• Jun302008

    Congress in a Wordle

    Posted by Gene in Random Stuff

    Congress in a Wordle

    This “word cloud” is an easily comprehensible overview of the words that have been used most often so far in this session of Congress. The bigger the word, the more frequently it has been spoken in the House and Senate:

  • Jun252008

    12 Rules for Success From Tiger Woods

    Posted by Gene in Business

    I don’t care if you like Tiger Woods or not, if you hate Golf or not or simply don’t think he can be motivational because he is young or plays golf or whatever… If you’ve ever tried to play the game of Golf in even a remotely serious manner you will find that it takes a great deal of focus and you actually need to practice to get good at it. This list that Alex Shalman has put together on Tiger’s rule book for success inspired me. You can directly apply this to business and life in general.

    1. Constant and Never Ending Improvement
    2. A Bigger Plan
    3. Embrace Defeat
    4. Take Life Lightly
    5. Don’t Stop
    6. Live Your Own Expectations
    7. Do What You Love
    8. Focus
    9. Pay It Forward
    10. Learn From All Mistakes
    11. Celebrate Your Victories
    12. Pay No Attention To Naysayers

    You can read the full post here.

  • Jun042008

    Newsletters and Spam

    Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

    The Neilson/Normal Group released a report on email newsletters, they reviewed just about every aspect of email newsletters and how we use them as marketers and recipients alike. One thing they did have to say is that you should keep it brief (people scan not read in detail) and only send one when you have something to say. The big detractor is Spam in the wild. Here’s what they had to say:

    There’s a little good news (but mostly bad news) about the impact of spam on email newsletters. The good news is that users in our recent studies were better able to differentiate legitimate opt-in newsletters from unsolicited messages than they could in the past. In our earlier newsletter usability studies, users sometimes confused the two. Now, spam has a very prominent profile in terms of popular awareness, press coverage, and the sheer amount of it hitting inboxes. Users have thus developed a reasonable understanding of the spam phenomenon as opposed to simply being baffled about unexpected messages.

    The bad news is that the increased burden on email users has caused people to become even more stressed and impatient when processing their inbox. Users have less tolerance for newsletters that waste their time.

    We have also found that people often use their spam filters as a shortcut to eliminating newsletters they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the newsletter is spam. Voila, that newsletter no longer shows up in the inbox.
    The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus be undeliverable to other subscribers who still welcome new issues. This is a compelling reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a subscriber than to be listed as spam.

    So, before you just “blast” out that next newsletter, make sure it has relevant, timely content and make sure it works (test it)…

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