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.

Help Me, Help You, Part II

Thanks to the nearly 100 readers who responded to my reader survey this past week.  While I’m not sure it’s a truly statistically significant base of OnlyOnce’s audience (I’ll have to ask my friends over at Authentic Response), I’ll treat it like it is.  Here’s what I learned.  First, the general results:

• Satisfaction levels are good – 46% are regular readers and love it, 48% read occasionally and think it’s ok, and only 6% gave it an “eh – wouldn’t miss it if it went away”
• Entrepreneurship is the most popular topic, with 86% interest, and Leadership/Management is a close second at 82%.  Online/Email Marketing came in at 61% and Book Reviews at 43%.  Current Affairs and Travel (which I almost never use) were 31% and 25%, respectively
• 72% of people feel frequency at 1-2 posts a week is on target.  Only 4.5% want fewer posts, and 24% (those kind souls) want it more often
• Most people other than Return Path staff found the site through a link on another blog rather than search

Next, the open-ended comments were interesting.  A summary snapshot:

• Positive comments were generally about tone and candid approach, succinct posts, and topics.  One nice person noted his/her favorite thing was “the author” (thank you Mom/Dad/Grandma/Mariquita/Michael)
• Constructive comments varied.  Some good ones are noted below:
• “assumes a level of knowledge not everyone has”
• “too heralding of the VC view of the world”
• “too much focus on email/marketing,” “too local/American” (that’s who I am, though)
• “ I would like to see more about what it takes to be a CEO in day to day operations. what skills do you find you need, what obstacles do you come across, issues with driving a company.”
• “A little too much PRish in regards to Return Path”
• “It seems like everything you write about is too positive. Or at least a negative story with a happy ending. Nothing about what sucks to run a company. I run one and a lot of it does suck.”
• “Not enough personal stuff — who is the author?” (see the About Me link on the blog)
  
• “The word vigilante is bandied around way too much by the author”
• And of course someone noted as constructive feedback that I haven’t yet mentioned my mother’s name (sorry, Mom/Joyce!).  And one person suggested I shave.  Thanks, really.

Finally, the demographics of my audience:

• 3 % are under 24, 45% are 25-34, 41% are 35-49, 11% are over 49
• 80% male and 20% female (surprising)
• Company data wasn’t so interesting, or I phrased the question poorly – but one takeaway is that about 1/2 of readers seem to be “in the industry” generally speaking, with lots of Return Path staff subscribing as well as lots of other entrepreneurs and a handful of VCs
• Level/title was more interesting – nearly half the audience is SVP-level or above at their company

Thanks again, everyone, and I’ll take note of this feedback for future postings!

Good Help is Hard to Find

We’re having a bitch of a time lately hiring good sales people.  We’re growing like crazy this year and are trying to invest more in our salesforce, but it’s not easy.  And we’re a good catch.  Good brand, healthy company, good comp and benefits, charming CEO, the works.

I just traded emails with a friend who is CEO of another online marketing services firm who said the same thing, with the exact same explanation I have:

I have been so unimpressed with everyone from our space (weak links drop out, mediocrity churns from company to company, and true talent is retained).

Anyway, we have gotten very lucky with a few key hires the past few months — and we certainly work like mad to retain the talent we have (or at least we try hard!) — but the reality is that it’s a good year for Internet businesses, and it’s hard to get people to jump ship when they have an established book of business and good commission check flow. 

Most of the people I know who are doing well with sales recruiting in our space these days, including ourselves, are mostly pulling people out of adjacent industries or even out of clients.  I’d ask my general readership for advice, but I assume if you have the secret sauce here, you’ll hoard it for yourself!

Deliverability Resources

After my last posting on email deliverability, a few people emailed me to ask about different resources that Return Path has published over the last six months or so on the subject. 

Clicking this link will take you to the white paper download form on our web site, which has all the white papers we’ve written in the past 12 months or so listed, and the most recent one on deliverability pre-checked to get you started.  You can check as many of the boxes you want in one shot, and although the download will trigger an email and/or call from someone in our sales department, you can simply respond to the email and tell them thanks but no thanks if you’re not interested in learning more about our services (of course, you’re also welcome to take the call if you’re interested). 

Anyway, deliverability topics we’ve covered of late which are on this list inclue:

Email Blocking and Filtering Report

Beyond Authentication: Keys to Email Delivery Success

Bonded Sender Increases Email Deliverability by more than 20%

Email Accreditation Programs: What Is All the Buzz About?

