Get a Phone!

An emerging pet peeve of mine (which I’m feeling acutely at this precise moment) is people who do job interviews on a cell phone.  I understand that lots of people today, especially younger people, don’t have land lines, only cell phones.  They’re welcome to do that, although why someone wouldn’t get Vonage for $15/month, I’m not sure.

The reality is that cell phones in this country still get poor reception half of the time.  How can you conduct a job interview and expect to be taken seriously if the person interviewing you can’t hear you and has to keep asking you to repeat yourself?  It’s as if you showed up for a job interview wearing a suit jacket with a bathing suit.  You’d just never do it.  Find a real phone somewhere that you can borrow.  Get Vonage.  Make sure you show up in person.  Something other than a cell phone, please.

A Tale of Two Strategies

Two headlines right next to each other in today’s Wall Street Journal tell an interesting story.  First, they tell of Google’s strategy to allow advertisers to use Google’s web site to bid on and buy print advertising in over 50 leading newspapers. Then comes CBS’s strategy to bring in a new executive digital media M&A guru, Quincy Smith from Allen & Company, to “find the next YouTube.”

(These links should work for a week, but I think that’s all the Journal allows – sorry!).

So there you have it.  CBS’ grand interactive plans are about trying to do value-based Internet acquisitions.  Best of luck.  Les Moonves’ quote is somewhat sad — “This shows how serious we are about new media.”

All that against a backdrop of Google probably dropping three engineers and a case of Jolt Cola into a room for a week and coming up with an automated way of buying print ads in newspapers whose circulations are declining precipitously.  Eric Schmidt’s quote is equally interesting for its contrast to Moonves:  “Anything that we can do to improve the economic efficiency of the old model [of advertising] transfers money from the old model to the new model.”

Now to be fair, Google did say that eventually they would have 1,000 people working on offline media placements, 10% of its workforce, but they will probably grow their way there profitably, instead of turning into a private equity firm.

Killer Email Industry Stats

In case you’ve missed any of these reported recently, all by the Direct Marketing Association’s outstanding research department (link so you can see the details of reports available to purchase):

• Email marketing in the US alone will account for approximately 71,000 jobs this year, growing at 8-10% annually historically and projected into the future as well
• The ROI for email marketing is $57.25 for every dollar spent. The ROI of all non-email online marketing is $22.52, less than half

As I mentioned here (where a client of ours said her email ROI was 40:1), the biggest problem with email isn’t how effective it is — it’s how much inventory you as a marketer have available in your housefile and super qualified and permissioned rental lists.

The Good, The Board, and The Ugly, Part II

Much has been written of late on various VC and entrepreneur blogs on effective management of a Board of Directors, Board materials, running good Board meetings, and the like.  A couple years ago, I even wrote out a few tips for those things myself.

But here’s one critical ingredient of a good Board you won’t find in all those posts:  have fun!  This picture was from today’s Halloween Board meeting at Feedburner…as one of Dick’s colleagues labeled it, The Dawn of the Living Costolos.

Happy Halloween!

Selecting an ESP

Return Path’s Ken Takahashi (formerly of DARTMail fame) wrote a great post today on the Return Path blog — the first in a series — about selecting an ESP.  If you are an email marketer who is thinking about selecting an ESP, it’s a great read.

Association Proliferation

NOTE:  I was fortunate enough to be asked to write a monthly column for DMNews.  This is the most recent column.  By agreement with DMNews, I am linking to them for the bulk of the content, but you can get an idea of what I’m talking about with the first few sentences below.

You can be forgiven if you can’t precisely remember the difference between the OPA and the IAB. Or the DMA and the DAC. Or EEC and ESPC. Or WOMMA and OMMA. And, while we are at it, what exactly is a MAAWG? And isn’t OLGA the name of someone you’d go out to dinner with?

Gone are the days when a business could belong to one or maybe two trade associations and feel that it was covering…(read the rest at DMNews here).

Another Entrepreneur Blog

My friend Jason Devitt, founder and CEO of mobile application company Vindigo, is contemplating his next career move and has started to blog more actively about entrepreneurship (after a 9-month around-the-world honeymoon which made for a great travel blog).

His most recent post is about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, which I thought was great, and he promises more good ones on related topics to come soon.

Winds of Change at the DMA

I’ve been an active member of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) for almost seven years now.  It’s kind of the Mac Daddy of trade associations in and around our business.  The DMA has taken its lumps of late, mostly deservedly so, and I think made some terrible moves, misjudgments, and decisions a few years back.

But I’ve continued to be an active member, mostly convinced by new DMA CEO John Greco and COO Ramesh Ratan that there was a new sheriff in town who was going to restore peace and order to the village.  John and Ramesh have a deep understanding and deeply held convictions about consumer experience and permission — and about the centrality of interactive marketing to direct marketing, and to marketing departments in general.

And they’re starting to make lots of changes at the DMA, from who is on the staff, to the staff’s mindset, to their goals, budgets, and plans — all to the benefit of interactive marketers.

