We’ve written a bit here about how some of the Presidential campaigns this cycle have embraced stripped down emails that don’t include a lot of images or fancy formatting. In that previous post, the focus was on how this format can make emails seem more personal, and not on the technical reasons to avoid using a lot of images. Josh Levy’s post yesterday about John McCain’s email mistakes inspired me to look at the issue from a more technical perspective.

The most compelling reason to limit the use of images in HTML emails is that tons of people are never going to see them. Some people actively turn off images. Others don’t see them because their email programs turn them off by default (Campaign Monitor has a great chart showing a breakdown). Some people work at companies that block images in emails to save bandwidth/stop porn. And yet more people are accessing email on cell phones that can’t read images. I have yet to see a percentage I trust completely, but it is estimated that somewhere between 25 and 50 percent of email users block at least some images in HTML emails. That is a lot.

Speaking anecdotally, I’m a lot less likely to see images in email than I did a year ago. At work we upgraded recently to Outlook 2007 which has images blocked by default. I never changed the setting and now follow the process of opting in to see images based on whether I trust the sender. I use Gmail for my personal email and follow the same procedure. (You really should check out that chart breaking down default settings for major email clients.)

So what to do. Stop using images altogether? Use them sparingly? Although a bit old, the useful Campaign Monitor blog provides a great guide to email design. Here are their six tips on how to send emails that actually gets to the recipient in a readable format:

1. Never use images for important content like headlines, links and any calls to action.
2. Use alt text for all images for a better experience in Gmail and always add the height and width to the image to ensure that the blank placeholder image doesn’t throw your design out.
3. Add a text-based link to a web version of your design at the top of your email.
4. Ensure your most compelling content is at the top (and preferably to the left).
5. Test your design in a preview pane, full screen and with images turned on and off before you send it.
6. Ask your subscriber to add your From address to their address book at every opportunity.

Anyone that has sent bulk emails out knows that it is a really stressful thing. Even if you do your job perfectly (no typos, valid web links, good HTML, etc.), your email is going to be garbled for at least a small percentage of people who have weird settings or are using funky email clients (Hello Lotus Notes). And those small percentage of people will inevitably complain to your boss’ best friend from high school and you’ll hear about it.

Given the high probability for mistakes, email is really a format where you need to keep things simple. If you have to use images, design the email so that it will degrade gracefully if images are turned off. The emails we design that use images typically look like an online version of letter head, with a single header image. If you keep it simple, you’ll get yelled out less for supposed mistakes and your click through rates will increase since more people will be able to actually see the content of your message.

Note: I just saw this post from Michael Whitney at Tech President that looks at the use of email by Presidential candidates and expands on Campaign Monitor’s tips. Great minds. Give it a read, as it goes into things in a bit more depth than my post.

Every once in a while we like to point out how non-profits and charitable causes can harness the Internet to better achieve their goals, and this post highlights the successful efforts of Goodwill of Greater Washington using a blog — about fashion.

True, Goodwill is about community development projects like job training for lower income folk and sales from used and thrift clothing helps fund such programs, but fashion is not one of the organization's main concerns. 

However, it understands that Napoleon Dynamite and others find cool second-hand threads at thrift shops to don.  These hipsters frequent thrift stores since they know that the fine line between "thrift" and the more haute couture adjective "vintage" is razor thin — price.  Further, many high end boutiques buy some of their stock at places non-profit second-hand stores and jack up the price.  Why can't organizations like Goodwill cash in more on "vintage" as well?

To counteract this trend, Goodwill here in DC hired Em Hall to write the DC Goodwill Fashion Blog in order to attract more customers to the stores.  Through this blog she spotlights (and, dare I say, markets) trendy items found on the racks and even auctions off higher quality and more haute items.  In some cases, these items fetch a far higher price through the on-line auction than a transaction in the store.  Thus, Goodwill gets more money to devote to its community projects.  In fact, Goodwills in other parts of the country have approached Ms. Hall to try similar blogging ventures.

This is a creative way that a non-profit organization has used a blog, and the best part of it is that blogging is cheap and easy.  But it does require some creativity and, in this case, a good sense of fashion.

Hat tip: Rachel Martin and Win Rosenfeld of NPR's The Bryant Park Project.

With Thanksgiving tomorrow, tis the season for sweets and treats.  A newspaper article about cookies sounds like a great idea.

