucking out on seeing Simian Mobile Disco at La Zona Rosa with a few of the geeks still left in town.

Reflecting upon the past week, it’s comforting to see a clear sense of community amongst the geeks. Topics that kept reoccurring were ones of social capital, change and collaboration. The jaded half of me couldn’t help but snicker. Is this hippie 2.0* or something?

Don’t get me wrong, I find this “Let’s hug, love and help each other” attitude immensely endearing and refreshing, but I can’t help but be tickled by some of the more naive ideas that were exchanged over the course of the week. Not every single one of our ideas will live on past the panels, not every one of our harebrained startup ideas will become the next Facebook and not every suggestion is revolutionary. But it doesn’t matter, it’s motivating to be surrounded by people with faith in their ideas and seemingly endless energy to turn them into reality.

So if it’s up to me, I’ll be attending SXSWi again next year. The panels may not all have been oh-so-fabulous, but regardless, meeting so many new people is an injection of energy, if nothing else.

I now need to somehow make sense of this creative energy and communicate it to my team at work. I’m not sure I can express it in words. Maybe I need a Kumbaya 2.0 to express my feelings?

[* I seemingly didn’t coin the word, as it comes up on the Interweb in a different context, but I think it’s terribly fitting here as well.]

This evening, looking at the activity on Twitter, I was fascinated to see how quickly the usual Jaiku crowd had migrated. For those who haven’t noticed, Jaiku was showing a big fat 502 Bad Gateway error for a number of hours before it was replaced by the Jaiku birdie telling us that busted hard drives were to blame for the downtime.

Now, Twitter is notoriously flaky and known for going up and down more than a kid’s see-saw in a busy park in midsummer. Yet, everyone flocked over as the default alternative to Jaiku. If it wasn’t Twitter, it would have been something else. Pownce? Facebook? Seesmic?

In a magpie-like fashion, the web 2.0 crowd will look for the next shiny thing. I know. I’m one of them, and I sure as hell am guilty for chronically creating accounts on every new service, just to promptly ditch it and move on.

So what makes a service people come back to? A site that makes it past the 12-18 months “best before” date? Or are all new web 2.0′ish services destined to peak quickly then die just as fast? Lots more thoughts to add on this, but first, I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks.

I’ll leave you on this thought… What if Twitter and Jaiku were down at the same time? Would the world collapse? Or would everyone’s productivity increase by 200%?

For now, I must go tweet about how sick I am of packing boxes. It’s more bearable than it was some years ago but it still bites.

Last week, Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Wired Magazine blogger, lashed out at lazy PR people. The crux of the story is that Chris gets torrents of press releases, some more or less relevant, from public relations agencies that can’t really be bothered to do their research before sending releases around. Therefore Chris chose to publish the email addresses of a few hundred PR people who’ve sent him said releases.

This story really rings true for me on three levels;

• First, I’m a blogger, albeit a small-time one. But I still get plenty of press material, ranging from jaw-droppingly excited news to awfully written, pointless drivel. More of the latter than the former, needless to say.
• Second, I come from an email marketing background where my key concern was whether the content I was sending week in, week out, to over half a million readers was worth THEIR while. I was, to say the least, precious about Data Protection and if anyone suggested buying lists from agencies or scraping our customer database for addresses, I suggested in return ripping their balls out and cooking them in a nice tomato and basil sauce. Once I felt that the company I worked for didn’t allow me to produce content I genuinely thought could make our customers feel warm and fuzzy inside, I had to leave.
• Finally, in my new role at Taptu, I wear many hats - one of which involves handling some of the communication and PR. I adore that part of my job but it means I’m on the OTHER side of the fence, sending press releases, praying that bloggers won’t rebuff me or, worse, publish a post claiming I’ve spammed them with irrelevant content. That’s amongst my worst nightmares, no joke.

It’s a funny place to be, to say the least. I sympathise with both camps to a certain point; the PR people who are given targets to meet, numbers of mentions and pageviews to get, and the bloggers who want real news.

At the same time, as a blogger, poor journalism in the form of bloggers who regurgitate press releases thinly veiled as news articles make my blood boil, as I know these are the people who have lulled PR agencies into a state of comfortable laziness.

There’s no denying it, working in PR and always being on top of the latest news and the important bloggers isn’t easy and requires passion. You need to be interested in your industry and personally invested. The canyon between the passionate product evangelist and the PR Joe Bloggs who’s trying to hit targets on paper is deeper and more obvious than ever, and I’ll let you guess which one manages to appeal to me, Carlo or Chris Anderson.

So PR people, make an effort to think before you send. Send quality news, don’t blow your own trumpet too much and let us figure out whether your product is “revolutionary” or “ground-breaking”. And bloggers, let PR people know when they’re hitting the sweet spot and when they’re not.

Hopefully, we can all learn to play nice together and live in a nice utopian world where bloggers and PR people walk together hand in hand, surrounded by rainbows and unicorns. Right? Right? Can’t we? Well… I tried.

