Google Wave and You Part Three

This is the third of three articles about Google Wave.

Part one showed how you can collaborate real time.
Part two showed how you can work with someone who speaks a different language.

Of course, it's not all about work. Sometimes you want to visit your peeps on Facebook or MySpace.

You log in and see what updates there are on Facebook and update your status there.

You log in and see what updates there are on MySpace and update your status there.

You log in and see what updates there are on Twitter and tweet your status there.

With Google Wave, you can set it up so that you can see the updates from your friends without visiting all the different sites.

You can update your status from inside the Wave. No need to log in and remember seven different passwords for seven different sites.

Again you are communicating real-time with Google Wave.


Real-time collaboration. Editing the same document at the same time.

Real-time translation. Writing in one language so --pow-- someone can read it in another.

Real-time communication. Keeping in touch via Facebook, MySpace, Twitter at the touch of a button.

Three of a great number of things you can and will be able do in Google Wave.

The wave is coming.

The wave of the future is here.

Google Wave and You Part Two

This is the second of three articles about Google Wave.

Part one highlighted the online collaboration.

Speaking of collaboration, what if your colleague is in a different country? In France? On the other side of the world?

What do you do if you don't speak the same language? Maybe you spend time bugging another co-worker who does.

"Excuse me, could you translate this for me? It's only 3 pages in 8 point font."

"Well, yes and no. Yes, I can, but no, I am busy right now. I have my own work to do."

Or maybe you can try to translate it yourself, but it takes time and it is another step in the process.

With Google Wave, you can set it up with your colleague so that when you type in English, -- pow!-- it shows up in French.

He or she types in French and --pow!-- you see in English.

English --pow!-- Anglaise.

Francais --pow!-- French.

Vous etes traduie --ahem-- you are translating real-time with Google Wave.

Google Wave and You Part One

This is one of three parts about what you can do with Google Wave.

In case you have been living under a rock, Google has this new application called Google Wave, currently available as a preview to friends of those who helped out with the beta test.

It's called an online collaboration and communication tool.

What does that mean, really? Let's break it down.

Collaboration is working on something together.

When you work on a proposal or some other important document with someone these days, you use a word processor. After your first draft you print it up or maybe you attach it to an email and send it to your colleague.

He or she receives the email, opens it up, reads the document, makes their corrections, saves it, attaches it to another email and sends it back to you.

You receive the email, open it up, read the document, make your corrections, save it, attach it to another email and send it back.

He or she gets it and does all that again and sends it back.

You get it and do that all again.

He or she -- again.

It gets exhausting.

With Google Wave, you and your colleague collaborate on the document the same time.

You type and what you're typing shows up on his or her screen.

He or she types and that shows up on your screen.

You are collaborating real-time, with Google Wave.

Success with Video in Email Part Three

This is a three part series regarding video in email.

Part One helps determine if this is right for your audience and objectives.
Part Two lists products and services available.

We would like to address some questions you may have related to execution.

What about bandwidth? If we have a video in email, will there be problems with delivering the content?

Choosing the right content provider is key here. Are the emails going to a large audience? Even if they go to a smaller audience or are one to one messaging, considering the viral nature of video, they will be played over and over again up to a month after the message has delivered.

What about the lead time? Doesn’t it take more time to create an email with video?

Yes, but it may be time well spent. Jeanniey Mullen and David Daniels in Email Marketing: An Hour a Day have this advice on the layers (versions) of email to create to support this.

1. A flat HTML version
2. A version with animated GIFs but no sound
3. A version with animated GIFs and sound
4. A Flash or video version without sound
5. A Flash or video version with sound

What about the ISP or domains that will block video?
These are the same questions about ISPs or domains that will block images. With different layers available based on the customer’s domain, email client or browser, you can ensure the best possible experience given the limitations. Having a partner that has a relationship with an ISP can help but

That's all for now!
In summary, with the right strategy, a message that lends itself well to video and an audience that is predisposed to view videos online, you can be successful with email in video.

