Eggblogg

If only it were true... some nice April Fool jokes

Post-date your emails and never miss a birthday again:

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html

And the BBC says penguins can fly, see for yourself:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/epeng001.shtml

Things I've learnt recently on Twitter

I confess I do not read all the new posts in my Google reader everyday. That would be hundreds to get thru. Brain overload! But I've started to connect with some interesting folks on Twitter who keep me informed. It's a form of social bookmarking, but I find it a bit less mechanical and a bit more serendipitous, which I like. So the moral is, don't just blog it, tweet it.

For example here are a few things I've read recently, and who tweeted about it:

Obama spent $1 million on Google alone in February - (Richord)

Social media starter moves for freelancers -  (Chris Brogan)

What is a friend? (Ann Handley)

eTips: These words must go!

I really think it's time to drop certain jargon words - take traffic, users and social for example.

More about what I mean in this week's edition of eTips ...

Here comes everybody

I just caught the tail end of 'Start the Week' yesterday on Radio 4 and heard someone saying that they couldn't imagine where people got the time to blog, tweet, polish their LinkedIn profiles etc etc - were these all people who used to spend their time watching TV? It made me feel a bit better about not blogging all day or even every day!

It turned out the guest on the show who was there to talk about the internet was Clay Shirky (great name!) so I went looking at the blog based around his new book, Here Comes Everybody. Here's what he has to say about What Businesses Need to Know about Social Media ...

Twitter in plain English

I'm getting impatient... I want everyone I know to be using Twitter, because at the moment I'm a bit lost and don't really know anyone there. (Come on, peeps! Come out and play!) Here's a good explanation of what Twitter is all about, if you're sceptical:

I came across this at Logic+Emotion. Enjoy!

eTips for 6th March, and related links

Is this relevant? The importance of targeting is today's eTip. The creative and the offer seem to get all the attention in email marketing - but what about timing and targeting?

Stories that have caught my eye today while researching eTips:

Can you blog away the blues? - from the Times online

Creativity vs the machine - Bill Nussey on why small companies can potentially do so well when it comes to innovation.

Some ESPs tolerate the big spammers - why?  - from the Email Experience Council

E-mail marketing is still favoured for customer retention

According to this report from eMarketer, email is the number one customer retention tool for US marketers. The report also highlights that although marketers plan to spend less overall this year on direct marketing, nevertheless they plan to increase their budgets for email and SEO.

Are we losing the ability to write, and do we care?

There's an interesting post over at e-Consultancy this morning, berating website owners for not realising that small improvements to web copy could actually make a big difference to profits.

Then at CatalystBlogger recently, Jennifer Williamson had a moan about copywriters being asked or expected to do stuff for free, and why that's wrong.

There's a common theme here - the perceived value of good writing (or rather the lack of it).

I've always felt the number one reason for this is that everyone can basically write, so it's not seen as a specialist skill, like, say, design. In a world where everyone writes, what makes a writer special?

Then again, all the evidence points to standards of literacy falling, certainly in this country. Kids grow up texting and have no need to learn long words, nor how to spell even short words or construct sentences. Very few 16 years olds are required to write essays or read anything remotely challenging - one girl I know went to sixth form college with the required pass in GCSE English, without having ever read a newspaper or a novel by a dead author, or written an essay longer than 500 words. She's bright, but no demands were made of her at school. We tolerate spelling mistakes even from authority figures such as teachers and national newspapers.

Perhaps writing is a dying art. And yet ... the internet is still a text based medium, and even the dominance of video, music and photo sharing hasn't eliminated the need for words to communicate.

So in a world where fewer and fewer people write, shouldn't that mean the writer's skills are valued more highly?  Or, as it seems at the moment, will we lose the ability to discriminate and just settle for any old rubbish? As the cliche goes, 'In the land of the legless, the one legged man is king'.

UK Businesses losing customers because they don't reply to emails

Why am I not surprised at this?

In this week's NMA we learn that '38% of UK consumers have decided not to use a business because of poor response to email queries, customer research specialist The Listening Company has found. It also found that 3 out of 10 consumers had difficulty finding contact details on websites.'

And then there are those who make it impossible to get off their mailing lists. Today I made 2 abortive attempts to 'unsubscribe' from emails, one was iStockphoto, whose emails contain a teeny weeny link at the foot telling you that To unsubscribe, Click Here and change your Control Panel settings. Please note this may take up to 2 weeks to process. And then you need to remember your login to access your control panel. Two weeks? Give me a break.

Then there was the lovely Pipex, t/a Supanames, with their press release emails coming from the attractive sounding noreply@supanames.co.uk telling me 'If you do not want to receive any more newsletters,  http://sitecontrol.supanames.co.uk/newsletter/lists/?p=unsubscribe&uid=a63def9b72fefea8af0c38057a32c2cc' - go ahead, feel free to click on it for me and unsubscribe me if you can. All I got was an error message. Nice!

20 blogging ideas

Chris Brogan knows a thing or two about social media and he's just come up with a list of 20 ideas for topics to blog about. I love this kind of post, for people like me who need inspiration (aka lazy bloggers).

Thanks Chris, I may well take on something here, I liked the idea of 'Mother-Daughter' interview, but maybe interviewing a client instead, and get them talking about their perceptions of things like, well, blogs.