[Cat picture by edmittance on Flickr]

On Thursday, I got annoyed enough with my half-assed Twitter username, and not getting a response from the team that I made a blog post out of it.

The next morning, I woke up to find a response to my feature request from 6th August from Crystal at Twitter:

Hello Vero,

Thanks for your email, apologies for the delay. We do this for the sake of ease. The limit on characters is mainly for SMS purposes; each message you send will include the user name associated with your number. Twitter messages have a 140 character limit, and a minimum of 10 characters is your phone number; adding 15 characters for a user name to 10 characters minimum for a phone number would be at least 25 of 140 characters. A long user name will also make it difficult for people to direct text you from their phones. Sorry about that! Can we send you a t shirt to make up for it?

Thanks,

Crystal

So there it is, I won’t get my full username back, which means I’ll continue to miss most @replies unless I change my username altogether. Part of why I’m making a big deal out of this is out of curiosity to see what it would take to get a response, but also because it strikes me as a bit of a lazy fix to truncate usernames of legacy users to 15chars retrospectively. Oh well, I still love Twitter.

As for the tshirt, I’m a sucker for schwag, so hopefully Twitter will send it to me even though I’m not based in the US.

Back when I worked in email marketing, I kept meaning to write about what it’s like to work in that field and what applications have blown my mind, or been the bane of my life. In March, I wrote an article for the Digital Web magazine about the Seven Deadly Sins of Email Marketing, but it focussed more on list management and attitude.

Today, I received an email from an old colleague asking for tips on the best email marketing software to use in her new role. Instead of responding via email, I thought I’d turn it into a post, since it isn’t the first time the question comes up.

The first step in deciding what type of email marketing application to use is whether you’re looking for a one-off-cost downloadable application or an online service-based application. At first glance, the downloaded app will appear to be the best option, and by far the cheapest. That’s the one big pro about it - it’s a one-off purchase. Now, I’ll be perfectly honest and say I’ve never used one of those apps, so the only recommendation I can make on that level is to look for reviews before you buy.

However, I can explain the cons of using a downloadable app.

One of the greatest challenges in email marketing is deliverability. By this I mean the percentage of total email addresses on your mailing list who receive your newsletter to their inbox.

Think of the process as a funnel:

1. Total number addresses in your list
2. Delivered emails
3. Opened emails
4. Clickthroughs to your site
5. Your reader taking action on your site

On that second level of the funnel, if you’ve chosen to use a downloadable app, you have to count on your ISP and your domain name, cross your fingers and close your eyes very hard when you hit the send button. Why am I saying this? It’s because you don’t have the online service’s great ISP relations squad behind you. You get no help whatsoever from your app to ensure your email is delivered, rather than wiped by the server or treated as spam.

If too many users flag you as spam or the ISP recognises your IP address as being troublesome (not necessarily by your fault, could be due to a previous owner of the address or because you’re sharing it on a network), you might find your whole domain blacklisted. This includes your entire sales team’s email addresses - and that can’t be good for business! Establishing relationships with masses of ISPs worldwide and ensuring nothing goes wrong is a full time job and a very difficult process, which small businesses can’t really manage on their own.

So there, that’s one of the many reasons I support online email marketing apps. They’re the guardian angels of deliverability.

No matter what, online email marketing services also vary wildly in quality. I’ve used a few of them, ranging from the extremely user-friendly Campaign Monitor (my preferred choice) to the awfully antiquated and highly aggravating Epsilon DreamMail and Axciom Digital’s Impact dinosaurs. [It should already raise a big red flag when the service is only usable in IE 6 on Windows…]

Services like Campaign Monitor suit the vast majority of small/medium businesses with to their simple and slick user interface, and are still priced very reasonably. The team does everything in its power to offer great email templates, and gives some of the best email marketing tips I’ve ever read on its blog.

Quite at the other end of the scale, services like DreamMail and Digital Impact give me a rash. They’re from a completely different school of thought, offering far too many radio buttons and tick boxes*, resulting in some very costly mistakes over my time doing email marketing. The service is slow, unreliable - often down “for maintenance” at peak times, unbeknownst to our assigned (and unreachable) account manager. Sure, the cost per email sent is lower when sending very large mailouts (to the tune of 3-4 million emails a month) but the service is dire and the time spent fighting with the system is disproportionate to the benefits gained from the cost-saving exercise for a business any smaller than that.

You might think I’m drawing a grim, black and white picture of the older and more traditional services, but speaking on behalf of those who’ve used it before and after me, we’ve gained a full head of grey hair between us from using them. Go for small, human services who are in tune with their users’ needs. Aren’t they the ones we want to see flourish anyways?

[* I once asked my account manager what some of the tick boxes did and what mysterious options were for. His answer? “Oh they’re deprecated, don’t use those. We should remove them but nobody’s done it yet. We’ll have a new product for Europe at some point but this is the US service, minus a few features.” Yeah, mate. That makes me feel like we’re very important customers… And we’re not talking about 2-3 small tick boxes, but nearly half the interface not being functional for us.]