Back to the Basics: Deliverability 101 – Getting your email into the inbox

Email Indigestion: How to Avoid Deliverability Failures by Optimizing Your Permission Practices

Email Deliverability Rates Impacted by Time Campaigns Sent

The Secret Role of the Email Address Book…and what it means for your email delivery

How Data Partners Impact Your Email Performance: The checklist for all email aquisition marketers to live by.

Avoiding the Spam Filter Trap

Enjoy!

Alter Ego

A couple people have asked me recently how I work with an Executive Assistant, what value that person provides, and even questioned the value of having that position in the company in an era where almost everything can be done in self-service, lightweight ways. At my old company (in the 90s), each VP-level person and up had a dedicated assistant – the world certainly doesn’t require that level of support any more.  In our case, Andrea has other tasks for the company that take up about half of her time.

I happen to have the absolute best, world class role model assistant in Andrea, who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for almost seven years now (which is a reminder to me that she has a sabbatical coming up soon!).

This is an important topic.  It’s tempting for CEOs of startups, and even companies that are just out of the startup phase, to want to do it all themselves…or feel like they don’t need help on small tasks.  My argument against those viewpoints is that your time is your scarcest resource as the leader of an organization, and anything you can do to create more of it for yourself is worthwhile.  And a good assistant does just that – literally creates time for you by offloading hundreds of small things from your plate that sure, you could do, but now you don’t have to.

I asked Andrea to write up for me a list of the major things she does for me (although she didn’t realize it was going to turn into a blog post at the time).  I’ll add my notes after each bullet point in italics on the value this creates for me.

• Updates and maintains calendar, schedules meetings and greets visitors – My calendar is like a game of sudoku sometimes.  I can and do schedule my own things, but Andrea handles a lot of it.  She also has access to all my staff’s calendars so she can just move things around to optimize for all of us.  Finally, she and I review my calendar carefully, proactively, to make sure I’m spending my time where I want to spend it (see another item below)
• Answers and screens direct phone line – The bigger we get, the more vendors call me. I can’t possibly take another call from a wealth management person or a real estate broker.  Screening is key for this!
• Plans and coordinates company-wide meetings and events – This is an extension of managing my calendar and accessing other executives’ calendars…and a pretty key centralized function.
• Plans and coordinates Executive Committee offsite’s – Same, plus as part of my theme of “act like you’re the host of a big party,” I like this to be planned flawlessly, every detail attended to.  I do a lot of that work with Andrea, but I need a partner to drive it.
• Collects and maintains confidential data – Every assistant I’ve ever had starts by swearing an oath around confidentiality.
• Prepares materials for Board Meetings and Executive Committee meetings – Building Board Books is time consuming and great to be able to offload.  We put together the table of contents, then everyone pours materials into Andrea, and poof!  We have a book.  For staff meetings, she manages the standing agenda, changes to it, and the flow of information and materials so everyone has what they need when they need it to make these meetings productive from start to finish.  In our case, Andrea is part of the Executive Committee and joins all of our meetings so she is completely up to speed on what’s going on in the company – this really enables her to add value to our work.  She’s also not just a passive participant – some great ideas have come from her over the years!
• Coordinates and books travel (domestic and international) – Painful and time consuming, not because Expedia is hard to use but because there is a lot of change, complexity, and tight calendars to manage and coordinate for certain trips.  And while it takes a while to get an assistant up to speed on how you like to travel or how you think about travel, this is a big time saver.
• Prepares expense reports – Same thing – you CAN do it, but easier not to.
• Manages staff gifts and Anniversary presents for all employees – This is a big one for me.  I send every employee an anniversary gift each year and call them.  Once a month, a stack of things to sign magically appears on my desk…and then gets distributed.  Andrea manages the schedule, the inventory of gifts, the distribution of gifts to managers.
• Manages investor database – I assume someday we’ll have a system for this, but for now, IR is a function that Andrea coordinates for me and Jack, my CFO.
• Assist Executive Committee with project as needed – The person in this role for you ends up being really valuable to help anyone on your staff with major projects.  Good use of time.
• Prepares Quarterly Time Analysis for CEO – This is a big one for me.  Every quarter, Andrea downloads my calendar and classifies all of my time, then produces an analysis showing me where I’m spending time my classifications are – Internal, External, non-RP, free, travel, Board/Investor.  This really helps us plan out the next quarter so I’m intentional about where I put my hours, and then it helps her manage my calendar and balance incoming requests.
• Help with communications – This one was not on Andrea’s list, but I’m adding it.  She ends up drafting some things for me (sometimes as small as an email, sometimes as large as a presentation, though with a lot more guidance), which is helpful…it’s always easier to edit something than create it.  I also usually ask Andrea to read any emails I send to ALL ahead of time to make sure they make sense from someone’s perspective other than my own, and she’s very helpful in shaping things that way.