For more information, read the following:
Email Marketing: An Hour a Day. Mullen, Jeanniey and David Daniels. Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, IN 2009

Success with Video in Email Part Two

This is the second in a three part series about video in email.

In Part One, we help you determine if video in email is right for you.

You have your audience, your strategy so what services should you consider to realize your objectives?

Unless you have resources in house, you will need a way to create video, host it, manage it and deliver it to your audience.

• Goodmail http://www.goodmailsystems.com/
Provides the CertifiedVideo service which allows video to play in email. Currently this is limited to AOL’s webmail service. It is not currently support in the AOL desktop client software.
In addition, the sender is responsible for hosting the video contents. Goodmail does not host videos for customers.
Their focus is on maintaining the relation with the ISP.

• FLIMP http://www.flimp.net/
This company has a solution that allows you to easily create a flash video landing page, with built in analytics. They can be used as sales collateral or as landing pages for a variety of communications.
Their focus is on hosting and managing video content.
 
• Vismail http://www.vismail.com/
Based in England, with an office in the States, and recently expanded into Australia, Vismail offers an email marketing platform which they say can deliver video and its player within the email itself without the use of ActiveX or executable attachments. Unable to tell how scalable the solution is.

I requested examples, which arrived in my Outlook inbox with a .wmv file attached.
 
When I clicked the image in the email to play the video, my browser opened to play the video.

There was a link on the browser allowing me to download something to make Outlook play the video in my email.

After running the ActiveX control, the video played.

This seems like a hurdle for customers.

• Liveclicker http://www.liveclicker.com/
A video hosting and image management service, whose clients include eBags (former Yesmail client) and Drugstore.com

• Veodia http://veodia.com/
An enterprise video host service which offers live streaming as well as on-demand video.
Their focus is on Business Professionals, IT professionals and Educator / Trainers.

• Brightcove http://www.brightcove.com/
An on-demand online video platform designed for use with professional websites. It provides everything you need to publish and distribute online.
Their focus is on creation, hosting and publishing.

• Google Video for business http://www.blogger.com/www.google.com/apps/business
This service allows you to share video with co-workers without sharing with the whole world.
This is useful for B2B or internal communications.
Their focus is on hosting and managing.

If you have the coin then you probably afford a service that meets most of your needs, otherwise you will have to coordinate two or three to meet your objectives.

In Part Three, we address common questions about execution.

Success with Video in Email Part One

This is the first of a three part series regarding video in email.

Video isn’t just for the TV set anymore.

Audiences can use a multitude of devices such as computers, mobile phones, portable media players to watch content produced not only by TV networks and movie studios, but also independents, amateurs and individuals. James L. McQuivey of Forrester Research predicts that people will watch an average of 5 hours per day in 2013, a full hour more than the average in 2008.

Therefore, many online marketers are investigating their options regarding video in email. Done well, it can reap many rewards. Done poorly, it can annoy customers and drive away business.

It is important to decide if video in email is right for your audience, determine if you are successful and choose the services that best suit your needs.

Is video in email right for your audience?

Jeanniey Mullen and David Daniels put forth the following questions in Email Marketing: An Hour a Day when deciding to use audio or video in email.

1. Can you communicate your key message in 20 seconds or less?
2. Will audio or video help explain your offering than photos with text?
3. Does your business/service thrive from referrals (from colleagues / businesses)?
4. Will the recipients of your emails be connected with broadband?
5. Will the recipients of your emails have sound cards on their computers?
6. Will the recipients of your emails have access to the Internet?
7. Do you have access to preshot content?
   
   If you can answer yes to at least five, then you may have a good reason to explore its use in your email campaigns.

How do you determine you are successful?

This depends on what your objective is.

If you want to increase your brand awareness, promote forward to a friend. Track the number of times the email or video is forwarded.

To improve up-sell or cross-sell, show videos of similar products, destinations or services. Compare conversion rates of email with and without videos.

