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. All with the same quality of art/creative as printed cards. It’s great! A good use of the email channel…much less cost…easier overhead for distribution…and of course better for the environment.
I wonder what made 2007 the tipping year for this.
New Del.icio.us for: Tag
New Del.icio.us for: Tag
As usual the laggard behind Fred and Brad, I just set up a for:mattblumberg tag on del.icio.us. Feel free to tag away for me! If you don’t know what this means, you can read either of their postings about it here or here.
Book Short: On The Same Page
Book Short:Â On The Same Page
Being on the same page with your team, or your whole company for that matter, is a key to success in business. The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, by Patrick Lencioni, espouses this notion and boils down the role of the CEO to four points:
- Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
- Create organizational clarity
- Overcommunicate organizational clarity
- Reinforce organizational clarity through human systems
Those four points sound as boring as bread, but the book is anything but. The book’s style is easy and breezy — business fiction. One of the most poignant moments for me was when the book’s “other CEO” (the one that doesn’t “get it”) reflects that he “didn’t go into business to referee executive team meetings and delivery employee orientation…he loved strategy and competition.” Being a CEO is a dynamic job that changes tremendously as the organization grows. This book is a great handbook for anyone transitioning out of the startup phase, or for anyone managing a larger organization.
I haven’t read the author’s other books (this is one in a series), but I will soon!
links for 2005-12-02
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Good quick point of view on what makes a great employee in a startup.
In Defense of Email, Part 9,732
In Defense of Email, Part 9,732
I commented today on our partner Blue Sky Factory’s CEO, Greg Cangialosi’s excellent posting in defense of email as a marketing channel called Email’s Role and Future Thoughts. Since the comment grew longer than I anticipated, I thought I’d re-run parts of it here.
A couple quick stats from Forrester’s recent 5-year US Interactive forecast back up Greg’s points con gusto:
– 94% of consumers use email; 16% use social networking sites (and I assume they mean USE them – not just get solicitations from their friends to join). That doesn’t mean that social networking sites aren’t growing rapidly in popularity, at least in some segments of the population, and it doesn’t mean that email marketing may not be the best way to reach certain people at certain times. But it does mean that email remains the most ubiquitous online channel, not to mention the most “pull-oriented” and “on demand.”
– Spend on email marketing is $2.7b this year, growing to $4.2b in 2012. Sure, email by 2012 is the smallest “category” by dollars spent, but first of all, one of the categories is “emerging channels,” which looks like it includes “everything else” in the world other than search, video, email, and display. So it includes mobile as well as social media, and who knows what else. Plus, if you really understand how email marketing works, you understand that dollars don’t add up in the same way as other forms of media since so much of the work can be done in-house.Â
What really amazes me is how all these “web 2.0” people keep talking about how email is dying (when in fact it’s growing, albeit at a slower rate than other forms of online media) and don’t focus on how things like classifieds and yellow pages are truly DYING, and what that means for those industries.
I think a more interesting point is that in Forrester’s forecast, US Interactive Marketing spend by 2012 in aggregate reached $61b, more than triple where it is today — and that the percent of total US advertising going to interactive grows from 8 to 18 over the five years in the forecast.Â
The bigger question that leaves me with is what that means for the overall efficiency of ad spend in the US. It must be the case that online advertising in general is more efficient than offline — does that mean the total US advertising spend can shrink over time? Or just that as it gets more efficient,
marketers will use their same budgets to try to reach more and more prospects?
links for 2005-10-11
links for 2005-10-20
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Get your mind out of the gutter! These are very useful and oddly hard to find graphics for doing checklists in presentations (thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for this link).
links for 2005-11-26
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Charlie O’Donnell from Union Square Ventures has a great post about LinkedIn, its limitations, and some things it could do to be MUCH cooler and more useful.
links for 2005-09-22
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Great blog posting from Rob Walling on hiring like crazy
links for 2005-11-16
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Jeff Jarvis on Why We’re Glad We’re New Media…good stats on all the troubles facing “old media” nowadays (box office, newspapers, music, radio, books)
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Fred Wilson on how VCs relate to entrepreneurs vs. their limited partners. They should think of entrepreneurs as their customers, and think of LPs as shareholders.
links for 2005-10-23
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Return Path’s newly unveiled web site is now a blog, with an online resource center for email marketers and postings by its executive team