A Thankful Moment

While there are certainly some aspects of being a CEO that are full of those proverbial thankless tasks…there are some moments that are just the opposite.  And boy are those rewarding.

I had one this morning.  While I frequently get nice emails or handwritten cards from employees after they interview or start or get a promotion or raise — and those are all great — this is one I can easily blog about because it’s online.

Yesterday was the first official day of work for Neil Schwartzman, who actually joined us many months ago as a consultant running compliance for our Sender Score Certified whitelist but just finally became a full-time employee as we set up a Canadian entity and International entity and whatever our lawyers and accountants told us we had to do in order to be legit about hiring out of the country.

Neil’s thank you post is very entertaining (I promise, our objective isn’t to have employees drinking and slacking off!), but more than that, rewarding in that he says we do a good job at Return Path of walking the walk around ethics, reputation, and high standards in what we do for the email ecosystem.  Now that’s rewarding.

But in some ways, it’s even more meaningful coming from Neil.  Just as he says he took a risk in coming to work with us, we took a risk in bringing him on board.  As a leading voice in the anti-spam community, Neil is exactly the kind of person that spooks out some of our clients who think of anti-spammers as the enemy.  Our view is, as you can imagine, more nuanced.  Anti-spammers who do their job well are a legitimate marketer’s best friend because they are keeping the inbox clean of actual spam.  As we tell our clients, we are a big tent here — the only way we will solve our clients’ deliverability problems is by working WITH the receivers of the world on common language, rules, standards, and metrics — not working AGAINST them.  And that’s where Neil has done such a great job for us so far — bringing his unique perspective on the spam problem and working alongside many others on our deliverability team like Tom Bartel, Tom Sather, Leslie Price, Melinda Plemel to help keep the world safe for email.

So thanks, Neil…and right back at you!

Brilliant Client Service:  It’s Not Just for Peaceful Revolutionaries Any More!

I just read this quote, attributed to an unlikely source, Mahatma Gandhi, in an annual report from InfoUSA, one of the biggest public companies in our industry:

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us.  We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work.  He is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it.
We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

This quote is widely believed to actually be from Gandhi, despite questions about that authenticity, at least according to one expert.

But boy is the content spot on.  We literally just finished developing something we call the Return Path Client Promise a few weeks ago, which you can see here.  The trick to getting something like this to work is that it has to be truly genuine and come from within, not from on high.  Our marketing, sales, and account teams worked diligently over the course of a couple of months to draft and refine this document and make it accurate and meaningful.

Why Exactly Does Anyone Use WebEx?

We had a terrible experience with WebEx a couple years back, which I blogged about here.  Since then, we’ve happily been using Ready Talk with nary a problem.

WebEx’s sales reps spam me all the time, and no matter how many times I try to get off their list, I keep getting the spam.  It’s embarrassing that an e-company is in flagrant violation of CAN-SPAM, the most permissive anti-spam law around.

But I’ve been on two or three WebEx calls lately where, sometime in the middle of the call, an automated voice comes on and says “thank you, your conference call is now over,” and closes down the call.  Sometimes, dialing back in works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Once a couple weeks ago, when dialing-in didn’t work, I just emailed everyone on the call, and we switched to my Ready Talk number.

I’m not sure how much due diligence Cisco did on them before acquiring them for a gazillion dollars recently, but the mix of poor technology, overly aggressive sales reps in violation of the law, and awful customer service sounds like a nightmare to me.

Email Marketing Blog

One of my readers just emailed me:

You’ve done a good job talking about first-time CEO experience but not explaining step by step what makes a good email vendor and why returnpath is, thus, the company we should use.  Subtly, over the years, I should have come to know exactly why I’d want to use returnpath…

As I wrote back to him, I’ve deliberately kept my blog away from being a promotional vehicle for Return Path, although I do periodically write about the company in one way or another.  My plan is generally to keep it like that.

In any event, the reader’s note reminded me that I may have a bunch of other readers who don’t realize that Return Path has its own blog, which is a great resource for email marketers large and small alike.  You can get to it on our home page, or the feed URL is here.  We also have a couple email-only options for feed distribution on our site.

It Never Goes Without Saying

Remember that old adage, "It goes without saying…"?  That saying shouldn’t exist inside a well-run company.  Communication — real communication, not implied communication — is the foundation for a successful business.