Consider including informative or funny material to help maintain loyalty. Steady open and clickthrough rate for your customers with a long tenure show they are still in engaged.

Part Two discusses what products and services are available to meet your objectives.
Part Three addresses questions about successful execution.

Best Practices for Integrating an Email Campaign with Social Networks

Cutting corners when creating the HTML version of a message may save you time, but do you a disservice if you want to take advantage of social networks.

Assuming you have a content that you think is "share-worthy", attention to details such as the basic HTML tags, placements of the link and chiclet, and what will be shared, should remove obstacles and increase the likelihood of something being shared.

Need for basic tags
Lacking the basic tags such as <html>, <head>, <title> may not matter when the message is displayed in Outlook or Lotus Notes or even web based email clients.

We can all agree that creating an email message that renders in an email client requires different strategy than creating a page that will render well in a web browser.

However, they are necessary if you wish the email to not only display in a browser but also to render well as a shared item in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn.

Facebook specifically scans the page for the following:
<meta name="title" content="Title Here">
<meta name="description" content="Description Here">
<link rel="image_src" href="preview-image-here.jpg">




If you don’t have the title defined, then Facebook will use the URL of the web page.

Other networks will use either the subject line or the title of the hosted message to name the shared item.



If you don’t define the image to be displayed, Facebook will include thumbnails of all the images in the message.

The most compelling one may not always the first one referenced in the code. If you want the customer to be able to choose, make sure they show up in the correct order.




Placement of a link or chiclet
The placement of the link and/or "chiclet" that allows the reader to share the email with their network should be placed above the fold in an appropriate place.

If it must be below the fold, then it should be close to image or copy that will draw their attention.

Check what will be shared
Test, test and more test! Make sure you have accounts in the major social networks and the ones that your audiences are mostly likely to use.

That’s all for now!
With deft use of tags, optimal placement of the social network link and rigorous testing, you can provide a better experience for your customers and make your content not only more "share-worthy" but also "share-able."

Book Review: Tuned In

Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs
Stull, Craig, Phil Myers & David Meerman Scott
John Wilen & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, 2008

Tuned In provides a six step process for the reader to find opportunities which will lead to the new hot item, termed "resonator." These steps are focused on looking to the outside marketer first to find unresolved problems and understanding the personas of the buyers (not necessarily those of who will use the good or service). Finally, with a great product, the authors provide smart ways of bringing it to market.

This book is useful not only for people who work in business. The ideas can be applied to organizations in different sectors, such as non-profit, government and academic.

It does test your underlying assumptions of what "research" is. It is now not only about reading reports and learning things from books. Its about listening to your customers, and people who are not your customers. The authors even maintain a blog so you can talk to them and other readers about the ideas in the book

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in making something really cool.

Snippets International Part Deux

Sean Mcpheat provides 5 Hot Email Marketing Best Practices to readers of the Fresh Business Thinking.com's newsletter.

At first pass one would say it is most useful to someone just starting out in email marketing, with advice such as "Make sure your email isn’t spam" and "Personalise your emails", but it is a good refresher even for the seasoned professional.

Once you have that under your belt, check out Five Steps to Improve your E-mail Marketing on Practical eCommerce

Finally, Barney Beal, News Director for SearchCRM.com reports that despite the downturn in the economy, marketers are not seeing their budgets going down but moving away from advertising on print, radio and television and utilizing online marketing more and more. Read the full article >>

What does marketing mean to you?

Did you all look at the results of this poll at Online Marketing Blog?

Readers were asked "What 3 digital marketing channels & tactics will you emphasize in 2009?"

Email marketing is fifth on the list after Blogging, Microblogging (Twitter), Search engine optimization, and Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn)! Should I be scared?

If you look at the rankings one way, you might think that marketers are trying to do more with less money. Many of them deal with networks that don't require much investment in money but a certain amount of time.