This may not be true of all companies at all sizes and stages, but for companies like ours, I’d classify a great assistant as a bit of an alter ego, one definition of which is “second self” – literally an extension of you as CEO.  That means the person is acting AS YOU, not just doing things FOR YOU.  Think about the transitive property here.  Everything you do as CEO is (in theory) to propel the whole company forward.  So everything your alter ego does is the same.  A great assistant isn’t just your administrative assistant.  A great assistant is an overall enabler of company success and productivity.  You do have to invest a lot of time in getting someone up to speed in this role for them to be effective, and you have to pay well for performance, but a great assistant can literally double your productivity as CEO.

Playing To Win

This weekend’s reading included Hardball, by George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer, which started as an article in Harvard Business Review sometime last year.  The book is a fleshed out version of the article, so don’t expect meaningful new revelations if you’ve already read it, but it is an incredibly valuable read, with lots more and more detailed case studies.

As with most business books, it’s not really geared towards small, entrepreneurial companies, but that doesn’t matter.  Most of the principles of competition — and how to win — are timeless.  The basic principles, each of which gets a chapter, are on Unleashing Massive Force, Exploiting Anomalies (perfect for the data junkie within), Threatening the Competition’s Profit Zones, Plagiarizing with Pride, Breaking Compromises, and M&A.

Breaking Compromises is my favorite, because it deals with a facet of human nature that I think can be devastating to business: the “that’s the way it’s always worked” conundrum, otherwise known as “baggage.”  Why does XYZ happen in our business, illogical as it may seem?  Because that’s how we’ve always done it!

We have a (new) mechanism for dealing with the problem of baggage at Return Path, which is meant to be disarming, a bit funny, but dead serious at the same time.  Any time anyone spots someone answering a question or a challenge with the “that’s the way it works” response, they’re strongly encouraged to pull themselves out of the situation and respond with a catchphrase like “baggage alert,” or “boy, that duffle bag must be heavy,” or “hey, nice napsack – is that new or have you had it for a while?”  While it may be a little embarrassing to the recipient, it’s meant to challenge norms and bring about creative thought at all levels of the business.

Breaking Compromises has led to Southwest and Jet Blue, to Saturn (the car, not the planet), and to automobile leasing.  Just think about what it — and the other tactics espoused in Hardball — can do for your company or industry.

The Rumors of Email’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part IV

This one could also be entitled “What Are The Bloggers Smoking?”

Reports from last week’s Blog Business Summit like this one are starting to filter in (pun slightly intended).  This one gets a big yawn from me, even more so than the other times I’ve posted on this subject, here, here, and here.  I’m as much of a blogger and a believer in blogs and RSS as the next guy — maybe even more so — but honestly, people, blogs are going to replace email?

I’d like to address a few critical points here head on, although a large part of me doesn’t even want to dignify yet another empty “email is dead” quote with a response.

Basic error #1. The article seems to confuse blogs with RSS feeds.  RSS feeds are data streams coming into an RSS reader application.  Blogs are web sites.  Hello?!?

Fallacy #1. Because blogs/RSS are interesting new media, email will go away.  To paraphrase my colleague Mike Mayor, why is it that whenever something new comes along, its proponents have to bash the current paradigm to make their thing seem more important?  Let’s go through this one — TV came along, and people said radio would go away.  Cable came along, and everyone said the networks were toast.  The fax machine came along, and FedEx was said to be relegated to legal documents that needed to be signed personally.  The Internet came along, and people said everything else was insignificant (newspapers, TV, radio, snail mail).  So yes, new media do arrive on the scene and perhaps make a dent in all prior media, but I’m having a hard time thinking of that one comes in and clocks another one mano a mano.

Fallacy #2. Spam has made email more difficult, therefore email will go away.  There’s a whole industry out there fighting spam.  I know, I know, just because we want the problem to go away doesn’t mean that we can will it away — but filters are working better by the day (did everyone catch this posting about Postini this week?), false positives can be managed down by vigilant clients working with vendors like Return Path, and whitelists, whenever they start really working and charging money to clients to guarantee delivery, will still leave email as the cheapest medium for targeted commercial messaging out there.

Naive belief #1. Spam has harmed email, but blogs/RSS are immune to the same problems.  I’m sorry, do you think the bad guys, or as Fred always calls it, the Internet Axis of Evil (spam, viruses, spyware, DNS hacking, phishing, and the like) are going to leave blogs and RSS feeds alone?  Not a chance.  The bad guys are already hard at work expanding their Axis of Evil.  There’s already comment spam for blogs (or blam, as some call it).  People have and can hijack RSS feeds (no cool name yet).  There’s Instant Messenger spam (spim).  Last week, I heard about a new one that blew me away, which is that someone figured out how to hijack a Voice Over IP phone call and insert an audio ad/porn into the call (spip).