We human beings live for "moments."  We mark time by observing regular occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays.  While religions and cultures differ on the details, we mark the cycle of life with things like baby namings, bar mitzvahs, confirmations, first communions, weddings, and funerals. 

There’s no reason the workplace should be any different.  Think about these few examples where it could "go without saying," but where you’re so much better off creating that "moment" by:

– Publicly acknowledging a member of your team for reaching an employment anniversary (the bigger the number, the heartier the acknowledgment)

– Laying the groundwork for a new initiative by reminding the team in a meeting or email about the company’s mission and how this initiative fits into the big picture

– Marking the end of a project or a transition period with a celebration

– Meeting two weeks after the end of a project or a crisis to do a post-mortem analyzing what went well and defining lessons learned for the next time

– Publicly thanking a colleague for helping out on something — anything

– Giving an employee a quick reprimand or constructive feedback right after an incident (probably privately) instead of letting the issue fester and its details slip from short-term memory

Clear, simple communication is the cheapest and easiest way to create a fun, rewarding, accountable, and focused work environment.

In the Land of Too Many Conferences, This is a Good One

It’s rare that I’m sad to leave a conference — usually I can’t leave fast enough.  But such is my mood today leaving Mediapost’s third Email Insider Summit.

Our industry is way over-conferenced in general.  I’m guessing that our company’s full conference calendar has 40+ events on it over the course of a year.  It’s more than we can afford to exhibit at, participate in, speak at, attend.  We do our best, and what money we spend is much more carefully monitored and measured than it used to be, but usually it’s with that sick feeling in the pit of our collective marketing stomach that we’re throwing money away just because our competitors are there.

But the Email Insider Summit is different.  While there are some aspects of the show that I don’t love — four days is a long time, and three half days of golf and snorkeling is a little too heavy on the boondoggle side for my personal taste — the content and attendees are fantastic.  Mediapost’s formula of comping marketers and charging vendors very high prices to attend ensures an intimate, high level, and vendor-light crowd.  That’s a recipe for success in my book!

The two most interesting nuggets from today:

1. John Stichweh from Coca-Cola’s observation that brand marketing and direct marketing continue to rapidly converge, and that measurement of outcome (e.g., ROI) as opposed to measurement of process (e.g., GRPs or impressions) are gaining steam, never to look back.  I couldn’t agree more.  What can be counted will be counted.  And it can all be counted in the world of advertising, somehow.

2. Lisa Galli from CNET’s discussion of mobile marketing and what they’re doing to take advantage of the channel.  The best example I’ve heard in years of a marketer leveraging a medium is their new SMS Reviews product — just text message CNET1 the words Review xxx (insert name of product here), and you’ll get a text message back with a product review.  Now THAT ought to make shopping for electronics much more interesting.

I’m ready for more conferences like these, and fewer mammoth trade shows.

Blogiversary, Part III

OnlyOnce turns three today.  While year 1 was exciting and year 2 was still a build, this year has been more about maintenance.  I don’t mean that in a bad way — I still enjoy writing it, but I am finding it a little tougher to make time for it (probably more a function of other things going on in life).  Also, I periodically catch myself starting some post or other and realizing that I wrote it, or something much like it, sometime in the past!

I think in honor of the third blogiversary, I’ll reinvigorate today by posting three times!

Feeling Less Like a Luddite:  Welcome, Lijit!

As I’ve written about a few times (here, here, and here), it’s easy to feel like a Luddite with the rapid pace of change of the web these days. Anyway, I’m feeling slightly less like one today with the addition of Lijit to my blog.

You’ll notice that I changed the search box from Google to Lijit on the right hand side of the page on OnlyOnce.  Lijit seems like it’s a better way to search a blog, and maybe other things as well.  Using Lijit, you can search not just the text of the blog itself (which is what Google allowed), but Lijit also goes out and searches a few other buckets of related content all in the same fell swoop.  So while it searches the blog, it also searches other sites that I run, other sites that are related to my site (e.g., blogs I subscribe to), other services where I might post content, like Flickr and Delicious and LinkedIn, and the open web.  Search results with four tabs — now that’s making good use of the web!

Old and Young Alike?

Fred has a couple good posts today about the age of entrepreneurs (here, here).  His evidence is that most entrepreneurs are in their late 20s or early 30s — in a very non-judgmental way.