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times has just an article today, but not one about recipes.  It is about Pepperidge Farm, the cookie company, which is employing social networking in a new advertising campaign.  While other companies establish a presence on an existing social network site by setting up a group, profile, or buying ads, Pepperidge Farm has launched artofthecookie.com.

The Art of the Cookie site is aimed at woman and helping them make connections through cookies. Sally Horchow, co-author of The Art of Friendship: 70 Simple Rules for Making Meaningful Connections, is a key spokesperson for the campaign.  On the site she posted a diary of a cross country trip she made this summer during which she spoke with women about friendships.  The site offers other tips about friendships.

Companies have taken a more serious look at social networking as many are either creating niche social network sites or participate on existing networks.  Clearly the notion of connecting customers with each other is gaining traction with the common practice of a company speaking to its customers.  

Pepperidge Farm didn't haphazardly decide to pursue a social networking centric campaign.  After conducting research in the homes of its customers, vice president and general manager Michael Simon explained to the NYT that "this notion of connection came up again and again…hectic lifestyles, life in general, has gotten in the way" of fostering friendships.  He expects positive results from portraying the sharing of cookies with others as a great way to make and strengthen relationships. 

It'll be interesting to see how this new campaign works out.  I wonder if a poultry company will launch a campaign about forging business deals over steak… 

MySpace (do I really need to link there?) is going to be offering a pay-for-friend model to record distributors. The catch for the record distributor? Give them the user the music for free. We're talking about commercial music that is also distributed in record stores here, not music from some obscure band.

So how does this work exactly? A user "friends" a record label and in exchange they can download an album. The user has the music they want, the record label has an audience for their brands that they can capitalize on, and MySpace gets a little change in it's pocket. Win, win, win? Maybe. I have my doubts as to whether people are really going buy in to an unfamiliar brand because they were able to download some music for free. But it's an interesting idea and definitely worth a shot. Frankly anything that takes current music business models in a different direction is worth a shot. Hats off to MySpace for the imaginativeness.

Speaking of obscure bands, the first band to try this out on MySpace is a band called Pennywise, via their record label Textango's MySpace profile. This will happen sometime next March.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Via AdWeek.

I spent the weekend up in Boston, MA at the New York Press Association's fall meeting. It was a great conference attended by publishers of all sorts of newspapers in New York State.  It was a diverse group of people–from seasoned Web veterans to those just getting their newspaper websites started.  

I  had the opportunity to give a presentation Friday morning about opportunities for newspapers online–with my talk based on the results from our 2007 newspaper study.  I tried to show that the Web, while a direct competitor for print, doesn't have to be solely a threat to newspapers. Rather, the Web can present a myriad of opportunities for newspapers, if they just use a little creativity and try new things.  My presentation was well received, and I think that everyone in the room was able to take away some tidbit of information for use at their home paper. You can take a look at my slides here.

Some other speakers at the conference made some really interesting presentations. Peggie Stark Adam presented the results of Poynter's 2007 EyeTrack study, which uses special equipment to track the way people read content in print and online.  She made some great points, and the study's major conclusion, that people read printed content and Web content differently, proves what a lot of people have been thinking for a long time.  Instead of rehashing the results here, I will simply point you to the results on Poynter's website. 

Bill Ostendorf, from Creative Circle Media Consulting, spoke about his experiences redesigning newspaper websites. He was a dynamic speaker, and reiterated a lot of what we have been saying about newspaper websites on our blog and in our studies, but in a much more in-your-face kind of way.  He really got the point across that newspaper websites generally stink, and showed some ways that his company has helped newspapers redesign their sites.  His company has developed what look like pretty effective content management systems for newspaper homepages and online classifieds sections.  A couple of things he said really stuck with me:

"Newspapers are Stupid! Don't Copy them!"–By this, Bill meant that newspapers, even the big ones, often get the Web wrong.  Despite this, newspapers have been copying each other online for years, which has resulted in LOTS of bad newspaper sites.

"Newspapers are smart and experienced! Learn from them!"–By this, Bill was referring to the success newspapers have had with engaging readers in their print editions. Newspaper websites can definitely take some cues from the basics here and improve their sites immensely.

Bill also made some great points by comparing the Apple and Google sites, two of the most successful websites in the history of the world, with typical newspaper sites like the Providence Journal, the Philadelphia Daily News , or the Honolulu Advertiser. I think his phraseology was, "Would you dress like that??"  Point taken.

Anyway, I thought the conference had a great mix of speakers, and there was definitely something for all kinds of newspaper publishers there, from discussions about design, CMS, advertising, marketing, and other topics.  So, NYPA, thanks for having me! 