Let's take some of the theories presented in "Tuned In" (still reading it, so review is forth coming) and evaluate these choices based on whether the marketer is listening to the market or talking at it.

You will see that top five tactics (including email marketing) are about talking. Number six, "Social media monitoring & outreach" is about eliciting feedback.

What does marketing mean to you? Getting the message out about your product or service? Or listening to what people need? Something else entirely?

Did you notice...

It is interesting that despite showing tweets that contain their product name on their web site, Skittles and their parent company Mars did not come out of the gate with an account for twitter so they could interact with their customers. Whether that was planned or not, it brought that candy treat to everyone's mind yesterday.



As Oscar Wilde said, whom I like to quote frequently, "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."



In other news, you may have seen something like this before, but the banner ad in my daily Dilbert email changes every time I open it up.











They are all for the same organization, but I wonder how this functionality could be leveraged to provide fresh content for other sorts of email campaigns. Your thoughts?

Synchronicity

While reading Scott Bedbury's "A New Brand World," I have become more aware of how little details can influence a person's impression of a brand.

Scott gives the example of how travelers judge gasoline stations not just on the price but also on the quality of the restrooms.

I was struck by a similar thought, might viewers judge your product by the channels through which you issue press releases.

Case in point, I receive Google alerts and one arrived recently that pointed me to a particular web site. A press release about a product called "Alerts," which I thought was amusing. However, one of the banner ads was an embedded video hawking embedded video. Again, more recursion! The irksome thing was that it auto-played when the page was loaded and there were no controls to pause or silence the video.

I took a couple of screenshots but won't embed a video of the video.

What I've Also Been Reading

A New Brand World: 8 Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century
Bedbury, Scott with Stephen Fenichell
Viking, New York, 2002

This was recommended by a colleague. Each chapter highlights one of the principles with many examples from the author's professional life at some very high profile companies.

For the sake of brevity, I will share the three that left the greatest impression on me.

Chapter Two: Cracking Your Brand's Genetic Code
Bedbury suggests that a brand can be not just about the suite of products or services a company provides but also about the core values it represents. It is important that all members of the company understand what that is so better decisions are made regarding the features and alliances the company makes.

Chapter Four: Show Some Emotion
The author gives examples of customer's devotion to Harley Davidson and Starbucks, then decodes in detail the emotions at play for each of those brands. He lets the reader come to his or her own conclusion with a number of other brands and their key emotions. The key is that while customers may not remember exact words or actions in a campaign or an interaction, how they feel about a product or a brand is not so easily forgotten.

Chapter Seven: Branding and the Corporate Goliath
Bigger does not always mean "bad." Rather than "hide the elephant" by pretending a company is smaller than it is, the author suggests "teaching the elephant to dance," so it can use its power for good. Like donating time and resources to charities and programs related to its field.

If you are interested in reading more, you may purchase this online from a variety of locations or in person at your local bookseller.

Powells: http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780142001905-0
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/New-Brand-World-Principles-Twenty-First/dp/0142001902/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235445449&sr=8-1

Personally, I found this a very insightful book and keep it on my bookshelf within arms reach.

Have you started thinking about the time change?

It's coming early this year.

The US and Canada will turn their clocks at 2:00 am local time on the second Sunday of March, March 08, 2009

Most of Europe will do the same at 1:00 GMT on the last Sunday of March, March 29, 2009

Here is a web site that not only tells you...

• when different countries "spring" forward or "fall" back
• some of the reasons why countries choose to do so or not
  
• the variety of benefits of adopting the practice and the disadvantages
  

It also presents the information in a very fun way!

Snippets International

Here's an interesting article highlighting a New Zealand email marketing company, Jericho, that also explains the industry to a lay person.

Best line from it "Email marketing works best by building loyalty."


Second, this article caught my eye because it shows how print advertising In Japan has moved past URLs to drive customers to web sites.