Naive belief #2. Blogs are truly interactive.  Other than a couple of very popular blogs during the height of last fall’s election, I just don’t think this is true for the mainstream.  There are certainly some people who have a little too much time on their hands who spend hours every day blogging, but most people skim most blogs as one-way communication.   While there are mechanisms for commenting, there aren’t ready mechanisms for publishing comments back to the blog audience (thank goodness), so this medium hasn’t turned out nearly as interactive as people had hoped at the onset.  RSS feeds, in case the writer/speaker was confused in this argument, are completely non-interactive.

Naive belief #3. People will read blogs with an agenda of marketing specific products and services.  The beauty of the blog is that it’s not corporate, and it doesn’t have marketing spin on it.  Blogs are much more journals and publishing tools than marketing vehicles.  Who the heck is going to read a blog on Coke?  Or Nike?  Or Microsoft?  Sure, I might read Howard Shultz’s blog if he had one (his book was good enough), but that’s very different than reading the Starbucks official blog.  Why bother?  Where’s the value there?

Ok, I’m done with today’s rant.  As I said, I love blogging as much as the next guy, but puh-lease!  And for the record, I do believe that RSS feeds and maybe even IM from marketers/publishers will supplement email and in some cases maybe even replace it, but email just isn’t going away any time soon.

Sometimes, There Is No Lesson To Be Learned

We had a very unusual employee situation this week at Return Path.  A brand new senior executive we brought in to the company to be our first ever head of HR and Organization Development resigned very abruptly after only a few weeks on the job, citing a complete change of heart about her career direction and moving on to a government position in economic and community development.  Unfortunately, the person gave no notice and provided no assistance with transition, and resigned by cell phone.  What a disappointment, especially coming from an HR professional!

After getting over my disbelief/irritation/rage (not easy, not a small amount), after communicating this difficult message to the company, and after sending a thoughtful-yet-cathartic note to the person, I sat down to think a little bit about how I could have prevented or at least spotted the situation in advance.

We interviewed the person thoroughly — 10 people internally conducted interviews, and I interviewed the person for almost four hours myself, conducting one of the most rigorous interviews I’ve ever conducted given how critical this position was to our organization at this time.  (The interview followed the Chronological In-Depth Structured interview format from Brad Smart’s book Topgrading — more on that in a future posting.)  I also checked five references on the person, all of which were sterling.  I had one outside person, an executive coach with whom I work, interview the person.  Everything checked out, and the person’s attitude and enthusiasm about the position couldn’t have been better.

My conclusion on the lesson learned here?  It’s “Sometimes, there is no lesson to be learned.”  There may be ancillary lessons around handling the situation once it became apparent, but I think the core lesson I’d hope to get out of this — that we could have done something different in the interview process or orientation or first few weeks to prevent or at least spot this ahead of time — appears to be nonexistent.  Hmmmph!

Why is Seth Godin so Grumpy?

Permission marketing guru Seth Godin says we should all Beware the CEO blog. His logic? Blogs should have six characteristics: Candor, Urgency, Timeliness, Pithiness, Controversy, and maybe Utility — and apparently in his book, CEOs don’t possess those characteristics.

Certainly, CEOs who view blogs as a promotional tool are wasting their time, or are at least missing a fundamental understanding about the power of blogs and interactivity.

But many of the ones I read (and the one I write) do their best to be anything but promotional. One of my colleagues here describes my blog as “a peek inside the CEO’s head,” which is a great way of putting it. And I still stand by my earlier posting about the value of the blog to me and to the company — hardly “annual report fluff.”

How’s that for honest, timely, controversial, and pithy, Seth?

Comment on Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes

My colleague Mike Mayor writes:

So you’e only asking for politicians to be honest Matt? Is that all? 🙂

Couldn’t agree more on the CEO side. A CEO who cannot admit to failure is doomed to be surrounded by “yes men” and, therefore, must go it alone, whereas the CEO who admits to having the odd bad idea every now and then is more likely to get truthful and accuruate information from those around him/her. Which scenario would you prefer to base your next decision on?

However, I look more to Hollywood for fostering the faux CEO/Board Room stereotypes, not politics. Look no further than the highest ranked show among 18 to 46 year olds: The Apprentice. Trump is just one contemporary example of successfully perpetuating the “kill or be killed” mentality of the ideal CEO. In his book, “How to Get Rich” one of his lessons is to “never take the blame for anything” (meanwhile Trump gets rich by being a caricature of a CEO).

