Something important to remember:
Shawn Ryan has created shows for cable and network.
For several years he led both “The Shield” on FX and “The Unit” on CBS at the same time. He won awards and prestige for “The Shield,” but he had 16 million viewers for “The Unit.” “The Shield” averaged fewer than three million.
He recalled that when he was producing the two dramas at the same time, “As soon as anyone in Los Angeles heard I worked on ‘The Shield’ and ‘The Unit,’ all they wanted to talk to me about was ‘The Shield.’ But anytime I went home to Rockford, Ill., all they wanted to talk about was ‘The Unit.’ That was always a nice lesson for me.”
(via New York Times)
In my day job, I spend a significant amount of time educating others on the best practices for email marketing. One of the most frequent situations I run into is the idea of sending a one-off message to a huge mailing list. Specifically, a mailing list that has been purchased, dug up, or otherwise not grown organically. These addresses are typically not current customers for us either.
If I get a 1% response rate on this, I’m happy!
The above quote is what I’m trying to avoid. Educated our sales team as to why we should avoid the “mass emailing” idea. The problem we run into is communicating the necessity of not using our email marketing for these “brand awareness” or “spreading the brand” mailings.
Target those prospects that have previously shown interest.
What you really should focus on instead of email as a “shotgun” approach, is to instead aim our email marketing towards the prospects that have previously shown interest or reached out to your company in some manner or another (tradeshow, call, white paper download, etc). Through a properly directed email campaign, we can garner that prospects interest in our company’s offerings. When you take the “blast” approach, there are usually consequences that affect all of your future email marketing:
- When your emails are marked as spam by the recipient, you’re increasing the chance of all emails being marked as spam. This reduces the likelihood of all future emails reaching the inboxes of our prospects.
- And once a recipient marks an email from your marketing campaign as spam, your company’s reputation and image is reduced to “just another spammer.” Not something that we want to happen!
And these two consequences usually go hand-in-hand, and also are greatly multiplied when left unchecked.
So, the take-home lesson is this: Don’t use email marketing as a brand awareness tool, or spreading your brand name. Email marketing is better utilized for measuring the interest in your company and your company’s offerings.
Since leaving the television industry almost a year ago, I’ve transitioned into the corporate marketing world fairly well, I would say so myself. One thing I miss, however, is being a total gear head with television equipment. One of the very first tasks I was given at my last job over 4 years ago, was to handle the RFP phase, installation, and on-going maintenance of our studio cameras and our editing suites. Lots of technical details and minutiae, but it was fun!
So, this gearhead is jealous jealous (that’s jealous-squared for those math-types out there) of everyone who is at NAB in Las Vegas right now. NAB is my favorite time of year, especially now with all the new cameras (Blackmagic, wha?) and exciting write-ups coming from my favorite people like Vincent Laforet and Walter Biscardi and Philip Bloom.
Maybe, I’ll take some vacation time one day to go out to NAB. Years ago, I dreamt of going to a keynote presentation at MacWorld. Obviously, that won’t happen anytime soon. So, today my tradeshow dream is probably NAB. Maybe CES, but I think NAB is still focused on getting things done, rather than all this consumer crap going on right now.
Later gators,
John
Update to my last post, thanks to one of the comments.
In addition to the lack of Mac-expected interface features, Excel 2011’s performance is a bit uneven. When you’re scrolling large spreadsheets (either by clicking and holding on a thumb scroller or by drag-scrolling), the sheet feels like it’s moving quite slowly, even on current hardware. In back-to-back comparisons between Excel 2004, 2008, and 2011, the 2011 release was easily the slowest of the three, it took over six times as long to scroll through my test document as did Excel 2004. (Microsoft has told us they slowed the scrolling down due to user complaints about it being too fast. While it may have been too fast in Excel 2004, it’s currently twice as slow as Excel 2008, which seems like an excessive slowdown to me.) When you add in the lag-on-window-resize, the Excel 2011 interface can feel slow at times. (Rob Griffiths at MacWorld via TechWorld)
This is exactly my experience. While I appreciate the increased speed in calculations, (I have noticed this – It’s very quick) in this day and age, I find it simply irresponsible to create a user experience as unfriendly as this.
