US email marketing company MailerMailer released its Email Marketing Metrics Report this week, revealing practices to help businesses increase returns from their email campaigns.
Key factors highlighted in the report include the use of shorter subject lines, personalisation of emails, and targeted, well-managed lists. Campaigns using these strategies achieved higher then average open and click rates.
An interestin view of email 'marketing' from e-consultancy
Michael Arrington has reported a rumour that Google “may be in the final stages” of a US$1.6 billion deal for video sharing site YouTube.
If the rumour is true and the deal goes through it could be another coup for Google, though it might yet turn out to be a big headache for the search giant.
Source: e-consultancy
I wait the time when a Public Relations practitioner mashes user generated content and sells it to Sky.....
Sky is making its first major move into the booming user-generated content market with a deal to bring Al Gore's Current TV, the channel made up of viewer-created clips, to the UK and Ireland.It is the first deal Current TV, branded "the TV network created by the people who watch it", has made outside the US since launching last year.
Mark Vernon at Guradian Unlimited has an interesting article about online social habits.
There is no doubt we need more reserach into the social significance of social media.There is a new verb: "to friend". It is what happens when people link up on websites such as MySpace. It differs markedly from "to befriend" which involves getting to know someone. To friend is just to connect.
As Danah Boyd, a social media researcher for Yahoo, has said: people do not think of meeting their online friends - they only think of connecting, for all sorts of different reasons. Michael Bugeja author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age, makes a different distinction: "Friending really appeals to the ego, where friendships appeal to the conscience."
Sociologist Sherry Turkle, in New Scientist, expressed her worries that online living is transforming human psychology by deskilling us from being able to be alone, and managing and containing our emotions. We are developing new intimacies with machines that lead to new dependencies - a wired social existence, "a tethered self". Conversation becomes merely sharing gossip, photos or profiles, not, on the whole, the deeper aspects of commitment, community and politics.
With the unveiling of its 'million minutes' promotion on Wednesday, Vivox is now enabling Second Life users to speak to each other via their phones.
That's a big step for Second Life, as the 3D virtual world does not have a default voice feature, as does There, from Makena Technologies. And that's because Linden Lab, the publisher of Second Life, has so far chosen not to integrate voice directly into the software.
C|Net gives the low down.
Itiva Digital Media has created a platform for broadcasting video and live content over the Internet that addresses industry concern over bandwidth management. Itiva’s patented technology, called Quantum Transport™, delivers high definition, full screen, rich media content to millions of viewers in a secure, cost effective manner. Itiva’s broadband broadcast technology breaks content into individual Web pages (called quanta) and sends them over the Internet to be re-assembled at viewers’ computers. Itiva provides a breathtaking video experience on the Web at lower costs for content publishers, ISPs and the consumer.It is quick and I would like to experiment more.
It has one of the best designs I've come across in a while, with functionality to match. Not only does it make it simple to create polls to include on your blog or website, but you can deliver them via widget and RSS feed as well - essential in this day and age. I think polls are are an excellent - and easy - way to bring more interactivity into websites, which is why I wanted to bring this to your attention.
The Guardian reports on a new planning tool for the advertising industry.
Until now, advertisers and their media agencies have had to rely on separate audience measurement tools - such as Barb and Rajar - that don't take into account that consumers are often using multiple media simultaneously and in different ways. Now there is a new advertising campaign planning tool from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.
"Before, all the standard industry measurement tools have been limited to individual media, such as TV or radio - this new tool pulls them all together," said Jim Marshall, the chairman of the Media Futures Group at the IPA.
Called the Touchpoints integrated planning database, the new tool has taken almost three years and more than £1m to develop.
There is an emerging crop of "citizen journalists" that have developed an unrealistic sense of entitlement and have ceased asking and are now demanding, at least in some cases, the same level of access and information from companies that has long been the exclusive privilege of mainstream journalists.It is worth reading his complete post.
Feedburner reports the number of subscribers to podcasts, for which his company is managing feeds, is growing 20-30% a month.Rick Klau, vice president, business development, said that at the beginning of the year Feedburner had 1 million subscriptions to podcasts it helped deliver. That number has now grown to 5 million subscribers for 71,000 podcasts. For you math fans, that means the average podcast has ... ta da!!! ... 70 subscribers.
Knowledge @ Wharton has been looking at the value of services like MySpace..
Less than three years after emerging from nowhere, the hot social networking website MySpace is on pace to be worth a whopping $15 billion in just three more years. Or is it?
Is the much smaller Facebook, run by a 22-year-old, really worth the $900 million or more Yahoo is reported to have offered for it? Maybe. Or maybe this is Dot-Com Bubble, Part II, with MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and the other new Internet phenoms destined for oblivion when the fad fades.
"What makes this hard is that these companies seem to be so many years away from the kind of earnings that the valuation numbers are forecasting for them," says Andrew Metrick, finance professor at Wharton. The $15 billion MySpace figure "would imply that a lot more people will be on MySpace than are currently on it."
Perhaps the problem is that they are looking at an old fashioned marketing and advertising models.
Thinking more about the nexus of relationships that form round bloggers would be a better model. Think in terms of society rather than customers.
The Skype founders are at it again. This time they are creating peer-to-peer software, dubbed the Venice Project, to stream TV shows over the Internet (see earlier post). Skype founder Janus Fris tells Om:
Like Skype, The Venice Project is simple - you download and you get free television. . . . we are inviting more people to our beta program. It is near television quality, and it needs about one megabit per second. We are building an ad-based system, and it is close to the television model. We will do revenue share with the content providers. With our system, people can be targeted with the right kind of ads. We are respecting the copyrights.
TVoIP is an interesting idea as a channel for communication.
Last time I checked, flirting was a fairly unprofitable activity.
There's a long list of high-traffic sites (beginning with theglobe.com and extending to hotmail and many others) that couldn't monetize. They were stuck because the bait that got them the traffic had no room for a reasonable hook. You could use a TV like model and interrupt with irrelevant ads, but it doesn't work so well.
All a long, long way to say something simple:
Whatever your website, I think you want better traffic, not more traffic.
Since it started marketing they have been surprised by the new uses that people have seen for the software. Sports clubs are considering using BloomBox to create a community of fans. Large professional services firms are considering using BloomBox as a knowledge management system. BloomBox would be great for these applications, and probably many more!