I’ve been reading with fascination a series of articles that have appeared lately that question the value of maintaining a presence in Second Life. To make a long story short, a year or so ago, when the Second Life hype was deafening, companies appeared in mass to construct their own virtual presences as a way to market their products. Now a year later, companies are rethinking their presences in Second Life for the simple reason that no one comes to their online stores.

NBA commissioner David Stern had this to say about his league’s presence, which went live in May of 2007:

I think we’ve had 1,200 visitors. People tell us that’s very, very good. But I can’t say we have very precise expectations. We just want to be there.

To put that figure in perspective, our modest blog here sometimes attracts 1,200 visitors in a given day. But I think Stern’s quote is instructive beyond the number he reveals. Like with so many companies/politicians/organizations, he has launched a social media campaign that has no real purpose.

To me there seem to be distinct phases to the life cycle of the hype around these social platforms as marketing tool.

(Phase 1) The real first movers start experimenting with marketing in places like YouTube, MySpace or Second Life. The Wall Street Journal or Business Week writes a story touting what they are doing.

(Phase 2) The “me too” crowd dives in head first in the hopes of getting some earned media and branding themselves as a company/organization that “gets it”. The campaigns are often sloppy and the commitment is shallow. Most of the campaigns end in failure.

(Phase 3) The hype is over. The “me too” crowd has moved on to the next thing and success/failure of campaigns are judged by the actual results that they produce as opposed to the hype they generate.

I think Second Life is in Phase 3. MySpace probably is too. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are in the middle of Phase 2.

So what’s my point? I don’t really have a big one. I’ve just seen some pretty awful videos on YouTube lately with no rationale beyond “me too-ism.” Before diving in head first, I’d encourage folks to truly think through what they are hoping to achieve and not do something just for the sake of doing it.

Not every company needs a Second Life island and not every politician needs a presence on 24 social networks.

For me the highlight of the Personal Democracy Forum was seeing Seth Godin speak in person. You can check out the video of his presentation below. If you haven’t heard Godin before, take the 15 minutes and watch it.

Click To Play

You can see other videos from the conference here.

Everyone knows about author bloggers like Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin. But outside of the Technorati Top 100, there are a lot of authors that have used blogs to create fantastic communities of users. Here are my five favorite, slightly lower profile author blogs:

(5) Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, started his blog in March 2006. Most of his posts expand on his New Yorker articles or comment on interesting stories he comes across. He has a very engaged community that posts hundreds of comments to every entry. He’d be hire if he posted consistently (nothing new since January).

• Sample Post: Defining a Racist

(4) Tim Ferriss

Ferriss is the author of the book the Four Hour Workweek and just started his blog a month or so ago. His writings, which focus on how to streamline your life and increase your own efficiency, have really struck a chord with folks. The blog has been really entertaining so far although it is possible that Ferriss is a bit of a one trick pony. Plus he doesn’t work much so we’ll see if he sticks with it after the promotional aspect wears off.

• Sample Post: How to Check E-mail Twice a Day… or Once Every 10 Days

(3) Scott Adams

Dilbert author Scott Adams writes daily posts about whatever is on his mind to his surprisingly fantastic blog. I’m a much bigger fan of the blog than I am of the Dilbert cartoon. Adams just has an interesting take on life that really comes across in his blogging.

• Sample Post: What’s Your Permanent Age?

(2) Freakonomics

I’m a big fan of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s book Freakonomics. So I was pleasantly surprised to find a year ago that not only were they blogging, but were doing so quite well on a daily basis. On their blog, they provide theirs takes on whatever topic strikes their fancy.

• Sample Post: Poker: Skill vs. Chance

(1) Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman is a bit of a jack of all trades - he has written books, comics and films, among other things. He is also one of the first author bloggers, having started blogging in February 2001 in an effort to promote his book, American Gods. These days Gaiman blogs about his work, his life and spends a great deal of time answering reader mail through the site’s Ask Neil feature. Gaiman was born for the blog format.

• Sample Post: Tabs, writing and why writers should not carry portfolios

This post is part of ProBlogger’s most recent group writing project, with the theme of “top five”. Be sure to check out other entries!

Forrester Research just released an interesting study led by Charlene Li about social technographics that breaks up web users into distinct and defined categories so that marketers can target their efforts to inspire action.