Basically, the ads show what search terms to input to get where you want to go. At first I thought that might seem like spoon feeding... But a term or key word is easier to remember than a long URL string. Don't you think?



Finally, a new development in the UK. Software that puts banner ads in your emails and keeps track of analytics! It appears to be a solution for small and medium size businesses.

Agile Estimation and Planning

I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Agile Estimation and Planning this Monday, presented by Mitch Lacey, author of Adventures in Promiscuous Pairing, at the Executive Center of the Doubletree hotel in Portland, OR.

The workshop was organized by the Software Associate of Oregon (SAO) and thankfully subsidized by the government so it cost a tenth of what it normally would.

Here are some key, basic points to share with you.

1) At the daily stand up, say what you did yesterday, what you plan to do today and what is blocking you if anything.

2) Story points are different from ideal hours. Story points are for gauging the relative size of a user story, so the product backlog can be managed. Ideal hours are for scoping out the tasks needed to bring the user story to fruition.

3) If you have a large number of stories to estimate, start with what you feel is the smallest and estimate it at 1. Then estimate the rest relative to the effort of the others.

Overall, it was a useful workshop for me. The attendees were a mix of developers, QA and "PM"s (like myself) with varying levels of familiarity to Agile processes, so he had he work cut out for him. On top of having a cold.

If he were to do another workshop in the area, I would probably go to it.

Metrics...

Metrics...

It's a fact of life. If we don't measure something, we don't know where we are or how well we are doing.

And once we start measuring, then we should all use a ruler of the same size, shouldn't we?

How many cubits in an ell? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?

Now this is not going to turn into a plea for the US to join the rest of the world and start using the metric system.

But I am going to ask is what does a term like "open rate," mean to you?

If you are not involved in online or email marketing, that term is probably Greek to you as well, but you can probably guess it means the number of people that opened something (an email?) per something.

Where opinions diverge is

• whether to count the people or the events
• whether to count them all or just unique events
• what events to count as an "open"
• is it just a person opening an HTML message?
• what if the images are blocked and they click a link?
• what if they clicked on a link in the plain text version?

The Email Experience Council has suggested a way to clarify these data points in their white paper "The Email Render Rate," available in their white paper section.

They propose the word "Render" instead of "Open" but also the use of "Total" or "Unique" to clarify whether unique or total events are being calculated.

In addition, they suggest the use of "Action" to include not only "Opens" -- excuse me, "Renders" -- but also people who click on a link in a message that was not rendered (whether due to having images blocked or being a text email)

Finally, they state after they finalize these definitions, they request support from email marketers and email solution providers in helping to use the new terms.

What are your thoughts?

What I've Been Reading Lately

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great
Derby, Esther and Diana Larsen
The Pragmatic Bookshelf, Raleigh, NC, 2006

One of the key events of an agile development process is the retrospective. This is the point at the end of a sprint or an iteration where the team looks back and what went well and what didn't go so great and decide what to do to make things better.

The first chapters explain the purpose of a retrospective, how to plan them and how to lead them. The authors do this by suggesting the following structure to a retrospective.

1. Set the Stage - get the group ready to talk.
2. Gather Data - discuss milestones and events
3. Generate Insights - talk about what happened. Sometimes the same event is viewed differently by different parties.
4. Decide What to Do - Based on the insights make some choices.
5. Close the Retrospective - Important for ensure energy doesn't dribble away. Decide how to document the experience and follow up.

The majority of the book presents specific activities to gather and process data during the retrospectives. There are several long and short activities for each stage.

I have found this book very useful in planning retrospectives.

Meeting Notes

One of the skills I found I was lacking after I became a product manager was maintaining and running a meeting. Unfortunately, this was not clear to me until after burning through a lot of good will.

To remedy that I decided to join Toastmasters, an organization where the members self organize to fulfill different roles in weekly meetings designed to improve the members' communication and leadership skills.

After three meetings, here are some things I learned or gleaned from others' activity.

