RSS adoption, what email vendors don’t offer, and what pushes a marketer to switch

For a summary and case study data on the state of RSS adoption, what other email vendors do or don’t offer, plus a round-up of the key issues that marketers need met in order to “switch, look here http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2988

Here’s a key snippet:
“A few track how many clicks the links sent through RSS get. Another few (often a separate group) track how many site visitors click on the RSS button to start getting the feed. Practically no one tracks anything else… and there’s zero sophisticated tracking we know of at all.

No deliverability, open rates, hard vs. soft bounces. No a/b tests, no usability tests, no offer tests, no recency/frequency tests, and multi-variable testing is not even on the map.

The kind of data that marketers and publishers rely on to make business, content, and marketing decisions for email campaigns is almost entirely lacking for RSS at this time.”

Writing for the Huffington Post and speaking at SMX West

No, I’m not talking about me. I’ve never written for the Huffington Post. I’m talking about my 16-year-old daughter, Chloe Spencer.

Some of you may remember (and are perhaps also sick of! ) me bragging about Chloe’s Neopets SEO blogging success and the resulting media attention and her past speaking engagement at BlogHer ’07. Well…

First, I’m proud to announce that Chloe’s back on the speaking circuit! Later this month she will be speaking at SMX West, on the “Google Generation” panel. (I’m speaking too, on a different session: “Unraveling URLs and Demystifying Domains.”) Look for us if you’re going to SMX too!

Secondly, Chloe stretched her talents in a different way, by writing a guest blog post on The Huffington Post, published earlier this month. I’m so proud! I’m excited to watch her grow as a writer — beyond Neopets game cheats and girly quizzes to something more meaningful to her. The opportunity was generously provided to her by Huffington Post columnist Erin Kotecki Vest. Erin also blogs on BlogHer.org. Erin knew of Chloe from BlogHer ’07 — she caught the buzz about “the teen blogger” speaking at the conference. In the post, titled “Who Me, Save the World?” and re-titled by Erin as “COUP! 16-year old Takes Over Huffington Post, Chloe’s 800-word piece is about how she wants to make a difference in the world through her dream of becoming a documentary filmmaker, how she is inspired by the likes of Michael Moore, Mark Achbar and Al Gore, etc. Here’s a small excerpt…

My main goal is to make our society wake up to reality; what’s happening to the world, and what each individual needs to do to help stop it. I’m not perfect though…no one is. But I do recycle, think about what I eat, and buy organic products when I can; the little things that would make a huge impact on our environment if everyone did them.

I confess to not being a regular reader of Huffington Post until very recently. I actually didn’t know much about its founder either, Arianna Huffington, until I had the pleasure of hearing her give one of the keynotes at IIR’s”THE Conference on Marketing” last week. Arianna was a great speaker and an inspiring lady. Here are a few points Arianna made during her presentation that I jotted down:

• On polling in politics: The dominance of polling is a weakness of our system. Polling is not a good predictive science. Only 25% of people asked actually respond to polls; it’s a small minority of bored and lonely Americans who want to talk to strangers. Polling undermines leadership. It’s like astrology; not to be taken too seriously: “Pollstrology.”
• On creativity: Holding grudges blocks creativity. Also there is certain creativity that we miss if we are sleep deprived. For men, sleep deprivation has stupidly been tied to virility. It’s a badge of honor for men to boast that they get only a few hours of sleep per night.
• On “disconnecting”: We’re paying a heavy price for being always-on, always connected. Practice “Email-free Fridays”.
• On double-standards that women face: Here’s a gem of a quote:
  

  “For a man to be called ruthless, he has to be Joe McCarthy. For a woman to be called ruthless, she just has to put someone ‘on hold’.”

How true that last quote is, unfortunately!
I was surprised to hear that the Huffington Post gets 250,000 comments per month and that they employ comment moderators to work around-the-clock. Wow, quite an operation!

Is a blog a blog if the blogger doesn’t allow feedback?

I just had a peruse around the Huffington Post, and I have to say, I was disappointed by the lack of a search engine (which is just bad usability) and no ability to post comments or trackbacks. In my mind, a blog without comments is not a real blog. Real bloggers accept and encourage feedback; they engage in a two-way conversation with their readers. Otherwise, the bloggers are in their ivory tower – fingers firmly plugged in their ears as they sing loudly “nah nah nah, I’m not listening”. The NY Times proclaims in its review of the Huffington Post to “Get ready for the next level in the blogosphere.” But it’s a step backward in the inevitable evolution towards a more conversational Internet if comments are disabled and discouraged.