These categories include: (more…)

Wagner James Au of GigaOM has a fascinating look at why, despite the endless hype, marketing in Second Life hasn’t proven to be effective yet. This is a good companion piece to a link I posted yesterday that provides some practical reasons to be skeptical of Second Life’s marketing potential (put me in the big time skeptic category).

Regardless of your personal feelings about Second Life, I think Au’s criticism of the execution of Second Life marketing efforts thusfar is illuminating:

To play in Second Life, corporations must first come to a humbling realization: in the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal, and unimaginative. Car companies are trying to compete with college kids who turn a virtual automotive showroom into a 24/7 hiphop dance party, and create lovingly designed muscle cars that fly, and auction off for $2000 in real dollars at charity auctions.

Faced with such talented competition, smart marketers should concede defeat, and hire these college kids and housewives to create concept designs and prototypes that re-imagine their brands merged to existing SL-based brands which have already proved themselves in a world of infinite possibility. Or as the Komjuniti study suggests, they can keep building sterile shopping malls, and continue wondering why Residents prefer nude dance parties, giant frogs singing alt-folk rock, and samurai deathmatches– and often, all three at the same time.

I think the same thesis applies to MySpace or Youtube or any of the new so called “social” marketing channels. Bringing an old mindset to a new medium doesn’t accomplish anything. Your only chance of having real and sustained success is if the mindset shifts as well.

• What the Chinese Want to Know
  Interesting list of the top search terms for 2006 on the Chinese search engine Baidu. Thankfully Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears’ don’t dominate Chinese thoughts they way they do those of Americans.
• Microsoft takes email design back years
  Outlook 2007 will handle HTML emails in a vastly different manner than previous versions of the email program. If you are sending out HTML emails, you should look at this list of what is and isn’t supported and run your emails through Microsoft downloadable email validator. This is a big deal.
• The XYZ of ABC
  Blog PI wonders if and when Republican online fundraising site ABC PAC will catch up with it’s Democrat counterpart, ActBlue. Mike Turk and Patrick Ruffini also weigh in. The biggest problem here for Republicans is that two years passed before someone took the initiative and developed a response to ActBlue.
• Huffington Post to Host Presidential Debates?
  The political blog the Huffington Post is trying convince Democrat and Republican presidential candidates to participate in online debates on the site. I don’t think it will happen. Second Life is a more likely venue.

In the most recent volume of Communique Magazine , TBG’s Gary Bivings authored a featured article. “Watching the Web” is a great piece about how PR and marketing techniques are changing to incorporate the monitoring of various new forms of media, primarily the Web. The article cites several examples of how the Web has affected PR and customer involvement in the pharmaceutical industry, and discusses how content tracking platforms can be an effective addition to any PR firms strategy (this includes our very own ImpactWatch !).

Among other issues, Gary listed the Top Seven Online Media Monitoring Practices in his article:

1. Get involved sooner rather than later
2. Implement a platform that will track online media for you
3. Categorize online activities of target markets/information seekers–blogging, message board posting, etc.
4. Make a list of the top sites to monitor per public/target audience
5. Track site statistics (eg, how often the site is visited)
6. Track bias of various sites with regard to your product
7. Decide how you will respond to the circulation of negative information about your product

You can read the article in its entirety here.

I found an interesting tidbit of information today on the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) website, which provides circulation trend data and marketing information for magazine publishers and advertisers.

MPA provides a list of 36 magazines that have active profiles on MySpace. Basically, these profiles give magazines an outlet for reaching out to tech-minded teens and young people on a personal level.

The MySpace pages of these magazines usually consist of a blog, a profile picture that depicts the most recent magazine cover, video content, featured music, and LOTS of comments. For example, on the Cosmopolitan and Maxim pages, there are over 20,000 and 46,000 friends listed, respectively. These magazines and others have created huge online communities not on their official websites, but on their MySpace pages.

Some of the most developed of the MySpace magazine pages are the pages for Teen Magazines, like CosmoGirl and Seventeen. These sites have links to interactive content on their regular homepages, and feature quizzes and games to engage their teen MySpace audiences.

In a report by Kat Haddon, “A Changing Business Model for a Virtual Phenomenon“, which is featured on the MPA website, the author gives a detailed explanation of the history of MySpace as well as suggestions for ways in which MySpace and other social networking sites can turn their huge audiences into profitable business models. Kat finishes her report with the following quote:

We trust the media we know, and we explore the media we don’t know. But with all our focus on new media, we seem to be forgetting the most important medium: people. Real-life community is an integral part of MySpace’s new proposed business model, because it has the potential to open doors for the future of marketing by bringing us back to real-life relationships.