One thing they’ve done is revitalized the Interactive Marketing Advisory Board (IMAB), which we created after AIM was dissolved last year, of which I’m the Chairman.  The IMAB has a star-studded list of member companies and individuals (see coverage in DMNews here) and is working diligently and in great partnership with the senior staff of the DMA to really bring interactive marketing principles to the core of the DMA’s offerings and ethos.  We still have a long way to go, as you probably noticed at this week’s DMA 06 show in San Francisco (great interactive programming, very weak interactive trade show floor and critical mass of key attendees), but I think the IMAB initiative has us off to a great start.

Stay tuned for more developments on this front over the coming weeks.

Book Short:  You’d Never Run Your Business This Way…

I am an unabashed conservative, so you might wonder what I was doing reading  A Country That Works, by union chief Andy Stern, the President of SEIU (Service Workers International Union) this weekend.  Well, part of it is that my mother-in-law Carmen works for him.  Part was that he was quite inspiring during his recent appearance on the Colbert Report a week or two ago.  And part was that I always like reading about different points of view, especially with the current, somewhat dismal state of the Republican leadership in Washington.

The book was very short and a worthwhile read.  I may not agree with Stern on some of his illustrations of the problems — his statistical presentations were a bit apples-to-oranges at times — and some of his solutions, which were a bit high on the big-government-tax-and-spend side for me, but the book was very plain-speak, apolitical, and solution-oriented, all of which I found refreshing.

He certainly had at least one underlying premise about “labor as electricity ” (compete on something else other than forcing wages to go lower) that is making me think hard about my long-standing philosophical opposition to federally-mandated minimum wages.  His notion of the importance of a global labor movement to act as a check/balance on corporate globalization both make sense.  Actually, now that I think about it, those two things put together start working well as one plank in a solution to global poverty.

But the best part of the book was the fact that Stern is clear that, like his ideas or hate them,  he is at least proposing that we DEAL with them.  America is missing serious debate about some critical issues facing our society.  Anyone who doesn’t think we have serious problems facing our future around retirement savings, education, and health care is not facing reality.  The debate happening in Washington today is weak at best, and over-politicized.

The bottom line is that I think we’re in danger as a country of boiling the frog when it comes to some major structural issues in our society, and, most important to me, You’d Never Run Your Business This Way.  Any good entrepreneur knows that when danger lurks around the corner, you have to reinvent yourself, and we as a country aren’t doing that at this moment when we’d benefit from it greatly for the long term.  Stern displays that mix of optimism for the future and serious reality check today known as the Stockdale Paradox and revered by Jim Collins in his two books on corporate leadership, Good to Great and Built to Last.

My biggest criticism of the book was that it was too short.  It was basically 1/3 Andy’s story, 1/3 SEIU’s story, and 1/3 labor’s story — and it could have been at least twice as long and gone into more detail on Stern’s points, especially in the last chapter where he starts spelling out his plan to get America back on track.  But presumably when Stern runs for national office or gets a cabinet appointment someday (no inside knowledge here, but the book certainly reads that way), he’ll flesh things out a bit!

Only Once, Part II

As many of you know, this blog is called Only Once because You’re Only a First-Time CEO Once — that’s the general theme of my writings on entrepreneurship and on the email marketing industry (read the initial posting which explains all of that here).

As of today, I am entering into another Only Once because "You’re Only a First-Time Parent Once" as well!  Mariquita and I welcomed Casey Joanna Blumberg into the world at 8:46 this evening.  Everyone is doing well, and you can see our official announcement here. 

Email Marketing Good and Bad:  Case Study Snippets

I had a good meeting this morning with one of our long-time multi-channel retailer clients who is in town for Shop.org’s Annual Summit.  Over the course of our conversation, she relayed two things going on in her world of email marketing at the moment that bear repeating (with her permission, of course).

First, the good.  In a recent study, our retailer hero determined that customers who receive their email newsletters and offers (not even open/click, just receive) spend on average 3x as much on in-store purchases than their non-email counterparts in any given week or for any given campaign.  Talk about deriving non-email or non-click value from your email marketing efforts!

Second, the bad (ok, well, it’s the ugly as well).  Our retailer hero was just nailed by Spamhaus because someone out there complained about a transactional email he or she received from the retailer.  She estimates that the poor Spamhaus listing is costing her millions of dollars a year in lost sales from regular customers.  The email was literally about a refund that the retailer owed the customer (why there was a complaint — who knows?).  What did Spamhaus suggest the retailer do?  Repermission their list around transactional messages — “or else.”  Seems to me that that’s a pretty tough stance to take on rather shaky evidence and with no appropriate dispute resolution mechanism (e.g., one that’s not just tuned to mailers’ interests, but one that’s fair in the broadest sense of the word).  No wonder Spamhaus is being sued, and no wonder the vigilante blacklist providers of the world are losing traction with ISPs and corporate system administrators.  Authentication and real, professionally run reputation systems with ample amounts of representative data, feedback loops, and dispute resolution mechanisms will ultimately win the day over the vigilantes of the world.  Folks like Spamhaus can get things right lots of the time and in fact do provide a valuable cog in the global world of spam fighting, but they’re less great at making amends when they don’t.

So email continues to have its challenges around filtering and deliverability…but how cool is it that marketers are really sinking their teeth into metrics that prove how effective the email channel is for driving sales, both online and offline?