1) If a meeting is important, touch base with the key players several days in advice to make sure the agenda is understood. If the meeting is not important, re-examine why you are meeting. Perhaps different parties have different needs. Coming to agreement about what the purpose of the meeting will help keep things on track.

2) Respect the time. Going over is disrespectful not only to the people in the meeting, but to the others that are waiting for the members of your meeting. Few people enjoy meetings, so ending on time after a productive session is appreciated by everyone.

3) Take notes. If there are action items, keep track of who is to do what. Follow up on those action items later in the day or week to make sure there were not any mis-communications.

If you get butterflies before talking in front of groups of 10, 20 or 200, here are 10 Tips for Public Speaking.

The Three C's

This is one of my guiding principles for work

Everything you do should serve one or more of the following groups

1) The company
2) The clients
3) The co-workers

1) The company
Generally, this means the work should serve to keep revenue coming in. After all, if the company doesn't make money, we don't get paid.

Make stuff that people will buy.

2) The clients
Generally, this means the work should serve the needs of the clients in the market.
If we were in the hotel business, that would mean making sure the guest enjoyed their stay.
If we were in the software business, that would mean creating cool things that allow them to work more efficiently or have more fun playing a game, etc.

Make stuff that people will use.

3) The co-workers
Generally, this means the work shouldn't make life more difficult for others to carry out their job.

Make stuff that can be supported.

Here is an example where these needs were a little at odds with each other when I was working at a hotel.

One of the guests was celebrating their anniversary and wanted their bedroom to be very romantic so he talked to the concierge and arranged to have rose petals strewn about the bed. He gave the concierge money for the flowers and a nice tip to get it all arranged while they were sightseeing. They come back after a nice dinner and its wonderful. They check out, pay their bill and everything hunky dory, right?

Well, an hour or two later, we get a call from housekeeping because rose petals are extremely difficult to pick up. You can't vacuum them and sweeping them is almost as frustrating. Because of the petals' concave form, they just stick to the floor.
You might think, so they just have to clean it up and move on. Well, each housekeeper gets a list of rooms they have to "turn,"

Depending on the property, about 30 minutes is allocated for each room, so for an eight hour shift, that's about 14 rooms, allowing for a 30 minute lunch and two 15 min. breaks. So when you get near to the end of your commitment and suddenly you find out that you got more than you bargained for, its a little frustrating.

I think this situation can sometimes be encountered with software programming. I won't bother you with such a detailed example, but it is like agreeing to do a small enhancement that turns out to take much more effort than first expected.

The key in both cases, is to do a once over at the beginning to make sure there are no surprises, but to also allow some breathing room for emergencies or unexpected changes.

Your customers love you

They would love you more if you wouldn’t send so much email to them all them.
They would love you more if you sent them email that was more relevant to them.
They would love you more if you honor their request to receive no more emails.

As we know email marketing practices grew out of the direct marketing industry. Raise your hand if you have ever mailed a reply to a piece of junk mail you did not want. Most people throw it away or recycle it.

However with an email marketing message in his or her inbox, a person can reply back or click on a link and communicate with your company. They can reply with some suggestions for improvements in your product, customer inquiries. Yes, the amount of unsubscribe requests, bounce backs and non-actionable emails such as out of office auto responses and transient delivery notifications makes the task of finding those pearls a little daunting, but they are there.

With the growing popularity of sites like Yelp and review forums within e-commerce sites, your customers can communicate more effectively with you and your other customers.

Listen to your customers. They know what they want.

So it begins...

Welcome to my web log.

A little self-introduction...

My name is David Johnson. I work at Yesmail in Portland, OR as a Product Manager.

I have experience in teaching and technical support so I draw upon those skills during the day as needed.

Living and visiting foreign countries also gave me a chance to build up my cross cultural communication skills, which are extremely useful in coordinating projects with different departments.

The purpose of this web log is to share some insights regarding product management, online software development and some email marketing.

If that’s your bag, baby... then come on board!