As Hugh McLeod so adeptly explained/illustrated, the conversation within your company (or, in Arianna Huffington’s case, within her clique) is separated from the conversation taking place in your market by a “membrane.” Blogs poke holes in that membrane by facilitating a dialogue between your company and your market. Disabling comments and trackbacks in effect stifles that dialogue and makes the membrane impermeable.

State Newspaper Picks Up Teen Blogger Story

Earlier this year, I had talked about my daughter Chloe and her success with Google ads in this blog post entitled, “SEO is the new first job for teens; flipping burgers is so last century.” Well, her success story has made the local news and I am a very proud papa. She’s quoted in The Capital Times by saying,

“Most people earn money by babysitting or working at places like McDonalds,” said Spencer, 16, who has earned up to $1,000 monthly from her site, Neopets fanatic.com. “I figured if I earned minimum wage I’d have to work 25 to 30 hours a week to make this.”

To read the entire article, please visit “Online cash flow McFarland teen makes money off Google ads.”

Enjoy, and have a great Thanksgiving!

Hacker wants to teach me a lesson??

I’ve been battling a hacker on this blog for the past two weeks. Perhaps you noticed the pharma spam redirects that just wouldn’t go away, despite reinstalling WordPress, moving servers, switching to a default theme, removing all plugins, locking down the admin with HTTP authentication, changing ownership and permissions on all files, etc. etc. Just to clarify it’s not just me doing the battling, I have had TONS of help from a couple of Netconcepts’ finest sysadmins (a big shout-out to Dave and Drew for the late nights!). It occurred tonight to Dave that this attack might be personal, because the hacker was vehemently expending so much effort to break back in and cause havoc each time that a hole was closed. But what did I do to deserve such violence? And to also target the blogs of my three children and of my Netconcepts colleague Chris Smith is really sick.

A helpful visitor emailed me a couple hours ago a screenshot of a popup window with a ransom note of sorts. Apparently the hacker heard me present at PubCon on December 5th and didn’t like me and/or what I had to say. The message was clear: either the hacker says his piece on this blog or the attacks will continue full-force. Here’s the screenshot:

That’s pathetic — resorting to a criminal act against me instead of simply engaging me in a dialogue through commenting or emailing me. I’m happy to take constructive criticism. But Mr. Lawless Hacker: don’t threaten me, don’t try to intimidate me, don’t steal from me, don’t vandalize my sites, and don’t harm my family or my colleagues in the process. Okay, so you want to take me to task for something, so be it. Do it in the comments.

Company names don’t always translate well to domain names

Be careful when converting your company name / brand name into an (available) domain name; it can have embarrassing repercussions.

I was reminded of this fact recently when seeing an email in my inbox that was sent to multiple recipients, including myself. One of the recipients was someone at arsecommerce.com. This domain name may appear rather ordinary to us Americans. But to those who speak “the Queen’s English” – including those in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – I bet they get a chuckle when they see it. I can imagine them thinking to themselves “Is this the company that put the “arse” in commerce?”. The company is ARS Ecommerce, not Arse Commerce.

Company names that work well in one context may not work so well in another. I remember a classic example of this from a hilarious piece in Business 2.0 magazine (circa 2001) called “Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History“. Here’s the money quote:

In October 1998, an e-commerce software vendor launches with the name Accompany, which, when said aloud, sounds exactly like “a company.” As in “Hi, I’m calling from Accompany.” “Which company?” “Accompany.” And so forth. It changes its name to MobShop in March 2000.

In my post on the News.com blog titled “Eleven steps to buying a domain name that doesn’t suck, I give another classic example of a domain name faux pas: therapistfinder.com. No, it’s a site for finding therapists, not rapists.

You also have to consider whether your choice of domain name will get you inadvertently blocked by email firewalls or the search engines’ adult filters.

Take for example this parts store – partsexpress.com – hyphenating the two words would have been a good idea. Ditto for whorepresents.com, an agency that represents celebrities.

Here are a few other examples of domain names gone horribly wrong:

• cumstore.co.uk for Cumbria Storage Systems, Ltd.
• choosespain.com to travel in Spain, pain-free!
• mammotherection.com deals with modern architecture and engineering
• cummingfirst.com is for a church in Cumming, Georgia

While these are pretty funny (and/or disturbing, depending upon your point-of-view), these are reputation management nightmares. Sadly, they were all preventable — usually with merely a well-placed hyphen or change in keywords. NYCanal.com could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment by choosing ny-canal.com or newyorkcanal.com instead.