Prepping RSS for Prime Time, Part II

David Daniels from Jupiter wrote a good article yesterday in ClickZ about RSS and email marketing.  It reads like a response to comments he received after publishing his main report on this topic earlier in the month.  He tackles three main points:  spam/clutter, personalization, and the (impending) flood of vendors.  It’s definitely worth a quick read if you care about the RSS/email debate and space.

I addressed this topic a little bit last June here, although somehow I forgot about the personalization challenge.  I think RSS is closer to prime time than it was then, but it’s still not quite ready to go toe to toe with email or other forms or more direct/addressable media yet.

New Deliverability Index is Out

Return Path’s semi-annual Sender Score Deliverability Index, which has become a sort of industry standard metric about how much non-spam commercial email is getting snared by ISP filters, is out.  You can read Heather Palmer Goff’s posting about it (and download the report and the metrics) on the Return Path blog here.

A Flurry of CAN-SPAM Activity – But Is It Meaningful?

Our four-year old oft maligned anti-spam legislation in this country, the CAN-SPAM act, has seen an uptick of activity this past week. 

Melinda Krueger sums up the sentiments of many in the anti-spam community in her Email Insider column today when she says,

There is no provision in the act against sending unsolicited email as long as you comply with the rest of the act. The motivation of the act was more to make voters feel politicians were doing something about this annoying problem.

In the last two days, however, we got news of ValueClick’s $2.9 million settlement with the FTC over a CAN-SPAM violation (the largest ever), as well as notorious hardcore spammer Robert Soloway pleading guilty on a variety of charges for Really Bad Things, probably including spamming (I’ve read differing reports of his plea, some of which include the CAN-SPAM violation, and some of which don’t).

I’ve never felt that CAN-SPAM did all that much to stop sneaky practices.  It has loopholes so large you can drive a semi through it.  People joke that the law means, “yes, you CAN spam.”  Yet, the law does seem to be doing at least a little of what it was intended to do, which is give the federal government the teeth to go after the bad guys. 

Soloway undoubtedly is a bad guy.  ValueClick may or may not be a bad guy, depending on who you talk to.  But, weak as the law may be, public fines and convictions for violations of CAN-SPAM will ultimately start to impact both the black hats and the grey hats.  Let’s just hope the feds keep up their enforcement work!

Pendulum Swinging Back?

The TechCrunch news du jour is that Jason Calacanis has stopped blogging and is instead using email to communicate with his circle. 

It’s interesting to note that after months (years?) of “email is dead” stories specifically around blogging, RSS feeds, and social media in general, the pendulum seems to be swinging back to email.  You should read Jason’s words yourself, but his notes are mainly that there’s too much noise and self-promotion in the blogosphere, while email promotes intimacy and efficiency.

Not surprisingly, TechCrunch is a doubter, but we’ll have to see.

Scaling Me

Two things have come up over the last couple years for me that are frustrations for me as a CEO of a high growth company.  These are both people related — an area that’s always been the cornerstone of my leadership patterns.  That probably makes them even more frustrating.

Frustration 1:  Not knowing if I can completely trust the feedback I get from deep in the organization.  I’ve always relied on direct interactions with junior staff and personal observation and data collection in order to get a feel for what’s going on.  But a couple times lately, people had been admonishing me (for the first time) when I’ve relayed feedback with comments like, “of course you heard that — you’re the CEO.”

So now the paranoid Matt kicks in a bit.  Can I actually trust the feedback I’m getting?  I think I can.  I think I’m a good judge of character and am able to read between the lines and filter comments and input and responses to questions I ask.  But maybe this gets harder as the organization grows and as personal connections to me are necessarily fewer and farther between.

Frustration 2:  Needing to be increasingly careful with what I say and how I say it.  This comes up in two different ways.  First, I want to make sure that while I’m still providing as transparent leadership as I can, that I’m not saying something that’s going to freak out a more junior staff member because they’re missing context or might misinterpret what I’m saying.  Ok, this one I can manage.

But the tougher angle on this is having unintended impact on people.  Throwing out a casual idea in a conversation with someone in the company can easily lead to a chain reaction of “Matt said” and “I need to redo my goals” conversations that aren’t what I meant.  So I’ve done some work to formalize feedback and communication loops when I have skip-level check-ins, but it’s creating more process and thought overhead for me than I’m used to.

Nothing is bad here – just signs of a growing organization – but some definite changes in how I need to behave in order to keep being a strong and successful leader.