The ideal CEO needs to set the example for the behavior of his employees, and creates opportunities by building relationships not “squashing the competition.” And like it or not, the ideal Board Room is actually a Think Tank of great minds working toward a common goal rather than a place to play mind games and mental poker.

Unfortunately, both of these things make for a horrible TV show but do contribute to building truly great companies! On the other hand, watch too many TV shows (or follow the politician’s lead) and you’ll likely become a CEO whose success is comparable to the CEOs of Enron and Tyco.

Political versus Corporate Leadership, Part II: Admitting Mistakes

The press conference this past spring where President Bush embarrassingly refused to admit that he had ever made any big mistakes, other than to reiterate his gaffe at trading Sammy Sosa when he owned the Texas Rangers, brings up another issue in this series: is it good for leaders, both political and corporate, to admit mistakes?

On the corporate side, I think the ability to admit a mistake is a must. Again, I’ll refer back to Jim Collins’ books Good to Great and Built to Last, both of which talk about humility and the ability to admit mistakes as a critical component of emotional intelligence, the cornerstone of solid leadership. And in another great work on corporate leadership, The Fifth Discipline, writer Peter Senge talks about “learning systems” and the “learning organization” as far superior companies. My experience echoes this. Publicly admitting a mistake, along with a careful distillation of lessons learned, can go a long way inside a company to strengthening the bond between leader and team, regardless of the size of the company.

But in politics, the stakes are higher and weirder — and the organization is a nation, not a company. Publicly admitting a single mistake can be a leader’s downfall. It’s too easy these days for political opponents to seize on a mistake as a “flip flop” and turn a candidate’s own admission into a highly-charge negative ad.

There was a fantastic op-ed in The Wall Street Journal back on April 15 on this topic, which unfortunately doesn’t have an available link at the moment, entitled “Bush Enters a Political Quandary As He Faces Calls for an Apology.” I’ll try to both quote from and summarize the article here since it’s central to this topic:

“For a politician, is an apology a sign of weakness or strength? That is the debate now swirling around President Bush after a prime-time news conference in which he refused reporters’ invitations to acknowledge any specific mistakes in handling the issue of terrorism or offer an apology to Sept. 11 victims’ families. Mr. Bush deflected the invitation, saying, ‘Here’s what I feel about that: The person responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Laden.’ Mr. Bush’s quandary is a time-honored struggle for politicians. While some have found a public apology helps them out of a tough spot, others discovered it can fuel more criticism. So far, there isn’t a definitive answer.”

The article goes on to say that while Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” mentality was de rigeur in the Beltway for a while (through Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco and Reagan’s poor handling of Beirut), nowadays, apologies are a dreaded last resort. The reason? The rise of partisanship and the use of ethics and congressional or special counsel investigations used to humiliate or defeat political opponents by raising the spectre of corruption. The examples? Gingrich’s struggles in 1996 over his book; Clinton’s ridiculous linguistics machinations (“it depends what the definition of ‘is’ is”) around the Lewinsky scandal; and Lott’s downfall over segregationist comments.

The piece wraps up by saying that “Mr. Bush was backed into the apology quandary by one of his administration’s toughest critics, former White House terrorism expert Richard Clarke…Since then, White House officials have been pressured to do likewise [apologize to victims’ families about the government’s failings on 9/11] — or explain why they won’t…[but] aides are convinced that admitting error would only embolden Mr. Bush’s critics in the Democratic Party and the news media.”

So the question is: would Bush be better off by saying “Sorry, folks, we thought there were WMD in Iraq, but it turns out we were wrong. And we miscalculated how difficult it would be to win the war, how many troops it would take, and how many lives would be lost. I still feel like it was right for us to go to war there for the following four reasons…”?

I’m not sure about that. He’d certainly be more intellectually honest, and a number of people in intellectual circles would feel better about him as a leader, but my guess is that he thinks it would cost him the election in today’s environment. My conclusion is that today’s system is discouraging politicians from admitting mistakes, and that it will take an exceptionally courageous leader (neither Bush nor Kerry as far as I can tell) to do so.

In the end, while humility appeals to many people in a leader, it’s not for everyone. Fortunately for us, CEOs don’t have to run for office and most CEOs don’t have to face some the same level of public, personally competitive, and media scrutiny that politicians do. Now that’s an interesting conclusion that I didn’t intend at the beginning of the post — being a good political leader and being a good politician are sometimes deeply at odds with each other.

Next up in the series: Not sure! Any ideas? Please comment on the blog site or by emailing me.