I have a slightly different take on it.  I heard from someone once that entrepreneurs are either late 20s/early 30s or in their 50s or even 60s.  So basically, the young entrepreneurs have nothing to lose because they’re so early in their careers…and the older ones can afford to take risk because they have already made their money elsewhere.

Not sure how much universal truth there is to that, but one thing I’m certain of is that using the Internet as a barometer of this is a mistake!

The Very Unfriendly Skies of United

The 6 a.m. flight from LaGuardia to Denver is unpleasant to begin with, but the idiots who set customer-facing policies at United seem to have found a new way of making it even less pleasant.

I’ve long-hated United’s “Economy Plus” seating, which gives the first 5-10 rows of coach a huge amount of leg room at the expense of all the other rows in coach.  American, by contrast, has more leg room in all rows of coach, so I can actually work in any seat on an American plane, laptop and all.  On United, the seats in the majority of coach are almost unworkable.

United used to just automatically put you in Economy Plus if you were a frequent flier with status.  But now United is taking Economy Plus to a new level — they’re automatically NOT putting you in Economy Plus and then charging more for it on the spot.  You can move yourself into Economy Plus for free online ahead of time, assuming there are open seats in it.  So really, the new policy is just designed to hold a gun to customers’ heads at the airport.

This morning’s flight is a prime example of how not to treat your customers.  It’s 6 a.m., and coach is maybe — maybe — half full.  And the announcement comes on that United’s new policy is that you are forbidden to move seats into Economy Plus after takeoff, even if there are open seats (which there are).  You can only do that if you pay $44, and a United representative would be happy to take that money at any time.

My colleague Angela had the best line on this situation — it’s as if United has put up an invisible electric fence in the middle of coach.  Whether or not there’s a ringing and a shock, it certainly feels like United is treating its customers like dogs.  They now join my customer service Hall of Shame along with Verizon (the anchor tenant) and Fedex/Kinko’s.

Silly, Silly Patent Nonsense

Some news floated around the email marketing world yesterday that is potentially disturbing and destructive but highlights some lunacy at the same time.  I hope I’m getting enough of the details right here (and quite frankly that isn’t a joke, which it feels like).

Tom DiStefano of Boca-based PerfectWeb Technologies is suing direct marketing behemoth InfoUSA for patent infringement of a business process patent for bulk email distribution that he received in 2003.

I will first issue my disclaimers that I’m not a patent lawyer (nor do I even play one on TV) and that I have only quickly read both the legal complaint and the patent.  But my general take on this is that it’s more silly than anything else — but has the potential to be destructive at the same time.

Silly reason #1.  I’d like to go patent the process of blowing my nose with facial tissue predominantly using my left hand after a sneeze — will you pay me a royalty every time you do that, please?  That’s a short way of saying that I am increasingly finding that the patent system is deeply flawed, or at least very ill-suited to the way technology and Internet innovation work today.  For centuries, patents have been put in place to provide inventors adequate incentive to invest in innovation.  That made sense in a world where innovation was expensive.  It took a long time and a lot of capital to invent, say, the cotton gin or the steam engine.  It takes a long time and a lot of capital to invent a new life-saving drug.  But Internet-oriented business process patents are just silly.  It can take a guy with a piece of paper a few minutes to sketch out a business process for some niche part of the Internet ecosystem.  No real time, no real capital.  And worst of all, it’s generally easy to “design around.”  Disclaimers and all, this seems to be just such a patent.

Silly reason #2.  The patent was issued in 2003.  Really?  I’m not sure when the patent holder claims he invented the bulk email distribution process, but unless it was in the early 90s before the likes of Mercury Mail, First Virtual, Email Publishing, etc., then it’s highly likely to be “non-novel,” “obvious,” and conflicting with lots of “prior art.”

Silly reason #3.  Why wait four years to prosecute a patent that the inventor believes has been violated so obviously by so many (hundreds, maybe thousands) companies for so many years?  I don’t quite get that.

I’m not exactly seeing the David vs. Goliath here.

So here we go.  It will likely take months and millions before this thing gets resolved.  If our legal system doesn’t come through as it should, or worse, if InfoUSA punts and settles, this is going to cause big problems for many, many companies in the industry.

I hope our friends at InfoUSA are happy to dig in and fight to have the patent invalidated, although that’s expensive and time consuming.  And assuming that the patent holder is likely to go on a rampage of legal complaints against every other player in the industry — someone should tell Vin Gupta that we can all band together to fight this silliness.  We’re happy to help here at Return Path.