Rejected by the Body

My most recent posting ("Sometimes, There Is No Lesson To Be Learned") about a strange hiring incident at Return Path has so far generated 5 comments — a whopper for my blog.  You can read them here if you want.  They’re a little bit all over the map, but they did remind me of something I frequently tell senior people who I am interviewing to join the company:

Hiring a new senior person into an organization is like doing an organ transplant.  Sometimes, the body just rejects the organ, but at least you find out pretty quickly.

At least we found out relative quickly with this one, although it was more like the organ rejecting the body!

OnlyOnce, Part II

After more than six years, my blog starting looking like, well, a six-year old blog on an off-the-shelf template.  Thanks to my friends at Slice of Lime, OnlyOnce has a new design as of today as well as some new navigation and other features like a tag cloud and Twitter feed (and a new platform, WordPress rather than Typepad).  I know many people only read my posts via feed or email (those won’t change), but if you have a minute, feel free to take a look.  The site also has its own URL now – https://onlyonceblog.wpengine.com.

With my shiny new template, I may add some other features or areas of content over time, as well.  There are still a couple things that are only 95% baked, but I love the new look and wanted to make if “official” today.  Thanks to Kevin, Jeff, Mike, Lindsay, and everyone at Slice of Lime for their excellent design work, and for my colleague Andrea for helping do the heavy lifting of porting everything over to the new platform.

Solving Problems Together

Last week, I started a series of new posts about our core values (a new tag in the tag cloud for this series) at Return Path.  Read the first one on Ownership here.

Another one of our core values is around problem solving, and ownership is intrinsically related.  We believe that all employees are responsible for owning solutions, not just surfacing problems.  The second core value I’ll write about in this series is written specifically as:

We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions

In terms of how this value manifests itself in our daily existence, for one thing, I see people working across teams and departments regularly, at their own initiative, to solve problems here.  It happens in a very natural way.  Things don’t have to get escalated up and down management chains.  People at all levels seem to be very focused on solving problems, not just pointing them out, and they have good instincts for where, when, and how they can help on critical (and non-critical) items.

Another example, again relative to other workplaces I’ve either been at or seen, is that people complain a lot less here.  If they see something they don’t like, they do something about it, solve the problem themselves, or escalate quickly and professionally. The amount of finger pointing tends to be very low, and quite frankly, when fingers are pointed, they’re usually pointed inward to ask the question, “what could I have done differently?”

The danger of a highly collaborative culture like ours is teams getting stuck in consensus-seeking.  Beware!  The key is to balance collaboration on high value projects with authoritative leadership & direction.

A steady flow of problems are inherent in any business.  I’m thankful that my colleagues are generally quite strong at solving them!

Today, the FTC very shrewdly punted on the issue of the proposed “Do Not Email” list implementation, saying that authentication systems need to be put in place before such a list can be considered. This buys the world more time to work on more effective, market-driven solutions to the spam and false positive problems.

I read a few interesting posts on this today, including one from Jeff Nolan which nicely captured Chuck Schumer’s elegant combination of demagoguery and idiocy about this issue; and one from Anne Mitchell pointing out that they’re about six months late with their conclusion. Feels about right for the federal government.

What’s interesting to me is that all of the comments by and about the FTC and the proposed “Do Not Email” list focus on the wrong thing: they say that the problem with the list is that spammers would abuse it by hacking into it and stealing all the email addresses. Ok, I’ll admit, that’s one theoretical problem, but it’s not THE problem.

The structural problem with a national “Do Not Email” list is that responsible emailers, non-spammers, don’t need to use it since they get appropriate permission from their customers before sending them email…and spammers won’t bother using it since they don’t give a hoot anyway and will find a way around the list as they do everything else. In the end, the creation of such a list would do nothing to stop spam, but it would certainly create a lot of confusion for legitimate marketers and their customers around opting in and opting out. It would also, notably unlike the fairly successful national “Do Not Call” list, not do anything to reduce the volume of spam, which will create disappointment and anger among consumers (and hello, Senator Schumer, backfire on its political sponsors).

Those aren’t bigger problems than spam to be sure, but why should we implement a solution to the problem that doesn’t work at all and that causes its own ancillary problems along the way?

It’s Up There With Air and Water Now

A study on “web withdrawl” conducted by Yahoo and OMD confirmed that most people are now so accustomed to using the web that they have problems when internet access is taken away from them. Nothing too earthshattering, but it’s an interesting quick read.

My favorite part: one person reported that he even missed getting spam. Now THAT’S a sign that it’s time to get outside and enjoy some fresh air.