5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful I’ve recently started writing a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. Ken has been covering email for a long time and is one of the smartest journalists I know in this space. My column, which I share with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, covers how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Below is a re-post of this week’s version, which I…
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The UnEmployee
The UnEmployee We have a few people who I think of an UnEmployees. They are people who we have almost hired over the years (sometimes more than once), but never have, people who are in our industry and are friends of Return Path. Sometimes they are clients or partners, sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they have a token stock option grant as advisors, sometimes they don’t. In any case, these people have played an incredibly valuable role in our company’s development over the years. They are extra “eyes and ears” for us that have often served up valuable information before any of our regular employees heard things. They have made powerful connections for us with other companies in the industry. They…
Feature Request, Part II
Feature Request, Part II In Part I, I asked for time zone alerts on cell phones for off-hours and a mechanism for alerting people when they’re replying-to-all when they were bcc’d. Today, I ask for an iPhone (and I suppose Android) app: turn a photo of a whiteboard into a Word or PPT document!
New Blog of Note in the Direct Marketing World
New Blog of Note in the Direct Marketing World Gene Raitt, Chairman of the DMA, has launched a new blog today called DM Unplugged. It’s not an official DMA property. Gene won’t be the only contributor — over time, other DMA board members (including me) and thought leaders in the direct and interactive marketing communities at large — will contribute as well. This is one small, though notable, development in a series of things the DMA is working on as it transforms itself. Look for some truly “unplugged” commentary on this blog about both things happening in the industry and transparent views into things happening at the DMA as well as invitations to contribute to the discussion on both.
Closer to the Front Lines, Part II
Closer to the Front Lines, II Last year, I wrote about our sabbatical policy and how I had spent six weeks filling in for George when he was out. I just finished up filling in for Jack (our COO/CFO) while he was out on his. Although for a variety of reasons I wasn’t as deeply engaged with Jack’s team as I was last year with George’s, I did find some great benefits to working more directly with them. In addition to the ones I wrote about last year, another discovery, or rather, reminder, that I got this time around was that the bigger the company gets and the more specialized skill sets become, there are an increasing number of jobs…
New Email Blogger Extraordinaire
New Email Blogger Extraordinaire My good friend and co-founder George Bilbrey, Return Path’s President, is now blogging. His blog, Monkey Mind Labs, is aptly named in part after Return Path’s long-standing but little-known corporate mascot. His first few posts are up. My guess is that his blog will be a bit like mine in that it will cover topics about email marketing as well as entrepreneurship, but I can almost promise that George will be both wittier and more insightful than I. At least, that’s what he tells me. Take a look! Subscribe. Enjoy.
Most scenic airport. Ever.
Most scenic airport. Ever. If all business travel started or ended like this (Jackson Hole), the world would be a happier place, I’m certain.
Drawing the Line: Where We Come out
Drawing the Line: Where We Come out In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we’ve had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in “grey” businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part — the so what. We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here’s where we come out. First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially “troublesome” clients: those whose…
Holiday Cards c. 2007
Holiday Cards c. 2007 Every year, I get a daily flood of business holiday cards on my desk in the second half of December. Some are nice and have notes from people with whom we do business – clients, vendors, partners, and the like. Some are kind of random, and it takes me a while to even figure out who they are from. Occasionally some even come in with no mark identifying from whence they came other than an illegible signature. And every year, I receive one or two email cards instead of print & post cards, some apologetic about the medium. Until this year. I think I’ve received about 10-15 cards by email this month. None with an apology….
Clients at Different Levels
Clients at Different Levels Recently, I’ve become more aware that we have a huge range of clients when it comes to the level of the person we interact with at the client organization. I suppose this has always been true, but it’s struck me much more of late as we’ve really ramped up our client base in the social networking/web 2.0 arena, where most of our clients are CEOs and COOs as opposed to Email Marketing Managers. Of course, we don’t care who our day-to-day client is, as long as the person is enough of a decision maker and subject matter expert to effectively partner with us, whether it’s on deliverability via Sender Score or on list management or advertising…
The 80 Percent Rule (Not the 80/20 Rule)
The 80 Percent Rule (Not the 80/20 Rule) I believe it was Ronald Reagan who said about the Republican Party that there are a lot of people in it with a lot of different views, but that as long he agreed 80% with someone, he was solidly “with them.” The older I get, the more I find this to be a great rule of thumb. Certainly in politics, it must be true. In a two-party system that handles an infinite number of issues, you’re never going to agree 100% with someone. You just have to get close. That’s why it will be interesting to see how things like the candidacy of Giuliani works, with him running as a pro-choice Republican….