It seems like magazines understand that the structure of news and media is changing, and some are trying to take advantage of this shift by offering online supplements to their printed content. While newspaper websites tend to be redundant when compared to their printed versions and other news sites, magazines sites supplement their print editions with original content on the Internet. What I’ve noticed from conducting my current research about magazine sites is that while the homepages of magazines don’t offer a lot of geeky Web 2.0 features, they have created a significant amount of content that is easily digestible and fits the format of reading on the Web. I think the presence of magazine MySpace pages is a great example of how old media can reach out to new media audiences without expending a lot of cash or effort.

Here is a list of the magazine MySpace pages features on the MPA website: (more…)

The Society for New Communications Review hosted their Inaugural Symposium and Gala last Wednesday and Thursday in Boston. I attended and am happy to report that your favorite blog, The Bivings Report, won SNCR's coveted Award of Merit in the Business category ! It is a great feeling to be honored by one's peers, particularly on a team effort like our blog.

SNCR followed their awards and anniversary ceremony with a really interesting symposium on, you guessed it, new communications. Highlights, extremely biased my own by personal and professional interests, are below:

• Paul Gillin gave an interesting summary comparing blogs and social media to traditional media.

New media: Outsource everything, leverage free content, involve the community, go after niche markets, market virally, low overhead, few staff, new web creating a robust set of operating principles, little to no barriers to entry.

Old media: Large infrastructure, supported by very expensive advertising, increasingly relies on blogosphere for niche news content, broader markets, subjective editorial decision-making necessary, significant barriers to entry.

If you want to dive really deep into this sort of thing you might want to check out Paul Gillin's book, The New Influencers when it's published early next year. His study comparing new media to old, was quite compelling, and was the first time I had heard so many things that I've come to take for granted strung together in such a logical way.

• SNCR had a panel of executives from IBM, EDS and Novell discussing blogging a la corporate. Topics included policies and monitoring of employees blogging publicly, internal behind-the-firewall corporate blogging successes and policies, brainstorming via blogs, and public blogging in highly regulated environments. Of particular interest to me was the different ways in which blogs were being leveraged internally in organizations, and the new corporate challenges that blogs are giving corporate communications and PR professionals.
   
• I met with Ted Shelton, CEO of Personal Bee, and one of the sponsors of the event, who was kind enough to give me a personal presentation of his new news aggregator. It's got some great ideas — if you can imagine a categorized feed aggregator, where the categories are created and added to socially, with the results presented in a combination of tag clouds and meme-type groupings then you get the idea. The interface is really slick, and is one of the coolest news products I've seen lately. Anyone interested in RSS feeds or news aggregators should definitely check it out. We might have a review on that one for you soon so stay posted…
   
• A panel of university communications executives explained how they had all tried to leverage student blogging as a recruitment tool with varying degrees of success. While corporate communicators can hammer blogging policies home, this panel reported having a hard time dealing with the transparent nature of blogs and trying to keep the image of their university intact.

• There was a discussion on selling the idea of blogging to corporations and the challenges involved there.

• Finally, there was a discussion on the use of copyrighted music in podcasts and the legal implications of doing so. It seems that the jury is still out on this one, but if you podcast, I would strongly advise against using copyrighted work as part of your podcast without consent.

SNCR will be posting the individual panelist findings and the case studies of the other award winners if you're interested in reading more about them. I can't seem to find them online yet, but will post a brief entry when they're up. I had a great time and would strongly encourage other web communicators to check out their next symposium.

In a move that can be described as either truly genius or truly bizarre, the Associated Press reported  that the Motion Picture Association of America has developed a curriculum to teach the Boy Scouts of America about the necessity of entertainment copyright law and the ill-effects of pirating movies. Scouts receive a merit badge after completing the program, which includes learning the fundamentals of copyright law, how to identify copyrighted works and understanding how copyright law can be violated. The curriculum also requires them to either visit a movie studio to meet the people hurt by film piracy or create a PSA which encourages others not to pirate entertainment.

Earlier this month, a Techdirt post discredited the MPAA report that piracy cost the industry $20.5 billion, calling their stastistics "bogus." Blogger Tim Lee of the Technology Liberation Front pointed out flaws in the study in a post linked by Techdirt.

No word yet on whether or not the Electronic Frontier Foundation or Public Knowledge have finished designing their own curriculum and merit badges.