Isigi promises herself to one day sit down and organize all her online subscriptions and back up all her files. But she’s accepted that there’s a price to pay for using the services.
“At some point you just have to surrender control,” she said.
(via As Web sites come and go, so too could the information you entrust them with – The Washington Post.)
The key is to limit the information you put out there in the first place.
Ever since I started my new job in October, I’ve been working with Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. As I’ve been working with Excel more than I have in the past, I noticed that I wasn’t seeing some of the features that my PC-using co-workers had access to. So, we installed Parallels, Windows 7, and Office 2010 on my MacBook Pro.
Here’s the rub: Office 2010 running through Parallels is much faster, more responsive, and just a better overall experience than Office 2011 running on Mac OS X Lion.
And this bugs me! I can’t figure this out. I’ll have to put some numbers together and see if I can nail it down.
From the Nov. 7, 2011 issue:
Three years ago Ross was waiting with his mother for a flight from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles. The plane was delayed, and Ross sat for several hours, people watching. “I noticed all these nonrevenue sports teams—men’s lacrosse, tennis and other teams from the Big East—that were catching flights,” he recalls. “One of them was the Seton Hall tennis team, which was flying back from playing Marquette. It occurred to me how little sense that made. Why was Seton Hall paying to fly tennis players to Milwaukee? Why didn’t they just take a bus to a school that’s close by?”
(via Sports Illustrated)
I’m definitely not an expert on the best solution to the problems facing the NCAA and pay-for-play. It seems like there can be a better solution than saying “Let’s just pay all the student athletes.”
Speaking of NCAA:
In other words, some lucky handful of incoming freshmen will be handed $2,000 without jeopardizing their status as amateurs. Yet any other college athlete who manages to get his hands on an extra $2,000 — by taking money from an overenthusiastic booster, say, or selling some of their team paraphernalia, as a few Ohio State football players did — will be violating the N.C.A.A.’s rules regarding amateurism and will probably face a multigame suspension. Behold the logic of the N.C.A.A. at work.
The N.C.A.A. would have you believe that it is the great protector of amateur athletics, preventing college athletes from being tainted by the river of money pouring over college sports.In fact, the N.C.A.A.’s real role is to oversee the collusion of university athletic departments, whose goal is to maximize revenue and suppress the wages of its captive labor force, a k a the players.
There’s a lot of hullabaloo going around about the NYTimes recent email gaffe.
First the timeline:
An email was sent out in the early afternoon (I got mine at 12:24 PM Central Time) stating:
As a valued Times reader we invite you to continue your current subscription at an exclusive rate of 50% off for 16 weeks. This is a limited-time offer and will no longer be valid once your current subscription ends.*
At 3:42 PM, a mere 3 hours later, I received an email with the subject and content:
SUBJECT: CORRECTION: Important information regarding your subscription
Dear New York Times Reader,
You may have received an e-mail today from The New York Times with the subject line “Important information regarding your subscription.”
This e-mail was sent by us in error. Please disregard the message. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.
Sincerely,
The New York Times
Then the confusion really starts:
Then a little bit later:
I believe it’s much to do about nothing. Really.
There’s two things at work here:
- The New York Times made a mistake.
- A bunch of rabid internet users jumped on the chance to yell “fire” before figuring out what happened.
We can’t really address the latter concern professionally, so let’s look at how the Times handled the situation.
I applaud the fact that the Times sent out a correction email so quickly. However, you might as well have had Netflix CEO Reed Hastings write the email. All the correction told us was that the Times made the mistake. It didn’t say what happened. It didn’t say anything about account security. It didn’t say if the Times sent out the email, or if a separate company sent out the email. (Kudos for not going “Chrysler” on their employee(s) who made the mistake.)
I would’ve liked to seen an email address those concerns, the concerns brought up by people commenting on the Media Decoder blog on the Times website and on Twitter.
I see that as room for improvement. All in all, it was a mistake. Seems pretty innocuous, but gives the bloggers and tweetdom something to chat about, right?
